BAD THERAPY: An Origin Story

Ten weeks until publication! And a new piece dropping Friday.

Dear Subscribers,

BAD THERAPY arrives in ten weeks and – first of all – THANK YOU.  This book took me almost two years (and hundreds of interviews) to write.  I’m so excited for you to read it.  And I could not have done it without your support.

I started BAD THERAPY, as I always do, with a question: Why is the rising generation suffering so mightily? Why did a generation who had seen no world war, no great depression, no 9/11—plunge into a bottomless well of despair? They received far more parental attention than we - their Gen X parents - did. And we showered them with more mental health resources – preventive care, treatments and interventions – than the children of any generation prior. They ought to be the picture of mental health. Instead, they seem to be the essence of psychological frailty.

I hypothesized that the answer to this question had to do with the way kids were being raised. I even sold a book proposal with that central argument. But no hypothesis should remain entirely unscathed after a serious investigation. And after hundreds of interviews, I understood that I’d only been half right: the rising generation had been raised differently. But that difference was not the result of their parents’ flawed judgment so much as it was parents’ willingness to be guided by mental health experts and to serve up their children for the experts’ evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment.

The rising generation is awash in therapeutic intervention, and it isn’t helping. Still, I resisted the notion that those interventions could possibly be making things worse.