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There's been some buzz lately around Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier (also known "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze").
The central thesis is that therapy, to the extent that it's effective even a little, comes with risks as well as benefits, and it's a bad idea to engage in recreational or mental hygiene therapy, in the same way that it's a bad idea to get unnecessary physical operations done. She argues that it's an especially bad idea to do this to children, who don't come into it with a fully formed self understanding, and that parents and schools have been engaging in way too much therapeutic activity without monitoring for harmful results. For most children, it's a better idea to try giving them as much freedom as is culturally reasonable and try telling them firmly to stop behaving badly and do better (and this is what better looks like), rather than trying to figure out if something's wrong with them psychologically. It probably isn't, unless adults introduce that. To back those assertions up, she conducted interviews with some psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, as well as teens and their parents.
Caveat: the book is primarily about and intended for middle class, essentially functional families that are assumed not to engage in abusive behavior, and therefore doesn't spend a lot of time worrying that the reader, released from the constraints of the therapeutic model, will start escalating from naming feelings to hitting or starving kids or anything like that. I don't know if this is warranted, but do suspect that families who are practicing overly authoritarian child rearing (e.g. "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl) are in an entirely different informational ecosystem. That seems likely.
There are three main threads: therapists, schools, and parenting practices. There's a lot of culture war fodder in each of these, especially an argument to massively downgrade the SEL components of schools -- that to the extent people actually go along with them, they aren't just a waste of time and money, but actively harmful. But more than that, to lay off the SEL inspired ways of talking about problems. Working in a public school, I find this somewhat convincing. There are kids who may or may not have psychiatric problems, I can't really tell, but as far as I can tell, the previously normal things (having to sit alone for a while, suspensions, ISS, noticing that other people are angry about the destruction of their concentration and personal property...) haven't ever been tried, in favor of treating the children as not entirely human (doling out pieces of candy one by one, each time they do a tiny positive thing, pretending like them terrorizing their peers can't be helped, organizing a bunch of meetings between six or so adults to consider ways to use behaviorist psychology on them). To the extent that the kid is basically a human being, this is counterproductive -- it's not actually helpful to become a raving lunatic that everyone else averts their gaze from. But there doesn't seem to currently be a path available for school personnel other than deeper and deeper into more and more therapeutic techniques, or for the parents of the other kids other than transferring schools entirely (something mentioned by some kids in relation to potentially complaining about an extremely bad classmate). There was a "mindset training" about how maybe when a kid who's known to be unreasonable throws a tantrum, maybe we should just instantly cave and find them what they want. "Bad therapy" is not very helpful there, since there's a legal apparatus built up around the problem. In my experience school staff understands that the procedures are stupid, but aren't really in a position to change anything, even up to state legislators.
I found the section on gentle, therapeutic parenting especially interesting. When I had my first baby, and had to sit around nursing the baby for an absurd amount of time day and night, said baby was very bad at sleep -- I hadn't previously realized that humans have to learn how to fall asleep -- so I would read parenting advice from generic online sources about my problems. There's a lot about "attachment parenting," gentle, gradual sleep training, and then as they get a bit older, a lot about gentle parenting. In my household, most of this was not so much tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and left untried -- we both like our parents and come from stable households, so kind of just act similar to our respective parents. Shrier found people who had given gentle, therapeutic parenting a really hard try, but not been blessed with gentle toddlers. The most optimistic account was of an Israeli psychiatrist with a young ADHD son who didn't want to use drugs (at least so young), and spent a lot of time gardening with him as an outlet, and seemed to be enjoying the bonding and enjoying the son. "Raising Raffi" by Keith Gessen chronicles attempts at fatherhood by a highly educated man fully bought in to never yelling or punishing, and Shrier's read on the situation is that maybe some small amount of punishment was in order. An observation from both Shrier and Jordan Peterson is that parents who keep losing power struggles with their young children can, and sometimes do, go on to resent the children, and people more broadly don't like them either, since they're out of control much of the time. That seems plausible, though I can't think of any specific examples. She also thinks that the children in question tend to be the ones who go on to cut their parents off anyway, after all that effort, and not want children themselves, since it looks like such a terrible slog. She doesn't present a lot of evidence for that, just her gestalt impression from interviews. Shrier advocates for parents who themselves like their parents and come from functional households to follow their intuitions and ask their families for advice, rather than reading contemporary parenting books. She, again, doesn't have much advice for parents who come from dysfunctional households with traumatic practices.
In general I liked the book as a bit of casual sociology, it has some interesting anecdotes in it, and would tepidly recommend it to anyone interested.
So one of the things that I think a lot of people don't really realize is just how messed up a bunch of families are, especially in ways that aren't intuitively obvious. There's a reason that the stereotypical 'instance' of a therapist is some elderly man saying "Tell me about your mother." - the way kids are raised can really screw up their relationships with reality. Kids are fairly hardwired to love their parents; they are basically unable to conceive of the fact that their parents
dislikedhatedabusedwere not ideal to them.There are basically 2 & 1/2 ways that I have seen how kids can react to severely traumatic experiences, which boil down to what I'll call relitigation, reproduction, and repression (note that these probably have real names, I'm not a psychologist).
Relitigation
In this situation, kids basically attempt to reproduce the situation that is too traumatizing to process in such a way that they are now in control of it. The stereotypical example here is of a man who was severely beaten as a boy, so beats his wife/kids as well. This is where the stereotype of bullies having low self-esteem, or being victims, tends to come from. There was a very sad picture posted last week of a man's boss yelling at him, who yelled at his wife, who yelled at her kid, who yelled at his cat; this is that behaviour.
Reproduction
This is the "1/2" of the above (I spent a lot of time wavering on whether to include it as part of the first category); in this situation, the child in question basically 'accepts' that the situation at hand is how love is expressed, and attempts to replicate it in their own life. The standard example here tends to be the girl who was sexually abused tends to end up as someone who overtly sexualizes herself; a warning sign of sexual abuse amongst teachers and similar mandatory reporting professions tends to be kids who do sexual things to get what they want (think, for example, of a 10-year-old who begins to strip if you tell her 'no' - it sounds horrifying, but I've seen it happen).
Repression
Unlike the popular conception, repression doesn't mean completely blocking out an experience; instead, under a repressive system, a child will instead block out all emotional valence from a bad experience. From my experiences in this category, you end up with children who tell 'funny' stories that absolutely do not hit the mark. Things like:
"Yeah, I was kind of mouthy when I was 7; at one point, when I was being a brat, my parents threatened to drown me if I didn't stop swearing. I called them 'shitheads' to their face, and after 5 minutes in the sink, I'd learned my lesson."
or
"When my dad decided (at age 5) that it was time for us to learn about the birds and the bees, he got me and my younger brother to watch one of his pornos."
Although that may sound horrifying to anyone with a normal childhood, that is just sort of the way that people with highly distorted childhood's think. They can recognize that it's weird, but they tend to think of it as 'funny' as opposed to 'awful'.
So the reason I bring all 3 of these up is that all 3 of them can become, in the parlance of rationalists, 'Trapped Priors'. The problem with a lot of them is that they're self-reinforcing; someone stuck in the reproduction mindset will tend to find people who are not interested in mimicking their abusive past boring, for example. The major area in which therapy is actually useful is in breaking these patterns; in an ideal situation, a therapist will identify what the negative pattern is, identify a way to counter it, and, well, train the individual in question to do so.
The problems with it are fairly straightforward:
I think that what we're seeing is the fairly standard loop of humans identifying a 'miracle cure-all', applying it way too broadly, and badly, and then eventually reaching the stage where we recognize it as a useful tool, and not an 'all the time' sort of thing. We've seen this before with radioactive material, and we'll see it again; it seems to be a familiar loop our brains get caught in.
This is interesting, and I appreciate you writing it.
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