Bad Therapy

Mental health interventions for children have expanded dramatically over the past several decades, yet youth anxiety and depression rates continue to climb. This paradox reveals a troubling possibility: the very treatments designed to help young people may actually be making them worse. The therapeutic culture that now permeates schools, families, and pediatric care operates on assumptions that deserve rigorous examination.

The evidence suggests that widespread mental health screening, social-emotional learning programs, and therapeutic parenting approaches may be creating the problems they claim to solve. Rather than building resilience, these interventions often foster dependency, rumination, and a victim mentality that leaves children less capable of handling life's inevitable challenges. By treating normal childhood struggles as pathological conditions requiring professional intervention, we risk transforming temporary difficulties into permanent disabilities.

Iatrogenesis refers to harm caused by medical treatment itself, a well-recognized phenomenon in physical medicine that receives little attention in mental health care. When therapists encourage children to focus intensively on their feelings and past traumas, they may inadvertently amplify emotional distress rather than alleviating it. The power imbalance between adult therapists and child patients creates particular risks, as children lack the developmental capacity to challenge inappropriate interpretations or resist suggestion.

The therapeutic relationship can foster unhealthy dependency, convincing young people they cannot handle problems without professional guidance. This external locus of control undermines the natural development of coping skills and self-efficacy. Children who might otherwise bounce back from setbacks learn instead to view themselves as fragile and damaged, requiring ongoing therapeutic support to function.

Research on psychological debriefing demonstrates how well-intentioned interventions can backfire. Studies consistently show that forcing trauma victims to process their experiences in group settings often worsens PTSD symptoms rather than preventing them. The assumption that talking through problems is universally beneficial ignores individual differences in coping styles and the potential for therapeutic interventions to interfere with natural healing processes.

The mental health field's reluctance to acknowledge iatrogenic effects stems partly from professional self-interest. Unlike medical doctors who must warn patients about side effects, therapists rarely discuss the possibility that treatment might cause harm. This lack of transparency prevents families from making truly informed decisions about mental health interventions for their children.

Schools have transformed into de facto mental health clinics, with armies of counselors, social workers, and psychologists now embedded in educational settings. This therapeutic takeover treats every classroom as a treatment facility and every student as a potential patient. Social-emotional learning curricula require children to share personal information and examine their feelings in ways that would be considered inappropriate in any other context.

The daily emotions check-ins that begin many school days exemplify this misguided approach. By constantly directing children's attention to their internal states, schools inadvertently promote a state orientation that interferes with learning and task completion. Research demonstrates that focusing on how you feel rather than what you need to accomplish reduces performance and increases anxiety.

School-based mental health programs violate basic therapeutic ethics by creating dual relationships. The same adults who provide counseling also have authority over students' academic lives and disciplinary records. This concentration of power creates opportunities for manipulation and exploitation that would be unacceptable in traditional therapeutic settings. Students cannot freely choose to terminate these relationships or seek alternative perspectives.

The therapeutic parenting movement has convinced a generation of parents to abandon their natural authority in favor of treating children as emotional equals. This gentle parenting approach prioritizes children's feelings over their behavior, replacing clear expectations and consequences with endless negotiation and accommodation. The result is not happier children but rather anxious, entitled young people who lack self-discipline and respect for others.

Parents who abdicate their authority create a power vacuum that children are developmentally unprepared to fill. Young people need adults to make difficult decisions and set limits on their behavior. When parents instead defer to children's preferences and emotional states, they burden their offspring with responsibilities that properly belong to mature adults.

The concept of childhood trauma has expanded far beyond its original meaning to encompass virtually any negative experience. Popular trauma theorists claim that adverse childhood experiences create permanent neurological damage that manifests in adult dysfunction. However, this theory rests on methodologically flawed research that confuses correlation with causation and relies heavily on retrospective self-reporting.

Prospective studies that follow children with documented adverse experiences into adulthood paint a very different picture. The majority of children who experience genuine hardship demonstrate remarkable resilience, developing into healthy, productive adults without therapeutic intervention. The trauma narrative ignores this fundamental human capacity for recovery and growth in favor of a deterministic model that traps people in victim identities.

The body keeps the score theory popularized by trauma specialists lacks scientific support. Memory researchers have thoroughly debunked claims about repressed memories and somatic storage of traumatic experiences. The brain does not store memories in muscle tissue, and the notion of inherited ancestral trauma has no basis in legitimate neuroscience. These ideas persist because they offer simple explanations for complex problems and absolve individuals of responsibility for their choices.

Schools and therapists now routinely subject children to trauma screening questionnaires that presuppose damage and encourage rumination on negative experiences. This archaeological approach to childhood pain often creates problems where none existed before. Children who might naturally move past disappointments and setbacks instead learn to excavate and preserve their wounds as evidence of their special status as trauma survivors.

The trauma industry has created a vast infrastructure of professionals whose livelihoods depend on finding and treating childhood damage. This economic incentive structure encourages the discovery of trauma where none exists and the prolongation of treatment beyond what might be beneficial.

The widespread use of psychiatric medications in children represents perhaps the most troubling aspect of the therapeutic culture. Stimulants prescribed for ADHD and antidepressants given to anxious or sad children alter developing brain chemistry during critical periods of neurological maturation. These powerful drugs carry significant risks of dependency, withdrawal symptoms, and unknown long-term effects on cognitive and emotional development.

The diagnostic criteria for childhood mental disorders have expanded dramatically, pathologizing normal variations in temperament and behavior. Energetic boys who struggle to sit still in restrictive classroom environments receive ADHD diagnoses and stimulant prescriptions rather than more appropriate educational accommodations. Shy children are labeled with social anxiety disorder instead of being given time and support to develop confidence naturally.

Medication often becomes a substitute for the patient work of helping children develop coping skills and emotional regulation. A child who learns to manage anxiety through pharmaceutical intervention never discovers her own capacity to handle stress and uncertainty. This chemical dependence can persist into adulthood, creating lifelong patients rather than resilient individuals capable of navigating life's challenges independently.

The rush to medicate childhood distress ignores the adaptive functions of negative emotions. Anxiety alerts us to potential dangers and motivates protective behavior. Sadness following loss or disappointment serves important psychological functions, encouraging reflection and adjustment to new circumstances. By immediately suppressing these natural responses with medication, we interfere with normal developmental processes and emotional learning.

Contemporary therapeutic approaches assume that children cannot handle emotional discomfort without professional intervention. This assumption becomes self-fulfilling as children learn to view themselves as fragile and incapable of managing difficult feelings independently. The medicalization of normal childhood experiences prevents the development of genuine resilience and coping skills.

Building authentic resilience in children requires reducing rather than increasing therapeutic interventions and allowing natural developmental processes to unfold. Children develop emotional regulation skills through experience, not through explicit instruction or professional intervention. When adults step back and allow children to navigate age-appropriate challenges independently, they provide opportunities for authentic growth and skill development.

Research consistently demonstrates that authoritative parenting produces the best outcomes for children. This approach combines warmth and responsiveness with clear boundaries and high expectations. Children thrive when they know adults are in charge and will enforce reasonable rules consistently. The permissive style favored by therapeutic parenting movements correlates with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems.

The most effective approach to supporting children's mental health involves subtracting harmful elements from their environment rather than adding more interventions. This includes limiting screen time and social media exposure, which research consistently links to increased anxiety and depression. It also means reducing the constant emotional monitoring and therapeutic processing that characterizes many modern childhood environments.

Schools and parents must recognize that some degree of struggle, disappointment, and emotional discomfort is not only normal but necessary for healthy development. Children who are protected from all negative experiences never develop the confidence that comes from overcoming challenges independently. This protective approach ultimately increases rather than decreases psychological vulnerability.

True mental health support involves creating environments where children can develop autonomy, face age-appropriate risks, and learn from natural consequences. This requires adults to tolerate their own anxiety about children's struggles and resist the urge to intervene at every sign of difficulty. When children are allowed to develop their own coping resources, they become genuinely resilient rather than therapeutically dependent.

The evidence reveals a fundamental contradiction at the heart of contemporary mental health approaches: increased therapeutic intervention correlates with decreased psychological well-being among young people. This suggests that many well-intentioned mental health practices are creating the very problems they aim to solve, transforming normal childhood challenges into clinical conditions requiring professional treatment. The therapeutic revolution in child-rearing has produced a generation of young people who are more anxious, depressed, and dependent than their predecessors despite receiving unprecedented levels of mental health intervention.

Genuine support for children's psychological development requires stepping back from therapeutic over-involvement and allowing natural resilience-building processes to occur. This means tolerating children's emotional discomfort, maintaining appropriate boundaries and expectations, and trusting in their inherent capacity for growth and adaptation. True emotional health emerges not from therapeutic intervention but from the patient work of growing up in environments that balance support with challenge, empathy with accountability.