The truth about child therapy – Abigail Shrier

Is mental health overdiagnosis harming children? Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, joins Freddy Gray on the Americano show to discuss how mental health experts are potentially damaging children. Have our efforts to support our children backfired?

//CHAPTERS
00:00 – Introduction
01:09 – The rise of mental health spending and its consequences
02:21 – Are modern mental health treatments making things worse?
03:38 – Why therapy for children is different from therapy for adults
06:52 – Parenting, therapy, and the outsourcing of emotional upbringing
09:23 – The impact of smartphones on children’s mental health
10:37 – Are we seeing a movement against over-therapeutic culture?
12:08 – The illusion of achieving constant happiness
13:24 – Over-medication of young people and its long-term risks
15:39 – Links between 'Bad Therapy' and the transgender movement
22:24 – How parents can course-correct before it’s too late
23:37 – Conclusion

#therapy #lockdown

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[tomsnoxell]

11:28 resilience is bred through failure. Spot on. If kids don’t experience failure they will be weak and prone to negativity.

[lesliecunliffe]

Therapeutic culture has gradually hollowed out our moral self-understanding and resilience for the last fifty years. Yet nobody in politics is willing to acknowledge this destructive trend.

[MsBByrne]

Finally. Its good to see the pendulum is at last swinging back. Its very refreshing!

[neillambert]

It is also that no one is at home anymore. Children in daycare from 6 months old is a modern problem.

[notyourordinarygran]

With helicopter parenting they have no chance to fail, to learn from. If we value our children then we have to make it possible for one parent to be able to support a family. Some parents drop their kids at Breakfast Club and then don't see them until the evening. They are too tired to cook, too tired to check homework, too tired to interact with their kids in any meaningful way. Is there any wonder people aren't bothering to have kids...why would you?

[eleonorelettres]

I'm a therapist and completely agree. And also won't work with people under 18. My clients must be sovereign over their own choices and minds

[Pleblordy]

It isnt just young people. This obsession with medicalising and labelling every aspect of human personality as potentially "problematic" is anti-human and tyranical. Not only does it give institutional power an overbearing attitude toward the human person it also encourages the "patient" to conceptualise themselves as an object rather than someone with agency. People would do much better to read some shakespeare or marcus aurelius than go to therapy. What we need is the return of a culture that edifies and encourages the development of wisdom through discipline, learning and experience of hardship.

[cheetalfatima]

Therapy for such young children discourages the development of emotional independence. We are increasingly compelled to look for extranneous sources to take responsibility for things like depression and anxiety, which completely divests us of personal accountability over our own mental health.

[God-dtom]

I’ve said this at house parties and dinner with friends who all seem to have children on medication or in counselling and it doesn’t go down very well.

[vcrN]

I was sent to child therapy at the age of 14 and it set the ball rolling in a very dark direction for me personally…
I was the scapegoat in a family consisting of one abusive father but that dynamic was never ever noticed, just MY mental problems. I would never EVER send my kids to therapy, my daughter is 14 now and she comes to me with her emotions, not a stranger!

[bigeasy]

This book is a must read for all parents.

[freebornjohn]

My parents taught me that life was hard, you don't complain and then you die - simple.

[dianacrainiciuc]

Practicing sports in your teenager years builds mental strength.

[splinterbyrd]

Counselling and psychotherapy has perhaps always been around, but in different forms.

People lived where they worked and worked where they lived. There were large extended families close to hand, grandparents with their wisdom and people went to church more.
They tended to stay in stable communities permanently.

Many a story by Charles Dickens opens with an orphaned child. _Great Expectations_ starts with Pip looking at the grave of his parents and siblings.

But Pip has his formidable older sister Mrs Joe, and her wonderful husband Joe Gargery, plus a number of other relatives and a community nearby, so he seems largely unharmed by having no mum and dad.

[davidlythgoe]

Depends on the therapist and what your actually going for.

[craigsproston]

I was teaching a class of 30 ukulele and i was showing them how to hold it. One child immediately puts it down and her head went down onto the desk. The TA immediately took the child out of the lesson and she did some colouring. No effort was made on the part of the TA to be resilient and keep trying. I found out later the child had no special needs.

[Rockatha]

Absolutely fascinating and something I have been saying for years. 30 years ago at the age of 10 I was put on Ritalin and year later resperidone. Resperidone at this time had not been tested on under 15s. I was on these drugs till I was 18 when I took myself off them. My pubity was affected and I didn't really finish puberty till I was 25. It is absolutely disgusting how we think we need to label everyone. Now we have nuro diversity which make absolutely no sense as everyone is nuro diverse as we are different to everyone else. The whole childhood metal health agenda needs to be looked at as we're going down a very dangerous slope.

[ML-wyog]

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is not that popular amongst a lot of therapists either. It would be good to critique a range of therapies .

[sscott]

I think that she needs to differentiate her argument. Therapy culture in the US is (I believe) far more prevalent than it is in the UK. I also think she generalises - 'most therapists say this, many do that'. Her description of therapy does not match my own experience of working in that area for the past 6 years.
I think she has a point about mental health resources being used for kids who are simply anxious or feeling down, which are very normal experiences for many people. Like Shrier, I am concerned that therapy is too often used for 'the worried well' - in these cases I would argue therapy is rarely harmful and mostly pointless.

[afifahhamilton]

She's a GREAT WOMAN!! Thanks for that interview Freddy.