More on One Nation Under Therapy
http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story144.htmExcerpts:
In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Jim Windolf, editor of the New York Observer, tallied the number of Americans allegedly suffering from some kind of emotional disorder. He sent away for the literature of dozens of advocacy agencies and mental health organisations. Then he did the math. Windolf reported, 'If you believe the statistics, 77 per cent of America's adult population is a mess.... And we haven't even thrown in alien abductees, road-ragers, and internet addicts.' If we factor in the drowning girls, diminished boys, despondent women, agonised men, and the all-around emotionally challenged, the country is, in Windolf's words, 'officially nuts'.
Our new book One Nation Under Therapy offers a more sanguine view of American society. It points out that there is no evidence that large segments of the population are in psychological freefall. On the contrary, researchers who abide by the protocols of genuine social science find most Americans - young and old - faring quite well.
'Therapism' in practice
These would-be healers of our purported woes dogmatically believe and promote the doctrine we call 'therapism'. Therapism extols openness, emotional self-absorption, and the sharing of feelings. It encompasses the assumption that vulnerability rather than strength characterises the American psyche and that suffering is a pathology in need of a cure. Therapism assumes that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counsellors, work-shoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it though the trials of everyday life. Children, more than any group, are targeted for therapeutic improvement. We roundly reject these assumptions.
Because they tend to regard normal children as psychologically at risk, many educators are taking extreme and unprecedented measures to protect them from stress. Schoolyard games that encourage competition are under assault. In some districts, dodgeball has been placed in a 'Hall of Shame' because, as one leading educator says, 'It's like Lord of the Flies, with adults encouraging it'. Tag is also under a cloud. The National Education Association distributes a teacher's guide that suggests an anxiety-reducing version of tag, 'where nobody is ever "out"'.
It is now common practice for 'sensitivity and bias committees' inside publishing houses to expunge from standardised tests all mention of potentially distressing topics. Two major companies specifically interdict references to rats, mice, roaches, snakes, lice, typhoons, blizzards and birthday parties. (The latter could create bad feelings in children whose families do not celebrate them.) The committees, says Diane Ravitch in her recent book The Language Police, believe such references could 'be so upsetting to some children that they will not be able to do their best on a test'.
Harmful effects on children
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 when educators, obsessed with the mission of boosting children's self-esteem, tell 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 behaviour - even criminality.
Therapism tends to regard people as essentially weak, dependent, and never altogether responsible for what they do. Alan Wolfe, a Boston College sociologist and expert on national mores and attitudes, reports that for many Americans non-judgmentalism has become a cardinal virtue. Concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, are often regarded as anachronistic and intolerant. 'Thou shalt be nice' is the new categorical imperative.
Summarising his findings, Wolfe says: 'What the Victorians considered self-destructive behaviour requiring punishment we consider self-destructive behaviour requiring treatment.... America has most definitely entered a new era in which virtue and vice are redefined in terms of public health and addiction.'
The trauma industry routinely flouts Morrow's wise injunction, and applies with abandon the diagnosis of 'post-traumatic stress disorder'. PTSD is a legitimate clinical condition marked by intense re-experiencing of a horrific, often life-threatening event in the form of relentless nightmares or unbidden waking images. PTSD is not to be applied to people who are acutely distraught - a perfectly normal reaction - after a terrifying ordeal, but to the minority who go on to develop disabling, pathological anxiety because of it. Worse, clinicians often diagnose PTSD in individuals who have not even been exposed to horrific events but are simply upset by troubling incidents. For example, professional journals are rife with examples of 'PTSD' patients who have been sexually harassed on the job, moviegoers upset by seeing The Exorcist, and motorists involved in minor accidents - treated as if they were survivors of the Bataan Death March.
The rise of therapism
Where did it come from, this current preoccupation with feelings? It has many roots. One is the eighteenth-century Romantic philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Rousseau, the expression of emotion is crucial to any moral and spiritual development. It can also be traced to nineteenth-century evangelical movements that offered nostrums for liberating their followers from negative emotions. Its more immediate and familiar progenitors are the new psychologies that flourished and were popularised in the USA after the Second World War - notably, Freudian psychoanalysis and a successor that came to be known as the 'human potential movement'.
Our book, 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 severely 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 behaviour. For, with few exceptions, that is what we are.
