Abigail, you're onto something. After my parent's nasty divorce, they placed ME in therapy. It's hard to quantify how damaging it was. Suddenly I felt like everything was my fault, that I was weird, that I was different. I loathed myself. As my terrible home life got worse, I was alternately diagnosed as having antisocial personality disorder AND bipolar disorder. These were the trendy diagnoses before the trans craze.
Funny thing happened after I was on my own and out of therapy: turns out there was nothing wrong with me. I am successful and (usually) happy, no thanks to my parents and the string of incompetent and greedy psychologists and psychiatrists that followed.
Reading about what was done to Chloe Cole and other confused and misguided children infuriates me. I’m glad brave people like Abigail Shrier are drawing attention to this. We need a societal reckoning, the sooner the better.
People don't realize how broken, corrupt, and full of pseudoscience and baseless pop psychology the entire field of therapy is. There's a real need for therapy for some people, but the vast majority of those practicing it right now don't have the training or skills needed to do it properly and are causing more harm than good.
Both of my sons were diagnosed with anxiety and depression as children and both have owned these labels. Had I known that behavioral counselors were only making them worse, I would never have used them. Now that they're adults, I don't know how to drag them both back to healthy. My oldest son's anxiety is so crippling that he's never had a paying job and lives off of disability. It's very real. I need a book "Gen Z was given a mental health diagnosis, and you shouldn't buy into it anymore".
As I read this I thought that it was spot on but did not relate to our particular family experience until I got to:
"For well over a decade, teachers and school counselors have assumed the mandate (and curricula, and use of instructional time) to play shrink indiscriminately with kids, often styled as “Social Emotional Learning.”"
Yes! The teachers and counselor at our daughter's high school called our daughter a crazy name and "he" behind our backs and then would not stop when we learned of it. This is a serious psychological intervention/playing shrink and not something anyone should do with another's minor child. Yet, the do. All the time. And, they call it "Let the child lead". Or, something. We parents were the dinosaur bad guys which created triangulation with our daughter. Love reigns in our family once more but all of this has to change. And, there need to be professional consequences for many - including Doctor Jason Rafferty, Doctor Jack Turban, Satanic Panic Doctor Diane Ehrensaft and Admiral Richard Levine.
But, I agree that the ROGD travesty needs to be viewed in the context of SEL/DEI/"Social Justice" replacing basic learning in school. Schools do not have a right to take up any of that. How did this get decided without parents even having a say? The State does not own our children but it is sure trying...
The point about "overcoming" vs "accommodation" is so on the mark. We need to quit teaching kids to fear being uncomfortable or challenged and start teaching how to think critically, solve problems, and conquer difficulty.
I'm Get X and we didn't have therapy back then, except for most outlandish cases. My mom died when I was 15 and my dad quickly remarried, and I hated the new "evil" stepmother. There was a rocky period for sure, I was even depressed for several months. But I went to college, moved across the world for grad school and lived my life without therapy until mid-40ties, when I started to hate my meaningless corporate job so much that I couldn't do it anymore. I went to a shrink who diagnosed me with ADD and prescribed Zoloft. The drug immediately made me feel even worse. I stopped taking it, quit the hideous job, got some new training and found the job that generally agrees with me, I actually even like it. Bottom line - glad we were taught resilience when we were growing up in the 70s and 80s. Kids nowadays are snowflakes.
Pop culture has been making girls and women feel bad about their bodies forever. Dissatisfaction with our bodies and who we are is very real. Approaching the problem by saying "all you have to do to feel better about yourself is take cross-sex hormones and have major surgery to rearrange your sex organs" is insane.
As a former Corrections Officer in a maximum security prison who then became a therapist. Also as a male whose dad committed suicide when I was six years old. I can say I am not your typical therapist and I am an outsider in the profession.
I intensely dislike most other therapists. Other therapists are overwhelmingly neurotic and extremely emotionally sensitive women. The idea that you should help a client stand up on their own two feet. Build some grit and transition out of therapy is considered toxic. Good therapy also involves confronting distorted thinking.
Therapy too often becomes a life long crutch, rather than help to get better.
Excessive anxiety is usually a lack of confidence. Depression is often being stuck and lacking direction in life. These are not hard for a good therapist to fix.
Some problems like PTSD, Anorexia, Gender Dysphoria, OCD are more durable and can take a long time to treat.
I think parents in general should channel more of their inner Fran Lebowitz.
"Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success."
Benign neglect is wildly underrated. Ensure they don't have unfettered access to the cesspool called internet, feign interest in grades and daily location, ensure 6pm family dinner is an absolute rule, remind them that nobody likes a drama queen, feed them, clothe them, love them, "only ask them what they want for dinner if they are paying...."
"Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have anything to add."
In short, treat them as poorly educated adults, but with more hope in a 12 year old than a 32 year old, and they will surprise you, take responsibility, and become adults.
Having a rancid alcoholic father and untreated bipolar mother with a good aunt as distant backup seems to have done fine for me.
Dec 23, 2023·edited Dec 23, 2023Liked by Abigail Shrier
In my child's forth grade class, the teacher asked each child how are they feeling on a scale of 1-10 during normal class time. after kids give their answer the teacher asks each child to explain their answer.
i cant imagine any teacher from my childhood asking this.
Is there a movement of people who sue psychologists? I reported the one who pretended to treat my daughter for a HIPAA violation and he was eventually fined over $10,000, by HHS, and listed on their web site. Though that did not help my daughter, at least he was harmed for his incompetence. We have a duty to make life hard for incompetent therapists. Report them; make formal complaints against them. Most people simply do not believe their efforts can have an effect, but they do. File formal complaints. In time politicians will recognize this as something useful too. DEI is dying now because many many people kept making it harder and harder for them to continue. Reason does eventually win out.
Abagail, my story goes way back to the 60s when my sister had a "nervous breakdown". I was pretty young but she was acting strange and this was Main Line Philadelphia. So off to the shrink she went. 50 years later, after she has been on lithium for decades, we were on a walk and she causally told me that her psychiatrist had told her (when she was about 14 years) that our parents didn't love her. I was, of course, stunned. I had and have no reason to not believe her. My wife and I have other heart-breakings stories with young people we loved and still love who left our lives right after seeing a psychologist. Something about our affections causing stress. In studying the history of psychiatry and psychology and its inter-weavings into the more authoritarian political frameworks, I found as, course, you and many have found, that the destruction of the family is at the top who of their list and I am sure this "virus" infects most who practice in the psych field - whether knowingly or unknowingly. Brock Chisholm and his ilk state this emphatically and boldly in their mission statements in the 40s regarding psychiatry. Knowing this does not heal our pain but it helps to see that this infection is really rooted into our modern society. Thank you for being so brave.
Abigail, you're onto something. After my parent's nasty divorce, they placed ME in therapy. It's hard to quantify how damaging it was. Suddenly I felt like everything was my fault, that I was weird, that I was different. I loathed myself. As my terrible home life got worse, I was alternately diagnosed as having antisocial personality disorder AND bipolar disorder. These were the trendy diagnoses before the trans craze.
Funny thing happened after I was on my own and out of therapy: turns out there was nothing wrong with me. I am successful and (usually) happy, no thanks to my parents and the string of incompetent and greedy psychologists and psychiatrists that followed.
"Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left." -- Aldous Huxley
Reading about what was done to Chloe Cole and other confused and misguided children infuriates me. I’m glad brave people like Abigail Shrier are drawing attention to this. We need a societal reckoning, the sooner the better.
People don't realize how broken, corrupt, and full of pseudoscience and baseless pop psychology the entire field of therapy is. There's a real need for therapy for some people, but the vast majority of those practicing it right now don't have the training or skills needed to do it properly and are causing more harm than good.
Thank you for protecting our daughters. We must remain vigilant against Manson family-style cult behavior that involves love bombing, obedience, and mutilation. What is the best way to protect women’s sports and spaces? https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-save-womens-sports-riley-gaines
Both of my sons were diagnosed with anxiety and depression as children and both have owned these labels. Had I known that behavioral counselors were only making them worse, I would never have used them. Now that they're adults, I don't know how to drag them both back to healthy. My oldest son's anxiety is so crippling that he's never had a paying job and lives off of disability. It's very real. I need a book "Gen Z was given a mental health diagnosis, and you shouldn't buy into it anymore".
As I read this I thought that it was spot on but did not relate to our particular family experience until I got to:
"For well over a decade, teachers and school counselors have assumed the mandate (and curricula, and use of instructional time) to play shrink indiscriminately with kids, often styled as “Social Emotional Learning.”"
Yes! The teachers and counselor at our daughter's high school called our daughter a crazy name and "he" behind our backs and then would not stop when we learned of it. This is a serious psychological intervention/playing shrink and not something anyone should do with another's minor child. Yet, the do. All the time. And, they call it "Let the child lead". Or, something. We parents were the dinosaur bad guys which created triangulation with our daughter. Love reigns in our family once more but all of this has to change. And, there need to be professional consequences for many - including Doctor Jason Rafferty, Doctor Jack Turban, Satanic Panic Doctor Diane Ehrensaft and Admiral Richard Levine.
But, I agree that the ROGD travesty needs to be viewed in the context of SEL/DEI/"Social Justice" replacing basic learning in school. Schools do not have a right to take up any of that. How did this get decided without parents even having a say? The State does not own our children but it is sure trying...
The point about "overcoming" vs "accommodation" is so on the mark. We need to quit teaching kids to fear being uncomfortable or challenged and start teaching how to think critically, solve problems, and conquer difficulty.
I'm Get X and we didn't have therapy back then, except for most outlandish cases. My mom died when I was 15 and my dad quickly remarried, and I hated the new "evil" stepmother. There was a rocky period for sure, I was even depressed for several months. But I went to college, moved across the world for grad school and lived my life without therapy until mid-40ties, when I started to hate my meaningless corporate job so much that I couldn't do it anymore. I went to a shrink who diagnosed me with ADD and prescribed Zoloft. The drug immediately made me feel even worse. I stopped taking it, quit the hideous job, got some new training and found the job that generally agrees with me, I actually even like it. Bottom line - glad we were taught resilience when we were growing up in the 70s and 80s. Kids nowadays are snowflakes.
Pop culture has been making girls and women feel bad about their bodies forever. Dissatisfaction with our bodies and who we are is very real. Approaching the problem by saying "all you have to do to feel better about yourself is take cross-sex hormones and have major surgery to rearrange your sex organs" is insane.
As a former Corrections Officer in a maximum security prison who then became a therapist. Also as a male whose dad committed suicide when I was six years old. I can say I am not your typical therapist and I am an outsider in the profession.
I intensely dislike most other therapists. Other therapists are overwhelmingly neurotic and extremely emotionally sensitive women. The idea that you should help a client stand up on their own two feet. Build some grit and transition out of therapy is considered toxic. Good therapy also involves confronting distorted thinking.
Therapy too often becomes a life long crutch, rather than help to get better.
Excessive anxiety is usually a lack of confidence. Depression is often being stuck and lacking direction in life. These are not hard for a good therapist to fix.
Some problems like PTSD, Anorexia, Gender Dysphoria, OCD are more durable and can take a long time to treat.
I think parents in general should channel more of their inner Fran Lebowitz.
"Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success."
Benign neglect is wildly underrated. Ensure they don't have unfettered access to the cesspool called internet, feign interest in grades and daily location, ensure 6pm family dinner is an absolute rule, remind them that nobody likes a drama queen, feed them, clothe them, love them, "only ask them what they want for dinner if they are paying...."
"Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have anything to add."
In short, treat them as poorly educated adults, but with more hope in a 12 year old than a 32 year old, and they will surprise you, take responsibility, and become adults.
Having a rancid alcoholic father and untreated bipolar mother with a good aunt as distant backup seems to have done fine for me.
In my child's forth grade class, the teacher asked each child how are they feeling on a scale of 1-10 during normal class time. after kids give their answer the teacher asks each child to explain their answer.
i cant imagine any teacher from my childhood asking this.
Therapists are the secular word's version of priests or pastors, and they're way worse at the job priests or pastors used to do.
Is there a movement of people who sue psychologists? I reported the one who pretended to treat my daughter for a HIPAA violation and he was eventually fined over $10,000, by HHS, and listed on their web site. Though that did not help my daughter, at least he was harmed for his incompetence. We have a duty to make life hard for incompetent therapists. Report them; make formal complaints against them. Most people simply do not believe their efforts can have an effect, but they do. File formal complaints. In time politicians will recognize this as something useful too. DEI is dying now because many many people kept making it harder and harder for them to continue. Reason does eventually win out.
Abagail, my story goes way back to the 60s when my sister had a "nervous breakdown". I was pretty young but she was acting strange and this was Main Line Philadelphia. So off to the shrink she went. 50 years later, after she has been on lithium for decades, we were on a walk and she causally told me that her psychiatrist had told her (when she was about 14 years) that our parents didn't love her. I was, of course, stunned. I had and have no reason to not believe her. My wife and I have other heart-breakings stories with young people we loved and still love who left our lives right after seeing a psychologist. Something about our affections causing stress. In studying the history of psychiatry and psychology and its inter-weavings into the more authoritarian political frameworks, I found as, course, you and many have found, that the destruction of the family is at the top who of their list and I am sure this "virus" infects most who practice in the psych field - whether knowingly or unknowingly. Brock Chisholm and his ilk state this emphatically and boldly in their mission statements in the 40s regarding psychiatry. Knowing this does not heal our pain but it helps to see that this infection is really rooted into our modern society. Thank you for being so brave.