Bad counsel.(One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance)(Book Review)

Sally Satel & Christina Hoff Sommers One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance. St. Martin's Press, 320 pages, $23.95

A few days ago I attended a talk by a leading member of the British psychiatric bureaucracy. It was his proud boast that he and his colleagues had persuaded the government that hospitals and health authorities should have to explain why they refused psychiatric assistance to anyone who had asked for it. The idea that some people might actually be harmed by the desired but nevertheless ineffective and unnecessary psychiatric assistance was completely beyond his comprehension. He evidently believed in a neo-Cartesian dictum: I want, therefore I need.

It is not difficult to work out that such an attitude would serve the financial interests and appetite for power of the so-called caring professionals. The psychiatric bureaucrat also cited in his talk a frequently quoted figure about the proportion, 70 percent, of prisoners who had "mental health problems"--among them, of course, unhappiness at being locked up. That slippery phrase "mental health problems" was meant to imply, though it could not prove, that a giant apparatus of care was necessary to cater to the 70 percent. When it comes to therapy, evidently, there can never be enough.

What the authors of this book call "therapism," the idea that man is psychologically fragile and can achieve mental stability only by means of professional assistance, is comparatively new, and is in antithesis not only to the traditional American virtues of self-reliance and sturdiness in the face of adversity, but also to a couple of millennia of moral reflection. Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded--at least by those who believe in therapism--as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned).

As the authors show, sometimes hilariously, therapism now pervades society. This is true not only in America but in much of Europe as well. Education departments regularly scour books to ensure that they contain nothing that might bring a blush to the cheek of the Young Person. Modern Podsnappery is not so much prudish about sex as inclined to regard everyone as suffering from severe psychological allergies. Any adverse judgment about anything (except adverse judgment itself) will produce a reaction in someone, just as traces of peanut do in the susceptible. Therefore, in the interests of psychological safety, it is best to avoid such judgment altogether. As for games in which there are winners and losers, they should be avoided: the experience of losing could damage the Young Person's self-esteem for life.

According to therapism, everyone who has ever witnessed anything unpleasant, or experienced loss or humiliation (which is to say, the great majority of humanity), is at risk of subsequent mental illness unless he expresses his feelings volubly and often, preferably as directed by a mental health worker. As the authors point out, there is no evidence that this is so--quite the contrary. As appetites grow with the feeding, so emotions grow with the expression. In fact, the evidence is very strong that most people are resilient, and that resilience is self-reinforcing. If, however, you persuade people that they are weak and fragile, that is what they will become.

At stake is our whole conception of what it is to be human. The common-law tradition is that everyone is responsible for his actions unless the contrary can be proved. Therapism, which has already subverted law to a considerable extent, believes that wrongdoing is itself a symptom. Man is a feather, blown on the wind of circumstance. There, but for the grace of my environment, go I.