Bad Journalism: The Problems with Abigail Shrier's "Bad Therapy"

Sloppy citations, inconsistencies, and a failure to engage with research on brain development all undermine Shrier's message

“It is often said that psychotherapists suffer from an emotional disturbance […] When he presents material that fits the therapist’s knowledge, concepts, and skills—and therefore also his expectations—the patient satisfies his therapist’s wish for approval, echo, understanding, and for being taken seriously. In this way the therapist exercises the same sort of unconscious manipulation as that to which he was exposed as a child.”

— Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), pages 19-21

In the second chapter of Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up (2024), Abigail Shrier points out a paradox: as mental health treatments have become more sophisticated and accessible over the past eighty years, adolescent mental health has gotten worse. Significantly worse.

“After generations of increased intervention, that shouldn’t be the case. More access to antibiotics should spell fewer deaths from infection. And more generally available therapy should spell less depression.” (Bad Therapy, page 21)

Instead of helping, Shrier argues that therapists—and therapy-inspired parents, educators, and online influencers—are sending children spiralling further into mental illness by encouraging them to obsess over their feelings, to ruminate, to publicly share their trauma, and to estrange from family, by affirming, accommodating, and over-monitoring them, and then, when they act out or struggle, sending them to the doctor’s office for a diagnosis and drugs.

She’s far from the first person to point out that many mental health professionals do more harm than good: as Alice Miller repeatedly pointed out over four decades ago, the profession attracts people who were themselves psychologically damaged in childhood, who then, if they are unhealed, may end up unconsciously exploiting their patients to fulfill their unmet needs.¹ Children are extremely vulnerable to this.

However, Shrier goes far further and alleges that the youth mental health crisis is mostly a product of iatrogenesis; in other words, “bad therapy” and “therapeutic parenting” are the main cause of rising psychological distress. She ruthlessly mocks “gentle parenting”, social-emotional “meddling”, the explosion of labels, widening diagnostic criteria, and “drug ’em” culture, as well as “trauma salesmen” (“Does the Body Keep the Score? Literally, No. Figuratively? Also, No”), parents who think their kids have “sensory” issues², and children who think their parents are “emotionally abusive” (on the contrary, she claims many parents are suffering from “Battered Mommy Syndrome”).

She suggests that all parents have to do is fire the therapist, use a little more authority, take away the smartphone, encourage kids to “knock it off, shake it off”, and everything will be okay. Tellingly, she titles the final section of her book, “Maybe There’s Nothing Wrong with Our Kids.”

This is a pretty outlandish claim to make. While she briefly engages with other cultural causes of distress, Shrier fails to take into account the potential role of various environmental toxins, dietary factors and nutritional deficiencies, and non-psychiatric pharmaceuticals, drugs, and healthcare interventions.³ There is also very little discussion of physical illness, even though mental and physical health are fundamentally intertwined, and rates of chronic physical illness are climbing in young people too.⁴

The “iatrogenesis” argument doesn’t even make sense within the context of Shrier’s own book; on page 201, she discourages the use of medication by pointing out that “anxiety and depression exist for a reason.” Anxiety “evolved to make us more alert” to danger, whereas depression’s purpose is to “protectively shut down the system […] [s]o that we withdraw from the thing that caused us harm and take stock.”

Okay, great, but this suggests that many of these children have good reasons to be anxious and depressed. But even if we do accept the (reasonable) premise, stated elsewhere,⁵ that encouraging excessive self-focus feeds anxiety and depression, Shrier fails to pin the blame on mental health professionals. Out of twelve chapters, three concern schools⁶, four focus on parents, cultural factors, and pill-pushing doctors⁷, and one is about teenagers weaponizing victimhood to bully insufficiently “woke” peers.⁸ Even the chapter entitled “Bad Therapy” dedicates about half its pages to problems perpetuated primarily by parents and doctors, not therapists or psychologists. While I have no doubt that “bad therapy” and the infusion of creepy, scripted therapy-speak into all corners of child-rearing is contributing to deteriorating mental health, the greater problem seems to be “bad therapy” practiced by people who aren’t therapists or psychologists. In fact, the majority of psychologists Shrier mentions are presented in a positive light, explaining why “coddling”, feelings-obsessing, over-diagnosing, and pill-pushing (etc) are harmful.

At several points, Shrier employs a tactic—somewhere between an ad hominem attack and a contradiction on Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement—I’ve noticed is extremely common among journalists, influencers, and many members of the “expert” class. I’m going to call it contemptuous contradiction.

Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement. Source: Wikipedia.

Contemptuous contradiction is when a writer contradicts an argument (states the opposing case) while mocking or expressing contempt for the argument in lieu of providing much in the way of counter-evidence. This is often accomplished by quoting an “expert” who claims the argument is wrong (Shrier does this frequently), or even just saying “experts say” without clarifying who the experts are (this is everywhere in mainstream liberal journalism). Contemptuous contradiction usually co-occurs with other forms of bad-faith attacks. The not-so-subtle message to readers is “this is so stupid I won’t even engage with it and neither should you!”

Here’s an example from Bad Therapy:

In Chapter 6, “Trauma Kings”, Shrier snarks Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s and Dr. Gabor Maté’s claims that trauma is stored in the body, assures the reader that their beliefs about trauma run contrary to “the best research”, and then cites an article by Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally:

““Memories are not stored ‘in the body’ [that is, in muscle tissue], and the notion of ‘body memories’ is foreign to the cognitive neuroscience of memory,” McNally has written, in a paper refuting van der Kolk. When you’ve experienced a potentially traumatic event, you’re particularly likely to remember it explicitly. There’s no evidence that even survivors of the worst traumas hold memories implicitly or that those memories can be stored outside of the central nervous system.” (Bad Therapy, page 119).

There’s a lot to unpack in this paragraph, but off the top of my head:

• Admittedly, I read The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk) and most of Maté’s books several years ago and don’t remember them perfectly, but I have zero recollection of either man ever claiming that trauma was specifically stored in muscle tissue. It’s too bad Shrier doesn’t bother to include a citation where van der Kolk or Maté (or anyone for that matter) actually claims this.

• The “body”, presumably, everything below the neck, is made up of a lot more than just “muscle tissue”.

• The “central nervous system” includes the spinal cord, which, last I checked, was located in the “body.”

• There is, in fact, evidence that trauma is “stored” in parts of the body outside the CNS. For example, studies on organ transplants have found that recipients often report personality changes and even memories from the donor. As well, there is evidence that chronic stress in early childhood affects gene expression, the gut microbiota, and mitochondrial function.

• As human brains don’t start explicitly recording memories until around two years of age, Shrier seems to be suggesting here that it is impossible for someone to be affected by traumas in the first two years. However, chronic stressors that occur in the first few years of life can cause long-term issues—perhaps more so than traumas which occur later—as these affect brain development during the critical early years, in particular of the right hemisphere.⁹

This isn’t the only time Shrier attacks van der Kolk for something she fails to demonstrate he actually believes. A few pages later, she criticizes him for research on war veterans showing that vets who developed PTSD had smaller hippocampi.

“In fact, subsequent studies of Vietnam vets have shown that small hippocampi are a risk factor for developing PTSD, not the result of wartime trauma. The trauma gurus may have fully reversed the real arrow of causality between smaller brain structures and PTSD.” (Bad Therapy, page 124)

Once again, there’s no citation to van der Kolk’s work, and the index of my copy of The Body Keeps the Score turned up nothing relevant. So I have no idea where (or if) van der Kolk “reversed the real arrow of causality” and claimed that wartime trauma shrunk the hippocampus. However, as maltreatment in childhood is associated with reduced hippocampal volume, what this research actually suggests is that people who were neglected or abused in childhood are more vulnerable to developing PTSD after acute traumas in adulthood—which is pretty on-message for “trauma salesmen” like van der Kolk and Maté.

In other parts of “Trauma Kings”, Shrier sarcastically refers to van der Kolk and Maté as “gurus”, claims the “greatest academic psychologists and psychiatrists today” disagree with them without any citation or clarification as to how she assessed who the “greatest” were, and suggests that people with poorer life outcomes are simply more likely to blame adverse childhood experiences for their misfortune. She mocks Nicole LePera (The Holistic Psychologist) for writing that immigration is traumatic for children because they have to take on more adult roles due to language/cultural barriers, without providing any evidence to the contrary. She claims children are more vulnerable to suggestion (i.e. false memory implantation) than adults—and, elsewhere in the book, to the pernicious effects of social-emotional learning and inappropriate survey questions—while simultaneously spending much of the chapter and book talking about how resilient to abuse and neglect they are.¹⁰

Shrier invokes multiple examples of high achievers who come from severely traumatic backgrounds to support the “resilience” argument. However, pretty much every single book on childhood trauma—in particular those concerning “narcissistic” parenting—describe overachievement and workaholism as common symptoms (an example of the “flight” response), in particular linked to avoidant attachment.¹¹ At several points she seems to conflate achievement with psychological health.

Unfortunately, sloppy citations and insufficient / omitted context are the rule, not the exception, in Bad Therapy. Bonnie Kristian, writing for Christianity Today, includes two examples. I’ll provide two more:

On page 19, Shrier mockingly references a Washington Post “mental health professional” who “informed readers that having your name mispronounced is damaging to the psyche.” Only in the notes at the back of the book does she clarify that the author was specifically referring to having one’s name mispronounced by long-term friends and colleagues.

My second example is more significant, as Shrier returns to this point multiple times. On page 167, in the chapter on “Gentle Parents”, she writes that:

“Dear God, we were tired. That’s how we knew we were great parents: we’d reached Level 5 exhaustion. Moms were putting in 50 percent more time with their kids than parents did in the 1960s; dads—twice as much.”

Okay, except around half of mothers stayed at home full-time with their children in the 1960s, compared to roughly a quarter of mothers in the past three decades—mom is now the sole or primary breadwinner in around 40% of families. So how can it be that modern mothers spend more time with their kids on average than their counterparts sixty years ago?

Shrier’s citation points to this 2015 report from the Pew Research Centre. I read the first page closely, and didn’t see the stat. I then used the search function on the other pages to try to find it. No luck.

Through Google, I found a few possible sources, including this 2013 Pew Research report (which actually claims less than a 40% increase for mothers and three times for fathers), this study (which also reports less than a 40% increase for mothers), and this study, which actually claims mothers have nearly doubled their kid-time and fathers have quadrupled it since the 1960s.

A few important details:

• All of these studies report that the time spent with children is relatively low: around an hour per day to 10 hours per week in the 1960s by mothers, up to around two hours per day now. (Fathers have jumped from around 1.5-2.5 hours per week to one hour per day). So these studies are clearly not referring to the number of hours mothers (and fathers) spend in the same spaces as their children / being physically available to their children.

• So what exactly is meant by “time with children” then? Well, looking at the last study: “feeding and preparing food for babies and children, washing, changing, putting to bed or getting up, unpaid babysitting, providing medical care, reading to or playing with children, helping with homework, and supervising.”

• All of these studies are based on self-reported data.

The methodology seems sketchy as hell. I realize TV dinners and cereal were pretty popular in the 1960s, but this suggests that parents basically never cooked, unless “cooking” was categorized under “housework” instead of “child care”.¹² And lo and behold, other data suggests households used to spend roughly 150 minutes per day cooking in the 1960s, with women doing most of that work.

In addition, I suspect working mothers—who spend fewer hours in the same space as their children—are more likely to compensate with more intensive parenting when they are with their children (“quality time”).¹³ And as all of this data is based on self-reports, it’s prudent to consider the role of subjectivity, and also the possibility that not all participants were completely honest.

I’m not trying to shame working moms here—I wanted to stay home and am extremely lucky to have the option, and obviously fathers and grandparents can be excellent primary caregivers—but this claim is misleading and deserves scrutiny, especially in light of evidence that the rise in daycare use (especially before the age of two) might be contributing to mental health problems in young people.

Nonsense statistics aside, the “Gentle Parents” chapter is fascinating. Shrier paints a picture of parents who want to be “best friends” with their children, suffocate them with their “anxious and needy voice[s]”, are “flatter[ed” by the “notion” that their children are “sensitive”, feed them junk food because they demand it, and speak in loving “scripts” borrowed from books and online influencers while secretly resenting/disliking them or even seeing them as an “enemy”.¹⁴ In the next chapter, these parents doctor-shop for a label to explain their child’s poor behaviour, and experience “relief” when a paediatrician “at last hands them a diagnosis and a prescription.” She later describes mothers as choosing their children’s activities and even their friends, while at the same time “manipulating” them by offering patronizing, “fake” choices. Parents make each day “activity-jammed, presided over by a series of adults who judge [children’s] progress”, which contributes to children being so tired, “it feels as though [they] are missing a layer of skin.”

Shrier is contemptuous of mental health professionals who label these parents “narcissistic” or “emotionally abusive,” instead suggesting at multiple points that out-of-control toddlers, sulky teenagers, and estranging young adults¹⁵ are abusing their parents. (She does concede there are rare cases of extreme physical abuse by parents and caregivers—she is dismissive of emotional abuse and neglect—and implies with her examples that this mostly occurs in lower-income homes. In affluent and middle-class families,¹⁶ the abuse seems to run from child to parent. I guess when these abusive young people eventually grow up and become parents themselves, they might then be abused by their own children, and thus the cycle will continue).

However, the pathological insecurity, enmeshed boundaries, infantilization, inauthenticity, and achievement-focus she describes are actually pretty typical of vulnerable narcissism, as is the parents’ willingness to diagnose and drug their children instead of examining and changing their own behaviours.¹⁷ Furthermore, researcher Jean Twenge (and others) have documented a rise in narcissism (as well as anxiety and depression) among college students—in particular among women—for decades. It’s not unreasonable to assume that decades of a “culture of narcissism” would lead to higher rates of narcissistic traits among college-educated mothers (and fathers!) today.

A diagnosis is a “relief” because it means the problem lies within the child, not the parent(s). And, as Shrier writes, diagnostic labels are “reductive and demeaning, and they have absolutely no business polluting a parent’s love.”

(Does this mean I think all young people who end up in therapy have narcissistic parents? No. Do I think all young people who estrange have narcissistic parents? Also no. Furthermore, narcissism is a spectrum—the personality disorder is at the extreme end—and I think it’s very common for a parent to be both loving and a little bit narcissistic, i.e. pathologically insecure.)

Shrier suggests at several points that the problem is that parents “devoured” “stacks” of “bestselling parenting books”, “most of them written by shrinks.” She implies this is relatively new issue, which is just incredibly incorrect (the problem of bad ideas in popular parenting books in Western countries stretches back to at least the 1600s; I discuss the dark history here). Still, I was looking forward to Shrier’s searing takedowns of bad advice from contemporary parenting books.

I was extremely disappointed. “The Road Paved by Gentle Parents” is over 30 pages long, and manages to provide only one example of bad parenting advice from one book (How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk,¹⁸ which was published in 1980, and thus presumably a book that had a greater influence on how Gen Xers were raised then how they parented). She also name-drops Raising Your Spirited Child (published in 1991), without providing an example, mentions The Myth of Normal again, which is not a book of parenting advice, and briefly discusses a memoir (Raising Raffi, 2022)¹⁹ and a book about how liberal children are more likely to end up in extremist groups (1975’s Liberal Parents, Radical Children).

She also mentions Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent (2021) to reinforce her argument that the war on spanking was misguided, as “brisk spanking[s]” are common across the globe. Hunt, Gather, Parent sounds like an interesting—and controversial—book, but, unfortunately, I don’t think Shrier actually read it. She quotes from page 2 and then seemingly pulls the rest of her material on the book from the Honestly podcast. Shrier ends her bit by mocking Doucleff for wishing Americans had parenting traditions: “She rarely seems to notice that until very recently, we did.” As I mentioned before, this is incorrect. The American “parenting traditions” Shrier is referring to were also largely products of parenting books, and modern parents have good reasons for wanting to reject them. Ironically, this is something Shrier apparently would have learned from Doucleff had she bothered to read her book.

Fun fact: NONE of these books were written by someone with a psychology degree, a masters in counselling, or a psychiatry speciality.

Instead, most of the examples of ridiculous “gentle” parenting advice are pulled from the Slate Parenting Facebook group (Shrier assures readers that Slate parents got their ideas from “stacks of parenting books” and podcasts, but does not say which ones).

The only contemporary book of parenting advice written by actual mental health professionals Shrier mentions in the whole chapter is 2011’s The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, which she obviously didn’t read past page 3. She mocks Siegel (she doesn’t mention Bryson), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and paediatrician, for introducing his book by claiming to know more about brain development than the average parent:

“Funny, you know who also lacks “basic information” about a child’s brain? Neuroscientists. Every one of the neuroscientists and psychiatrists I spoke to impressed upon me how little we know about what goes on in the brain, or the relationship between neurological events and human emotion or behavior.” (Bad Therapy, page 181).

Uh, yeah? Neuroscience is a relatively new and rapidly growing field, and the brain is infinitely complex. But I don’t think any of Shrier’s sources meant to imply that people who have dedicated their lives to studying the brain and attending to the health of children, like Dr. Siegel, are somehow no more knowledgable about it than your typical mom. The Whole-Brain Child provides some pretty basic, well-supported facts about brain development and the differences between the left and right hemispheres.²⁰ And at no point do Siegel and Bryson claim, as Shrier insinuates, that “Parents are Morons” because they haven’t studied neuroscience.

It is, however, pretty audacious to declare that reading about brain development is a waste of time when you’re writing a book subtitled Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. It turns out the left/right hemisphere thing is pretty darn relevant, as the mental illnesses and developmental disorders that are becoming exponentially more common are all related to right hemisphere dysfunction (see footnote 9).

But what really frustrated me is that The Whole-Brain Child does not advocate for the kind of “gentle” parenting Shrier finds so noxious. If she had bother to read past page 3, she’d have discovered that she’d agree with a lot of Siegel and Bryson’s advice (e.g. “never negotiate with a terrorist” when your child manipulatively tantrums, children should respect parents’ authority, children should be given meaningful, age-appropriate decisions, parents should avoid rescuing their kids from consequences of said decisions, children should be encouraged to think about how their actions impact others, and children should be encouraged to face and overcome fears created by trauma). In fact, Shrier makes very similar recommendations throughout Bad Therapy.

While I’m all for Shrier’s takedowns of “gentle” parenting, I was frustrated that she did not distinguish this from attachment parenting, which is the style of parenting that authors such as Gabor Maté and Siegel & Bryson actually advocate for.

Attachment parenting, unlike the nebulous “gentle” parenting, is a set of guidelines to follow (to the best of your ability) when your child is a baby to foster secure attachment and healthy brain development via bodily closeness. It includes stuff like breastfeeding, baby-wearing, co-sleeping / bed-sharing, responding to baby’s cries, and sharing meals with your child. I did “attachment” parenting, but I’m not a “gentle” parent. I say no all the time, give orders, tell my kid she can’t have toast until she finishes her eggs, and say things that are messy and authentic instead of scripted and eerily perfect. I know a handful of non-gentle attachment mothers, and all of us have relatively healthy, well-behaved, confident, and outgoing toddlers who eat their vegetables without throwing a tantrum. Attachment parenting is based on neuroscience and brain development, and is inspired by traditional (i.e. pre-books) parenting methods—gentle parenting is not.

This omission becomes glaring near the end of Bad Therapy, in a section starting on page 220 about Japanese child-rearing. Shrier points out that Japan has relatively low rates of diagnosed depression and anxiety, and credits this entirely to a culture which fosters independence. She gives many examples that truly sound wonderful: kids walking to school without adult supervision as young as five, running around on playgrounds with boulders, streams, and hiding spaces, and given the freedom to work out conflict without adult supervision.

However, what Shrier misses is that before Japanese parents foster all that wonderful independence, they have one of the highest rates of bed-sharing in the world; a majority of kids share beds with parents or grandparents until around age five or six. A key point here, which is illustrated well in The Whole-Brain Child, is that parenting should be age-appropriate. Ironically, by its closing chapters Bad Therapy turns into a book of parenting advice—but while a lot of Shrier’s tough-love recommendations are fine for older children and teenagers, they’re inappropriate for babies and toddlers. Children under three don’t exist in Bad Therapy, a reader from another planet could be forgiven for thinking human children emerge into this world as bratty parent-smacking toddlers who constantly demand chicken nuggets.

Which brings me to my next point; Japanese children eat significantly healthier diets than American kids. I’m sure the awesome playgrounds contribute to better mental health outcomes, but I bet a bigger factor is all the brain and mood-boosting Omega-3s-filled seafood.

These aren’t the only issues I caught in Bad Therapy, but this review is long enough as it is and several of the omitted problems—such as Shrier’s odd choice to treat the DSM-5 as an respect-worthy document in a book partially about the problems of diagnostic labels and medication or her misunderstandings regarding the folk diagnosis “complex PTSD”—would take too many words to discuss. No doubt I missed a lot as well; I tried to be thorough but I didn’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb.

Here’s the thing; I think Abigail Shrier has some salient points. I pre-ordered Bad Therapy (both in print and in audio format!) for a reason. A cynical part of me suspects that many of the weaknesses I found were at least partially a result of Shrier’s ideological motivations—say what you will about crazy woke ideas, to me there are few beliefs more deluded than the belief that the level of psychopathology we see today somehow arose out of a culture that was healthy and awesome until a few years/decades ago—but ultimately I think the main issue is that Bad Therapy was rushed, slapped together and hurried to the presses in order to capitalize on the success of 2020’s Irreversible Damage. And, unfortunately, because of that, what could have been an important book ended up being kind of a mess.

The strongest chapters of Bad Therapy were those that concerned schools. Shrier’s examples of social-emotional learning (SEL) seemed extreme to me, but when I looked up SEL activities online I was horrified. The majority looked at best like they would stunt emotional growth in children, at worst like straight-up psychological torture. The chapter on “Mental Health Survey Mischief” in schools was equally appalling, as was the chapter on school “Shadows” and how “restorative justice” enables violent kids, and the short one on educator-endorsed cry-bullying brought to mind this skit by Ryan Long Comedy. Shrier might have failed to make the case that there’s a widespread issue with psychologists and therapists, but she did a really good job of demonstrating that something really fishy is going on in the education system.

I think Alice Miller was on target forty years ago when she argued that the mental health field attracts a lot of people who were psychologically damaged themselves in childhood; I suspect this is also true of teachers and other “educators.” And just as the mental health field attracts the mentally ill and parenting books are frequently written by lousy parents, it seems like anti-bullying work attracts vulnerable (victim) narcissists, and SEL activities are frequently designed by people with poor social skills and emotional intelligence.

Shrier astutely argues that many therapists might choose to take young clients for financial reasons (parents pay on time!) and out of a motivation to treat the least sick for the longest period of time, but I think more is going on here. I can’t shake the uneasy observation that people with unhealed childhood trauma and mental illnesses frequently end up in professions where they work with children. And as Shrier points out, school counsellors are also compromised by “dual” relationships (they know each kid’s friends, classmates, parents, teachers, etc). She hits the nail on the head when she writes (page 65): “The epicenter of bad therapy in your children’s life is, most likely, their school.”

Complicating this further, therapies directed at children are not particularly effective; as Shrier points out²¹ research shows that when a child presents with psychological distress, it’s more effective to treat the parents instead. (The problem here is that if the parents in question are narcissistic, this would be very difficult for therapists to do).

While Shrier has a blind spot when it comes to affluent parents and narcissistic tendencies, I agree with her that family estrangement should not be treated lightly or encouraged by therapists. There are extreme cases where estrangement is the best way for a child to protect themselves, but in the majority of cases—even when one or both parents are high in narcissistic traits—I think a therapist’s role should be to help the child set healthy boundaries, not to wall themselves off completely. This is especially true once the child has children of their own. (I am not referring to cases where the grandparents pose a clear physical or psychological risk to grandchildren; but in many cases, people mellow with age, and someone who was a lousy or even abusive parent can become a not-so-terrible or even half-decent grandparent.)

One of the more powerful segments of Bad Therapy (pages 232-237) concerns the problem of family fragmentation²²; through poignant interviews, Shrier argues that lack of close contact with grandparents and other extended family members renders children “uniquely vulnerable” and that parents preferring their children to get “direction from the adults they’ve hired, who report to them” is a significant contributing factor in the mental health crisis. Extended family can be an important buffer to nuclear family dysfunction and neglect.

“We don’t permit kids a web of stable relationships. We choose for them the very best, hand-picked friends, based on our preferences, at different locations, as if we were collecting rocks on the beach. But when you look at societies with very high rates of pathological depression, Chentsova Dutton says, two things stand out: a high value placed on individualism and high relational mobility (meaning, lots of turnover in the characters that inhabit your life). (Bad Therapy, pages 230-231).

Shrier circles an obvious, painful truth here, which she also alludes to in an interview with Jordan Peterson on pages 152-154: “It’s our social context that keeps us sane.” Therapists and therapy-obsessed non-therapists are not helping young people when they encourage them to dwell on their feelings; psychological health and a healthy sense of self arises from directing our attention outward not inward.

Or, as Iain McGilchrist put it:

“[T]he self originates in the interaction with ‘the Other’, not as an entity in atomistic isolation. The sense of self emerges from the activity of the brain in interaction with other selves.” (The Master and His Emissary, page 88).

In other words, we need authentic, spontaneous, unregulated, consistent, and informal relationships with other people in order to develop a healthy sense of ourselves. Paid caregivers such as nannies, daycare workers, and teachers cannot provide that, and neither can therapists, screen-based relationships, or SEL-informed lessons on how to make friends. And the use of parenting scripts undermines our children’s most important relationships of all.²³

Shrier wonders why young people are less resilient to trauma nowadays, and tries to pin the blame on therapy culture—but she actually does a better job of answering this question when she talks about the importance of long-term, informal relationships with family, friends, and neighbours. Because it’s not the degree of the “traumatic” events in our lives that matter so much as whether we’re suffering with people we care for, or alone. Oxytocin lowers cortisol, “the cure for pain is love.” The traumas of today’s youth may or may not be greater than those of previous generations, but their loneliness is certainly is.

Bad Therapy closes with a plea to readers to dismiss “expert” opinion when it comes to raising your children, a message which deeply resonated with me. I’m also sympathetic to Shrier when she naively tells parents to trust their instincts instead, because I made the same mistake after I dove into the research on “poisonous pedagogies” in parenting books.

My great-uncle, a respected criminologist, put me in my place: “You can’t tell mothers to trust their instincts,” he said, “because in a lot of cases, their instincts are bad.” Unfortunately, as Allan Schore once said, “Parenting well does not come naturally, what comes naturally is parenting the way we were parented.”

I wish I could end on a more positive note, with better advice to parents and parents-to-be out there, but the best I can offer is “pick your experts wisely.” Bonnie Kristian, in Christianity Today, also rejects Shrier’s “individualistic” approach, acknowledging her “real need for help from fellow followers of Jesus who sometimes do know better.”

I’m not a Christian—though my (Jewish) husband and I have been exploring Judaism, in particular Kabbalistic teachings, together—but over the past few years, with the aid of magic mushrooms, I have found myself believing in and accepting guidance from a higher consciousness.

I know this will sound wacky to many, but I’m far from the only woman who has found that a little bit of help from magic mushrooms has made me a better mother.

Not a perfect one, but, I hope, a good enough one.

1. “As long as the therapist is not aware of his repression, it can compel him to use his patients, who depend on him, to meet his unmet needs with substitutes.” (The Drama of the Gifted Child, page 8).

“As adults we don’t need unconditional love, not even from our therapists […] If a therapist promises unconditional love, we must protect ourselves from him, from his hypocrisy and lack of awareness.” (Ibid, page 45)

2. It’s worth noting here that some children are born with a genetic predisposition to higher sensitivity, a short allele on the serotonin transporter gene which affects their ability to feel pleasure and cope with stress, and renders them more vulnerable to numerous mental health conditions.

3. For example, regarding “sensory sensitivities”, a lutein deficiency causes light sensitivity, and magnesium and B6 deficiencies can cause sound sensitivity. And the lack of “resilience” in children might have something to do with deficiencies in magnesium, zinc, Omega-3 fatty acids, iron, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and B Vitamins.

4. For example, the rates of allergies, asthma, and obesity are all rising in youth, and all three are correlated with common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

5. See the sub-section “Hell is Thinking about Yourself” from Bad Therapy, Chapter 7, pages 152-154.

6. “Social-Emotional Meddling”, “The Schools Are Filled with Shadows”, and “Hunting, Fishing, Mining: Mental Health Survey Mischief”

7. “The Road Paved by Gentle Parents”, “Spare the Rod, Drug the Child”, “This Will Be Our Final Session”, and “Spoons Out”

8. “Full of Empathy and Mean as Hell”

9. Many common psychiatric conditions, including autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, multiple personality disorder, and borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, are associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009), pages 403-407; The Matter with Things (2021), pages 305-369).

10. And maybe children were more resilient to abuse and neglect a few generations ago! This brings me back to the possibility that young people are more fragile than they used to be in part because they’re being poisoned by pollution, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and processed foods.

11. “Flight types appear as if their starter button is stuck in the “on” position. They are obsessively and compulsively driven by the unconscious belief that perfection will make them safe and loveable. As children, flight types respond to their family trauma somewhere along a hyperactive continuum that stretches between the extremes of the driven “A” student and the ADHD dropout running amok. They relentlessly flee the inner pain of their abandonment and lack of attachment with the symbolic flight of constant busyness.” (Pete Walker, https://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm)

12. Is this because parents are more likely to prepare separate food for their children now than in the 1960s? This is something Shrier mocks “gentle” parents for on page 180 (“I don’t want a grilled cheese sandwich! Make chicken nuggets!"). We just feed my toddler the same food we prepare for ourselves; it’s a huge time-saver and she eats a healthier and more varied diet than most kids her age because of it. But I guess that would ding us on “child care” hours in surveys like this one.

13. For example, there is some research suggesting American mothers are more likely to try to entertain their babies when they interact with them compared to mothers from other cultures (see Erica Komisar, Being There, pages 77-78).

14. All quotes taken from pages 176-186 of Bad Therapy.

15. For example, on pages 60-61, she interviews “speaker, author, and psychologist” Joshua Coleman, a self-declared expert on family estrangement who charges parents $995 for a 45-minute consultation. (Targeting your services toward affluent parents instead of their mentally-ill children is objectively a better business model). Coleman informs Shrier that estranged parents are typically not abusive as children who were actually abused are “more interested in salvaging whatever they can of parental love.” Neither he nor Shrier consider that a child might flip from one state to the other (and then back again; on an unrelated note, Coleman claims to now be close to his own once-estranged daughter).

16. There is a significant body of research finding that children from wealthy homes experience “similar emotional difficulties and mental illnesses as children born into severely socioeconomically deprived families; children born to parents who were in the socioeconomic middle seemed to do the best.” (Erica Komisar, Being There, page 51).

Bad Therapy actually mentions a study to this effect (on pages 227-228), which found that in the Great Depression, children of the very poor and the very rich fared the worst in the long-term, whereas middle-class kids fared better. Shrier interprets this result as finding that moderate deprivation and struggle is better for kids than the over-protection and non-deprivation experienced by rich children. Maybe so; but I think a bigger factor at play is that people high in narcissism and psychopathy, who are drawn to high-risk, high-reward pursuits, are more likely to end up at the very top and very bottom of the income/wealth spectrum, and it is traumatic to be raised by narcissistic parents, even when they are wealthy, famous, and/or powerful.

Furthermore: “What do families at either socioeconomic extreme—both wealthy and poor—have in common? The mothers are often absent, both physically and emotionally.” (Ibid, pages 51-52).

“We need to seriously examine the culture of affluence—what it values, what it neglects, and what it disparages—to find clues to the disrepair of so many of its children. […] Why are children in the highest income brackets no more likely to view their parents as available, affectionate, or capable than children whose parents are at the bottom of the economic and social scale?” (Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege, pages 17-18).

17. On page 242, Shrier even describes parents who are “reluctant” to let their son stop taking Ritalin after he tells them he hates how it makes him feel.

18. The advice? “Punishment doesn’t work” and deprives the child “of the very important inner process of facing his own misbehavior.” I agree this is lousy advice, and strongly agree with Shrier’s argument that failing to punish a child for, say, hitting his sister, is not particularly “gentle” to the sister who “just been clocked in the head with a Magna-Tile” (page 189). However, I think it’s important to point out that this book was written by two theatre and education majors, not by people with degrees in psychology.

UPDATE: A reader let me know that the authors of this book actually advocate against “corporal and humiliating punishments” and “offer excellent alternatives to traditional punishments that trigger the frontal cortex and help children to understand what they’ve done wrong and how to atone for their misdeeds”. Not quite the same thing.

19. UPDATE: A reader who actually read Raising Raffi has alerted me to the fact that Shrier misrepresents this book as well, implying that the issues with Raffi were caused by the father’s attempts at “gentle” parenting. The reader felt the parents’ anger issues, mental health issues, relationship issues, and “non-gentle” behaviours (e.g. locking the toddler in his room, yelling at him) were actually driving the misbehaviour. Raising Raffi paints a child less than five years old as the abuser of his parents. His parents are Sad Young Literary Men author Keith Gessen and Gawker hit-piece writer and confessional essayist Emily Gould . Here’s an article about them “calling off” their divorce, which they had publicly announced and crowdfunded for. Here is another one about their exploding marriage and Gould’s resentments of her husband. Shrier’s section on Raising Raffi is titled “Pity the Gentle Dada” (pages 176-179) and paint Raffi, a child, as a monster, omitting this important context.

20. The authors don’t dive into the evidence, since the book is written to be short, sweet, and accessible, but one can always wade through Iain McGilchrist’s 600-page The Master and His Emissary for details.

21. Bad Therapy, pages 40 and 240.

22. Family fragmentation is, of course, not just a consequence of estrangement, but also of higher mobility—of young people moving away from their hometowns for school and/or career opportunities—an issue that is concentrated disproportionately among affluent liberals.

23. I also strongly suspect that the use of scripts would adversely affect the development of non-verbal communication skills, right hemisphere-dominant skills which largely develop in the first three years. How are children supposed to learn authentic facial expressions, tone of voice, body language from people who are putting on a show?