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Years ago, in New York, I was very close to someone – let’s call him N. – who, when I first met him, seemed to be at the height of mental health. He was young, smart, funny, good-hearted, and ambitious. He was a boy of the Midwest, where he’d been raised in one of those marginal Protestant denominations that could only have been founded in America. N. wasn’t just brought up as a member of this sect; his father was the principal of the parochial school that N. attended, and for several years N.’s mother was also his teacher. When N., in his teens, began to moonwalk away from the faith, his mother remained loyal, but his father rejected him entirely – and cruelly. But N. soldiered on. Moving to New York, he found a decent entry-level job and a wide circle of friends, myself included, with whom he shared his big dreams of climbing the professional ladder. Sure enough, he soon progressed to a better job, and then an even better one. He was a hard and cheerful worker. His employers and colleagues loved him. The friction with his father seemed to have disappeared into the mists of time.

Then something happened. Pretty much overnight, his behavior changed. Formerly frugal, he went on spending sprees. One day he loved his job; the next day he quit. Yes, he found a new job, which he also loved, and for a while things seemed to go on as before. Then one day the same thing occurred: out of the blue, he left his job, full of complaints about aspects of it that he’d claimed to love the day before. Obviously something was wrong. I didn’t know exactly what, but plainly it required medication. I urged him to seek help – to go to a psychiatrist who’d prescribe whatever he needed. Instead he went to a psychologist, supposedly to get a referral to a full-fledged psychiatrist. That was where things really started to go downhill. Because the psychologist decided that N. didn’t need medication. He needed talk therapy.

It didn’t take long for the therapist to find N.’s vulnerable point: his father. Meeting with N. several times a week, he insisted that they talk about nothing else. Steadily, the cheery, self-assured person I’d known deteriorated into an insecure mess. He didn’t just discuss his father with his therapist; when he was with friends, he couldn’t talk about anything else. Alarmed, I urged him to quit the therapist. He refused, but agreed to see a psychiatrist. Alas, the psychiatrist also opted for talk therapy.

Then one day, somebody handed me a copy of a memoir by, of all people, the actress Patty Duke, in which she recounted her decades-long battle with manic depression, a.k.a. bipolar disorder. Just a few pages into the book I experienced a shock of recognition: N. was bipolar, a malady for which talk therapy was useless. Phoning his psychologist, I explained N.’s predicament and demanded that he put an end to the talk therapy. He hung up on me. I then phoned N.’s psychiatrist and told him his patient was bipolar. He was actually receptive to my input, and promptly put N. on meds. But they didn’t really work. Maybe they were the wrong meds. (With bipolar disorder, different meds work for different patients.) Or maybe N. wasn’t taking them (which is common in such cases). Or maybe it was just too late – maybe all that talk therapy had caused too much damage to undo. In any event, during the next few years N. – no longer capable of holding down a job – repeatedly engaged in suicidal behavior and was in and out of psych wards. His meds were adjusted over and over again. In vain. He died young. And when I think of his death, it’s impossible for me not to blame that psychologist  who insisted that they talk about N.’s father.

If an incompetent psychologist can do so much damage to an adult, what can he do to a child? That’s the theme of Abigail Shrier’s magnificent and vitally important new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), writes here about matters that aren’t entirely unrelated to the concerns of that courageous and pathbreaking bestseller. Both books take aim, in large part, at the psychotherapeutic community. In the first, Shrier took issue with therapists for putting children with so-called gender confusion on the road to unnecessary hormone treatments, surgical butchery, and a lifetime as physically mutilated freaks – and as cash cows for the pharmaceutical industry (and, naturally, for the therapists themselves). In her new book, Shrier takes on purportedly therapeutic practices to which she was exposed while researching its predecessor.

One of those practices is the routine determination that perfectly ordinary childhood conduct is in fact proof of psychological ailments (many of them concocted only in recent times) with names like “social anxiety disorder.” “Nearly 40 percent of the rising generation,” Shrier reports, “has received treatment from a mental health professional – compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers.” More than one out of ten American kids has been diagnosed with ADHD. Also, while “therapists often act as though talking through your problems with a professional is good for everyone,” the fact (as I experienced with N.) is that “[a]ny intervention potent enough to cure is also powerful enough to hurt.” Too often, she underscores, therapists encourage kids – and adults, too, of course – to scratch at old wounds that are healing, or that have long since already healed, until they begin to bleed again.

Responsible mental-health professionals whom Shrier interviews confirm the absurdity of the near-ubiquitous claim by therapists “that all unhappiness in adulthood is traceable to childhood trauma.” Advocates of “this baseless and unfalsifiable assertion,” notes Shrier, “have made endless mischief” as a result. And popular culture has spread this toxic gospel far and wide. In the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character “can escape his traumatic past…only after he has thoroughly explored his history of child abuse with his therapist.” In one Hollywood movie after another, the efficacy of psychotherapy is invariably celebrated. In real life, by contrast, “rehashing sad memories often creates more problems than it solves.” Amen.

Where did all this bad therapy start? Shrier traces it back to the aftermath of World War II, when sincere attempts to help veterans suffering from what we would now call PTSD led, over the ensuing decades, into a ballooning in the number of mental health professionals. Curiously, however, as the number of those professionals grew, the number of young people supposedly debilitated by anxiety and depression also grew. The reason? The institution, validation, and veritable sanctification of a culture of therapy. A culture of radical overdiagnosis by mediocre practitioners eager to slap a diagnosis on even the most routine strains and stresses. A culture of overprotective parenting by fathers and (especially) mothers who, wanting above all to be perceived by their children (and others) as “nice,” are reluctant to exercise any authority – and who, as a result, end up raising budding authoritarians. And a culture of teachers who obsessively ask kids how they’re feeling, who encourage them to “marinate” in their own experiences of being “sad, scared, or vulnerable,” and who often (in utter contravention to time-honored practices) actually share with those kids the horrific details of their own childhood traumas.

Another way to say all this is that over the years, bad therapy moved beyond therapists and began to be practiced by parents, too – and, often without parental permission, by “teachers, counselors, and school psychologists.” Shrier outlines the steps by which these therapists, both professional and amateur, cause severe psychological damage to mentally healthy kids: they teach them to be obsessed with their feelings, they reward their alleged emotional suffering, they affirm their worries, they accommodate their fears, they hover over them, they diagnose and medicate with terrifying liberality, they encourage them to share their “traumas,” and they pressure them to break contact with “toxic” relatives. Once they’ve completed all these steps – and thereby ensured that the kids in question have moved on from ordinary childhood health to a dependence on treatment – they know their job is done.

And what has all this bad therapy – practiced not just in clinics but in homes and schools – produced? A generation of young people who, in an unsettling number of cases, have been convinced that they’re suffering from crippling emotional traumas, are terrified of simple social encounters, and can barely carry out the most basic of everyday tasks. Thanks to the refusal of most therapists to countenance even the mildest degree of parental discipline, bad therapy has also produced a great many extremely spoiled brats whose misbehavior is routinely excused by their therapists as – what else? – symptomatic of some psychiatric malady or other.

Understandably, Shrier dubs today’s young people “the most unwell generation in recent history” – a generation trained to interpret everyday events as microaggressions and to experience even the most fleeting moments of displeasure or distress as nothing short of unendurable mental torture. In one of the more engaging parts of this book, she examines a couple of the fathers of this dysfunctional new dispensation. One of them is Bessel van der Kolk (born 1943), a Dutchman who has taught millions of worshipful readers “that their bodies stored the trauma of their childhoods” – and that this trauma must be unearthed. Another menacing quack is Gabor Maté (born 1944), a Hungarian-Canadian who teaches, in Shrier’s words, “that we are all damaged goods” – and hence all in need of therapy.

To be sure, social media, too, deserve some blame for the psychological problems afflicting today’s younger generation – even though none of the psychological organizations have dared to say so. Reading Shrier’s comments on this topic, I couldn’t help thinking about the three sons – ages fifteen, seven, and three – of a family I know very well. All three of them have smart phones – and they know their way around them the way a brain surgeon knows his way around the cerebrum. Recently, when I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the light on my phone, the seven-year-old took it from me, flipped the light on instantly, and handed it back. As for his three-year-old brother, the kid stares at his own phone constantly. To drive at night in a car with these lads is to be surrounded by glowing screens making all kinds of noises. And it is to recognize that they – as well as hundreds of millions of their agemates all over the planet – are growing up in an entirely different world than the one I grew up in, and that their minds are consequently being shaped in entirely different ways. When their budding brains are spending so much time immersed in virtual reality, how can they possibly perceive real reality in the same way I do? They can’t. And they never will.

Among the phenomena whose dangers Shrier explores is group therapy, an activity to which children are now increasingly subjected. Back in the 1970s, I regularly watched a sitcom called The Bob Newhart Show in which Newhart played a Chicago psychologist; one of the running gags involved his group-therapy sessions, the patients – all adults – being a gaggle of utter misfits none of whom, it was obvious, would ever be “cured.” Years ago, in New York, after my first long-term relationship ended under particularly traumatic circumstances, a friend suggested I attend a group-therapy session directed precisely at people who’d undergone such situations. So, for once, I tried out therapy for myself. Everyone present in the room that evening was a longtime regular. It was obvious that they loved rehashing their traumas on a weekly basis. It was also obvious that they had no interest in moving on with their lives – they were determined to dwell pathologically on their past. Indeed, to an alarming extent, their traumas had become their identities. It took me two minutes to recognize this so-called help session as a sort of prison where you could easily become a version of Brooks – the tragic character from The Shawshank Redemption. who, having spent so many decades behind bars that he’s come to think of his prison as home, goes berserk when he’s informed he’s been paroled.

Needless to say, I bolted pronto and never looked back.

Which, Shrier counsels, is what most parents nowadays should do with child therapists. A couple of generations ago, she recalls, we believed in resilience. Then we “surrendered our faith in the native human ability to surmount hardship.” We bought into models of therapy that refused to recognize that children need, and even ache for, authority. They crave discipline. Whether they themselves realize it or not, they want demands to be placed upon them. Defined boundaries make them feel safer, and when demands are placed upon them they learn, over time, the deep joys of pride in accomplishment and a healthy self-confidence. Shrier reminds us that it’s the children of lax, therapy-loving parents who gravitate toward extremist cults – because the cults, even as they spout radical, anti-establishment rhetoric, actually provide those young people with the boundaries, discipline, and sense of direction for which they’ve thirsted for so long.

Not, of course, that it’s all about rules and limits. Even as you discipline kids, you should allow them the freedom to make mistakes, to get scraped up in the schoolyard, to make errors and learn from them, and to grow accustomed to dealing with – and surmounting – life’s challenges. Needless to say, you should also discourage involvement with social media, encourage real-life experience, and welcome every opportunity for your kid to develop hobbies that don’t involve computers and participate in activities that take them out of doors. A lot of this may sound like common sense to you and me, but the evidence all around us shows that Shrier’s message – which she delivers throughout with passion, panache, and mountains of evidence – is one that not an inconsiderable number of parents desperately need to hear.