Bad Therapy: why kids aren't growing up
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
I found this part of the review pretty funny:
"Shrier reserves her most scalding contempt, however, for so-called gentle parenting and its acolytes, the well-meaning moms and dads who have been snookered into surrendering their authority, never telling their children no. Instead of the crisp directness of “knock it off,” Shrier explains, gentle parenting promotes a feelings-centered approach, replacing punishment with “Why don’t we try taking a few breaths together now, Harper?”
The use of “Harper” is code here, of course, meant to invoke the type of namby-pamby elitist parent living in a coastal city who would name their kid that. Just in case we weren’t sure whom Shrier is referring to, she specifies: “If someone wanted to kill all human desire to reproduce—to achieve, at last, this thing environmentalists call “population control”—steering readers to the Slate Parenting Facebook group might be a promising way to start,” she writes. (I’ll admit that—reading this book with a review for Slate in mind—I did not see that one coming!)"
Haha, there is absolutely fuckary afoot here. How is it that two unrelated institutions (psychiatry and education) both took a sharp turn toward iatrogenesis at the same time? The more they "help" the worse everything gets.
Therapists do not help these days, they indulge, and there's a shortage of them. "Gentle parenting" is a delegation of therapists' useless role (affirm everything) to parents. Pharmaceutical supplies were disrupted for no legitimate reason (remember the DEA/FDA "quotas" being the problem? They never changed them, and now things suddenly work ahead of an official inquiry). The media prints nothing but negativity. Mental health crisis indeed. It appears engineered.
It's not the Chinese. They need us to keep taking Adderall and keep learning math-- to develop new IP for them to steal.
This one's an insider threat with the heuristics of world-class Narcissism.
I get the issue, and we have a real problem in this country with depression. But the solution is to ask a sterile question on basically what looks like a standardized test to a kid? Eh, I think not.
"First, do no harm" is a pretty useful goal...
Can such things ever be valuable? Sure! But when a patient is getting bombarded with several impersonal depression screeners in a week, and then getting nagged when they balk at completing the superfluous ones for the umpteenth time, it's very clear that any emphasis on value has long left the building.
The only point of that interaction is to get my wife alone and ask her if she is in danger and if she needs help. I wish I had some data to prove my feeling that this line of questioning must help vulnerable women escape abusive situations.
The author's seems to be externalizing her own discomfort. She would do well to interrogate why the idea that therapy seems to be so distressing to her and do some personal growth rather than blaming her distress on something she ultimately can't change: other people.
I stopped reading and was relieved that the post has already been flagged.
ADHD is not "some other novel ailment". It is a recognized medical condition which causes people to be different. As a parent with a child on the spectrum and the other with ADHD I talked with many people, doctors, counselors and teachers. All of them tell me that my sons need help. One doctor told me that both qualify as persons with a disability. It's my opinion that my sons are not really disabled but different and that the world of today is not the same as thousands of years ago. I am happy that I and my wife are repeatedly told that our sons are happy and full of love.
But there's surely one thing I am extremely sure of: ADHD is not "some other novel ailment".
Flagging, too.