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| One Nation Under Therapy | | Date Created: May 11, 2005, 10:44 PM |
 One Nation Under Therapy by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel is the definitive statement on one of the forces of left-liberal nature -- therapism. Sommers wrote, The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism? Satel is a psychiatrist (amazing how those psychiatrists have the best read on general socio-medical issues) who wrote, PC MD, another classic. So they know whereof they speak.
So after skewering feminism and PC thinking as it applies to medicine, these two are the perfect collaborators to explain how therapism has taken over psychology. They don't get into related issues like Recovered Memory and Facilitated Communication, but they do deal with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. They agree that it exists which I'm not convinced (it "became" a disease in 1980), but they show how it's over-diagnosed and can be applied to whatever is needed for "victims" such as people seeking disability payments or plaintiffs seeking jury awards.
"These would-be healers of our purported woes dogmatically believe and promote the doctrine we call 'therapism'. Therapism valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings. It encompasses several additional assumptions: that vulnerability, rather than strength, characterizes the American psyche; and that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, workshoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it through the trials of everyday life. Children, more than any group, are targeted for therapeutic improvement. We roundly reject these assumptions...
We suggest that young people are not helped by being wrapped in cotton wool and deprived of the vigorous pastimes and intellectual challenges they need for healthy development. Nor are they improved by educators, obsessed with the mission of boosting children's self-esteem, telling them how 'wonderful' they are. A growing body of research suggests there is, in fact, no connection between high self-esteem and achievement, kindness, or good personal relationships. On the other hand, unmerited self-esteem is known to be associated with antisocial behavior -- even criminality. Therapism tends to regard people as essentially weak, dependent, and never altogether responsible for what they do.
[This is the connection to victimology, another of the forces of left-liberal nature]
We also reject therapism's central doctrine that uninhibited emotional openness is essential to mental health. On the contrary, recent findings suggest that reticence and suppression of feelings, far from compromising one's psychological well-being, can be healthy and adaptive. For many temperaments, an excessive focus on introspection and self-disclosure is depressing. Victims of loss and tragedy differ widely in their reactions: some benefit from therapeutic intervention; most do not and should not be coerced by mental health professionals into emotionally correct responses. Trauma and grief counselors have erred massively in this direction.
[Isn't that just like PC liberal solutions to problems. They're based on nonscience. They don't work. And they're often actually harmful to the people they're supposedly helping. And the liberals pushing this not only have a vested interest in such therapism but couldn't care less whether they do any good or not.]
...But this approach [psychology and talk therapy] can be, and has been, taken too far. The popular assumption that emotional disclosure is always valuable, and that without professional help, most people are incapable of dealing with adversity, has slipped its clinical moorings and drifted into all corners of American life.
One Nation Under Therapy describes the incursion of therapism and the growing role of helping professionals in our daily lives. It rejects the presumption of fragility and challenges the dogma of self-revelation; it exposes the folly of replacing ethical judgment with psychological and medical diagnosis, save for instances where individuals are truly mentally ill. The book contends, in other words, that human beings, including children, are best regarded as self-reliant, resilient, psychically sound moral agents responsible for their behavior. For, with few exceptions, that is what we are."
[Again the connection to victimology and the failure to treat people as individuals but rather as groups or stereotypes.]
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