Abigail Shrier has a new book on where therapy for the young went wrong

We all remember Abigail Shrier from her controversial first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which pointed out the huge increase in the number of adolescent girls who wanted to transition to becoming trans males, attributing some of the rise by the egging-on of gender dysphoric adolescents by social media to go ahead with transitioning.  As Wikipedia describes it:

Shrier states that there was a “sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls” in the 2010s, referring to teenagers assigned female at birth.  She attributes this to a social contagion among “high-anxiety, depressive (mostly white) girls who, in previous decades, fell prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder”  Shrier also criticizes gender-affirming psychiatric support, hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery (together often referred to as “gender-affirming care”) as treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

The book was controversial, but it was also brave, and since its publication Shrier’s theses have largely been substantiated: the social-media contagion is present quite often, and the willingness of bad therapists to shunt children onto the medical track has led some countries to consider hormone therapy as “experimental.”  But soon after Shrier’s book came out, there was a maelstrom of controversy, as always happens when anybody goes against the tenets of gender activism.

First, ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio called for banning the book (yes, the ACLU!). Have a gander at his tweet (archived but, I think, taken down)

Other stuff happened.  Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine reviewed the book favorably, but her review was removed and had to be published elsewhere because editors Steve Novella and David Gorski,  didn’t like the book and wanted to ban a favorable review. Amazon suspended paid advertising for the book shortly before it came out, and Target did ban it from sale, albeit briefly.  Here’s more from Wikipedia:

In July 2021, the American Booksellers Association, a non-profit trade association that promotes independent bookstores, issued an apology for including the book in a monthly mailing, calling the decision to do so a “serious, violent incident” and characterizing the book as “anti-trans”.^[20] This set off further controversy, with some arguing the association was now trying to censor the book, and others saying the apology was insufficient.

The book has been translated into multiple languages and foreign-language versions have been released in other countries such as Spain,^[36] France, Hungary^[37] and Israel where a speech by Shrier drew protesters.

Backlashes against the book have led to termination of its publication in Japan.

This is what happens when you advance a thesis—and Shrier advanced it with data and well as with civility—that runs contrary to the gender activist narrative that many people are born in the wrong bodies, realize it on their own without social contagion, and then, often after cursory “affirmative therapy”, undergo surgical and hormonal intervention whose results may be either unknown or harmful (note: many who transition are happy with what they did, and Shrier noted that).

But I think the backlash took Shrier by surprise, and she’s had to defend herself numerous times. She even started a Substack site called The Truth Fairy.  It was from that site that I got the announcement of her new book, which I can’t read in toto as I don’t subscribe. But I thought I’d call attention to it, first by reproducing what I can see:

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.

Bad Therapy is being published by my own publisher, Penguin Random House, and will be out on February 27 of next year (click on the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site). The book is already #1 in parenting over two months before the publication date!

The summary from Amazon:

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

• Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
• Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
• “Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Clearly this book is not solely about “affirmative therapy”—the tendency of some psychologists to immediately accept a child’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and immediately putting them on puberty blockers or other hormones without a thorough and ardent discussion and analysis of the adolescent. Rather, it’s about the failure of child therapy in general, both directly and through what child psychologists say that has filtered down to parents.  I haven’t seen the book, but suspect it should be read by both parents and child psychologists. It seems to be a sort of supplement to Lukianoff and Haidt’s popular book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which dealt mostly with how parents and societal norms were screwing up kids. Shrier now adds therapists to the mix.

Oh, and we should be prepared for strong pushback by therapists, who, after all, think that they’re doing a terrific job. But they’re often not, as we can see from the persistence of psychoanalysis long after its been debunked.