Please meet ... BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
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Please meet ... BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
Hundreds of interviews, two years of my life, to discover the untold story of how mental health experts are making adolescents sicker, sadder, unwilling to grow up
Dear Friends,
I wanted you to be the first to see the cover of my new book, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (out February 27, 2024).
A single question motivates BAD THERAPY: Why does the generation that received the most therapy, the most mental health diagnoses, the most psychiatric medication also seem to have the worst mental health? How did a generation raised so gently come to believe it had experienced debilitating trauma? And when faced with tasks teenagers a generation ago handled with ease, why are so many of today’s young people falling apart? Why are they not able to do for themselves? Why are they not growing up?
BAD THERAPY is the product of hundreds of interviews with parents, teenagers, child psychiatrists, academic psychologists, sociologists, parenting coaches, teachers and school counselors. And what I learned is this: The experts are a big part of the problem. For more than a generation, our mental health experts have been treating healthy young people, making them sick, feeding the well into an unending mental health pipeline.
But we parents can fix this. We can act on the knowledge gained from tens of thousands of hours with our kids, family traditions, and our own judgment and reclaim our kids from the experts whose advice has made young people’s mental health so much worse.
I look forward to continuing this discussion with you, here on Substack!
And I will be speaking on campus, mid-October, at the University of North Carolina followed by the University of Virginia. Details to follow.
Much Love,
Abigail
p.s.
BAD THERAPY is available for pre-order on Amazon as of today.
Please meet ... BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
When my now 27 year old was about 9 her small country primary school was broken into and the office vandalised (foam in computers and a bit of grafitti). She came home quite excited and keen to play detective. But the next afternoon she was quite different. She arrived home speaking of being traumatised and violated. Yes! The pschologists had been sent in to deal with the 'trauma' of the children and teachers. I quickly reminded her about how she had felt the day before and she immediately forgot about 'being violated' and reverted to interested detective mode. I learnt so much about the role of experts in creating trauma from this incident and have always sought to help my children find their strengths and resilience.
All my children were adopted as toddlers from India so do have some very real trauma issues but as a family we have always been able to have open conversations about this and my husband and I have tried to support them through their feelings of abandonment, loss, shame and more. While I do know that a really good therapist would probably have helped with some of the legacy issues, especially with my youngest, I have been too wary of the current desire to victimise to turn to the professionals in the hope of finding the very rare good one while risking sending them to a 'bad' one. Given my youngest began to have some 'gender' issues as a 13 year old in 2016 and knowing what I know now about ROGD I am very very thankful I never sent her to a therapist. Especially in my state of Australia where there is an affirmative only model! At 20 she is now a very proud gender critical woman.
BTW, with the school break in it turned out to be a couple of bored teenage ex students who had done the deed.
Painfully accurate. My own field of psychology has been ideologically captured. I hope your book provides much needed courage and solutions to break away from the current group-think.