Summary of Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

By GP SUMMARY

DISCLAIMER

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.
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Summary of Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
 
IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Abigail Shrier's Bad Therapy delves into the negative effects of the mental health industry on American children's mental health, revealing that most therapeutic methods have serious side effects and few proven benefits, highlighting the backfire of such efforts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9783755470533

Book preview

Part I

Healers Can Harm

Iatrogenesis

In 2006, the author moved from Washington, DC to Los Angeles to be closer to her boyfriend. She had only ever visited California once and was aware that everyone else could identify her body in the event of an untimely demise. As a lawyer, she faced the unpleasantness of becoming a lawyer and needed someone to listen to her worries and misgivings. She hired a therapist, who helped her realize that most things were someone else's fault and helped her diagnose them freely.

The author had a great year with her therapist, but a month before their wedding, her therapist informed her that they needed more work. The therapist was a formidable woman with at least fifteen years on her and a doctorate in psychology. The author decided to take some time off and resumed therapy with her.

A few years later, she married and resumed therapy with a psychoanalyst for a year or so. Every experience with therapy has fallen along a continuum from enlightening to unsettling. Sometimes, it rose to the level of fun. Learning a little more about the workings of her own mind was at times helpful and often gratifying.

Parents often assume that therapy with a well-meaning professional can only help a child or adolescent's emotional development. However, like any intervention with the potential to help, therapy can harm. The author's experience with therapy has shown that children and adolescents are not typically equipped to say these things due to the power imbalance between child and therapist.

Iatrogenesis refers to the phenomenon of a healer harming a patient during treatment, often not due to malpractice but because treatment exposes a patient to exogenous risks. Interventions carry risk, and when a sick patient submits to treatment, the risks are typically worth it. However, when a well patient does, the risks often outweigh the potential for further improvement.

Psychotherapy needs a warning label, as it can provide relief but also deliver unintended harm in up to 20% of patients. Therapy can lead a client to understand themselves as sick and rearrange their self-understanding around a diagnosis, encourage family estrangement, exacerbate marital stress, compromise a patient's resilience, render a patient more traumatized, depressed, and undermine their self-efficacy. This is true even for adults, who are generally less easily led by other adults.

Iatrogenic effects pose at least as great a risk, and likely much more, to children. For example, police officers who responded to a plane crash and then underwent debriefing sessions exhibited more disaster-related hyperarousal symptoms eighteen months later than those who did not receive the treatment. Burn victims exhibited more anxiety after therapy than those left untreated. Breast cancer patients have left peer support groups feeling worse about their condition than those who opted out. Counseling sessions for normal bereavement often make it harder for mourners to recover from loss.

Our psyches are more bespoke than mental health professionals often acknowledge or allow, and therapy can hijack our normal processes of resilience, interrupting our psyche's ability to heal itself. Even when patients' symptoms are made objectively worse by therapy, they tend to assume the therapy has helped. They rely largely on how purged they feel when they leave a therapist's office to justify their sense that the therapy is

Reviews for Summary of Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier

[Kyle Sweeney · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Good summary and felt like understood the book. vv an