This year’s World Happiness Report contained surprising news. Despite the near-universal presence of social media, which studies show strongly correlates to depression and anxiety, there’s been an uptick in happiness for people under 30 in several non-English-speaking countries. English-speaking countries, on the other hand, have experienced a palpable drop in happiness.
In the Atlantic, Derek Thompson suggested that one cause of this drop could be the Western world’s increased focus on mental health. In the past few decades, English-speaking countries, especially America, have been inundated with terminology and conversations around personal “well-being” and “self-care.” In fact, between 1952 and 2016, the leading handbook for psychological disorders grew by 200 new terms, an increase of not only new words but new mental difficulties.
Mental health has also become a focus of broader culture. Many TikTok celebrities regularly “open up” about their personal mental health struggles. Teachers often spend as much time instructing students in therapeutic techniques as in mathematics, and parents are quicker to turn to counselors than to pastors.
And so, the generation that has been most fed on therapy, wellness techniques, and “gentle parenting” is also the generation most burdened with depression, anxiety, and mental health disorders. All the discussion around mental health, Thompson argues, may be prompting excessive introspection. Also, an under-30 crowd that has been engulfed in these new cultural norms are more likely to interpret typical swings of emotions as signs of the “psychological disorders” that they hear so much about.
In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, researcher and author Abigail Shrier takes this analysis a step further. Not only has the increased focus on mental health prompted more diagnoses, but the proposed solution—constant therapy—could also be making things worse. Shrier cites a variety of findings to illustrate this point:
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. And counseling sessions for normal bereavement often make it harder, not easier for mourners to recover from loss.
Therapeutic treatment for mental conditions involves interaction with one’s sadness, whatever may have caused it. In group therapy, patients listen and theorize with others about their sadness. In individual therapy, patients rehearse their own sadness, often for months and even years at a time. In both cases, the focus is on looking within. This, Shrier argues, “can hijack our normal processes of resilience, interrupting our psyche’s ability to heal itself, in its own way, at its own time.”
Also, therapists can be incentivized to continue treatment after a patient feels better. As Shrier wrote, “It’s in therapists’ interest to treat the least sick for the longest period of time.”
To be clear, Shrier is not opposed to therapy, nor does she downplay the importance of mental health. Neither does the Holy Scripture. In fact, the entire book of Proverbs is basically an encouragement to seek wise counsel. God, reflecting on His good creation, declared that it was not good for man to be alone. It’s notable that He did not say that man was “lonely,” the subjective experience of feeling alone. His solution was to draw man outward to another image bearer, not inward in self-reflection.
There is a time to seek wise counsel and even prioritize our mental health, but it is never done without reference to God and others. After all, it’s written into our “programming” that we live best (and happiest) when we live with and for others.
This Breakpoint was co-authored by Aletheia Hitz. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.
Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/Westend61
Published Date: August 8, 2024
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.