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A review by lpm100
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
dark
funny
informative
fast-paced
5.0
Book review
Bad Therapy
5+/5 stars
"Iatrogenic mental health treatment is the risk; Lose the smartphones, social media and helicopterish tendencies."
*******
Of the book:
-389 sources; 32/chapter
-1.6/page (=well sourced)
-251 pages of prose/12 chapters=20/per
-4-5 hours of reading time
*******
This is a GREAT book for parents:
FIRST: it has a lot of information all in one place that a lot of parents should know. (A lot of these ideas are in the ether, but parents can't find a good discussion of them all in one place / can't quite put their finger on what is wrong in many aspects of children's mental health.)
What are "these ideas"?
1. The reinterpretation of every single minor stressor in a child's life as something that needs therapy.
2. Say's Law (i.e.--supply generates its own demand), as applied to the mental health industry.
3. Things that have been discussed very intelligently by a number of authors:
a Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that as conditions get easier in developing countries, what is defined as a "stressor" keeps getting defined down.
Before: people survived combat in World War II and most went back to living normal lives.
Nowadays: people need years of therapy if someone merely makes a mean face at them.
b. Authors such as Lenore Skenazy have talked about the damage from helicopter parenting.
c. Eric Hoffer quote: "What the intellectual craves in his innermost being is to turn the whole globe into a classroom and the world’s population into a class of docile pupils hanging onto the words of the chosen teacher." AND "A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker’s sense of worth."
d. There are even resonances to the fine work of Lenore Skenazy: "Helicopter parents create idiot children."
SECOND: It brings across the point *loud and clear* that once you start down the road of trying to medicalize every minor problem of a child...... that way, madness lies.
If you have a child that you think needs to be medicated, you must be EXTREMELY JUDICIOUS in taking that direction.
*******
What are other takeaway messages?
1. Therapy is to solve some "problematic" mental state can actually be iatrogenic . Trying to remedy a mental state may end up inducing that mental state.
2. Once you start down the path of Therapy for unnecessary reasons, it's very hard to get out of that state.
3. Just because any conceivable thing *could* be medicalized does not mean that it *should* be.
4. Excessive rumination will cause people to put themselves into a certain mental state that they might have otherwise been able to shake off.
5. Basic microeconomic concepts can explain a lot of this:
a. A therapist has an incentive for therapy to be open-ended, because that means that she has a job indefinitely.
b. She is going to choose patients that have smaller problems and stretch out the sessions (chiropractors have been doing this for over a century), because they're easier to treat than people that are really ill / frankly psychotic. And they're likely to have better insurance that will pay better reimbursement rates.
*******
Spillover thoughts:
1. Once you realize that these problems are such as they are, your best bet is to send your kids to some type of parochial school. (Jewish is my preference, but Catholic or Muslim would work just fine.)
2. People have survived for several hundred thousand years without smartphones, so there's no reason that kids cannot make it without them just a little bit longer.
3. The author is very opposed to any type of medication, but in moderate doses it can be very helpful--And I speak as a very experienced parent of hyperactive children. (Drugs such as Ritalin have a half-life of 2.5 hours.)
Ten steps to bad/useless / overwrought therapy:
1. Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings;
2. Induce rumination;
3. Make "happiness" a goal but reward emotional suffering;
4. Affirm and accommodate kids worries;
5. Monitor, monitor, monitor;
6. Dispense diagnoses liberally;
7. Drug 'em;
8. Encourage kids to share their "trauma";
9. Encourage young adults to break contact with "toxic" family;
10. Create treatment dependency
Verdict: Recommended.
Vocabulary:
state orientation
action orientation
iatrogenic
Quotes:
(p.61): "If your career isn't going well, if you're having trouble in relationships, if you're dissatisfied with your life, commence the hunt for hidden childhood traumas."
(p.80): " For more than a decade, they have been quietly increasing and expanding their interventions, transforming every school into an outpatient mental health clinic, staffed largely by those with no real training in mental health."
(p.128): "Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it - - but so can other people."
(p.215): "... Poet Robert Hayden felt his father's devotion not through any declaration, which his father may never have made, but paid out in steady acts of sacrifice [=working a second job on freezing cold Sundays]."
(p.216): "WhatsApp has become a nightmarish blizzard of parental anxiety."
(p. 225): "Sometimes the Israeli Defense Forces will provide young recruits or mistaken address to test the Young person's ability to handle adversity. The army - - and Israeli society more generally - - believes it has a responsibility to force young people to handle the unexpected. They consider this essential preparation for a life full of unpleasant surprises."
Bad Therapy
5+/5 stars
"Iatrogenic mental health treatment is the risk; Lose the smartphones, social media and helicopterish tendencies."
*******
Of the book:
-389 sources; 32/chapter
-1.6/page (=well sourced)
-251 pages of prose/12 chapters=20/per
-4-5 hours of reading time
*******
This is a GREAT book for parents:
FIRST: it has a lot of information all in one place that a lot of parents should know. (A lot of these ideas are in the ether, but parents can't find a good discussion of them all in one place / can't quite put their finger on what is wrong in many aspects of children's mental health.)
What are "these ideas"?
1. The reinterpretation of every single minor stressor in a child's life as something that needs therapy.
2. Say's Law (i.e.--supply generates its own demand), as applied to the mental health industry.
3. Things that have been discussed very intelligently by a number of authors:
a Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that as conditions get easier in developing countries, what is defined as a "stressor" keeps getting defined down.
Before: people survived combat in World War II and most went back to living normal lives.
Nowadays: people need years of therapy if someone merely makes a mean face at them.
b. Authors such as Lenore Skenazy have talked about the damage from helicopter parenting.
c. Eric Hoffer quote: "What the intellectual craves in his innermost being is to turn the whole globe into a classroom and the world’s population into a class of docile pupils hanging onto the words of the chosen teacher." AND "A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker’s sense of worth."
d. There are even resonances to the fine work of Lenore Skenazy: "Helicopter parents create idiot children."
SECOND: It brings across the point *loud and clear* that once you start down the road of trying to medicalize every minor problem of a child...... that way, madness lies.
If you have a child that you think needs to be medicated, you must be EXTREMELY JUDICIOUS in taking that direction.
*******
What are other takeaway messages?
1. Therapy is to solve some "problematic" mental state can actually be iatrogenic . Trying to remedy a mental state may end up inducing that mental state.
2. Once you start down the path of Therapy for unnecessary reasons, it's very hard to get out of that state.
3. Just because any conceivable thing *could* be medicalized does not mean that it *should* be.
4. Excessive rumination will cause people to put themselves into a certain mental state that they might have otherwise been able to shake off.
5. Basic microeconomic concepts can explain a lot of this:
a. A therapist has an incentive for therapy to be open-ended, because that means that she has a job indefinitely.
b. She is going to choose patients that have smaller problems and stretch out the sessions (chiropractors have been doing this for over a century), because they're easier to treat than people that are really ill / frankly psychotic. And they're likely to have better insurance that will pay better reimbursement rates.
*******
Spillover thoughts:
1. Once you realize that these problems are such as they are, your best bet is to send your kids to some type of parochial school. (Jewish is my preference, but Catholic or Muslim would work just fine.)
2. People have survived for several hundred thousand years without smartphones, so there's no reason that kids cannot make it without them just a little bit longer.
3. The author is very opposed to any type of medication, but in moderate doses it can be very helpful--And I speak as a very experienced parent of hyperactive children. (Drugs such as Ritalin have a half-life of 2.5 hours.)
Ten steps to bad/useless / overwrought therapy:
1. Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings;
2. Induce rumination;
3. Make "happiness" a goal but reward emotional suffering;
4. Affirm and accommodate kids worries;
5. Monitor, monitor, monitor;
6. Dispense diagnoses liberally;
7. Drug 'em;
8. Encourage kids to share their "trauma";
9. Encourage young adults to break contact with "toxic" family;
10. Create treatment dependency
Verdict: Recommended.
Vocabulary:
state orientation
action orientation
iatrogenic
Quotes:
(p.61): "If your career isn't going well, if you're having trouble in relationships, if you're dissatisfied with your life, commence the hunt for hidden childhood traumas."
(p.80): " For more than a decade, they have been quietly increasing and expanding their interventions, transforming every school into an outpatient mental health clinic, staffed largely by those with no real training in mental health."
(p.128): "Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it - - but so can other people."
(p.215): "... Poet Robert Hayden felt his father's devotion not through any declaration, which his father may never have made, but paid out in steady acts of sacrifice [=working a second job on freezing cold Sundays]."
(p.216): "WhatsApp has become a nightmarish blizzard of parental anxiety."
(p. 225): "Sometimes the Israeli Defense Forces will provide young recruits or mistaken address to test the Young person's ability to handle adversity. The army - - and Israeli society more generally - - believes it has a responsibility to force young people to handle the unexpected. They consider this essential preparation for a life full of unpleasant surprises."