Author Note
Some children have mental illness and need therapy, this book focus on a separate and large group of children who the author doesn’t label precisely.
Intro
- Anecdote about taking her child in for a stomach ache and the practitioners wanting to administer a mental health screening
- Anecdote/testimony about her rearing and an extrapolation on how her generation raises children with a focus on therapy and pathologies.
- Scare quotes around “mental health”, “resilience”, “accepting your trauma”
- Basically “kids these days”, and it’s therapy’s fault
Chapter 1
- Anecdote about her therapy
- ****Good point****: Adults often have a better sense of self and therefore can assert in therapy when the therapist has missunderstood or has arrived at a conclusion that isn’t correct in their opinion. This avenue is not/lesse available to children.
- Any medical intervention procedure has risks, therapy is not an exception. Applying an intervention to a unhealthy individual the cure may be worth the risks. Applying an intervention to a healthy individual only carries risks.
- Psychotherapy carries risks:
- Studies have shown PTSD symptoms can get worse through therapy, she cites a Lancet study1,a Perspectives on Psychological Science paper2, and a Contemporary Clinical Trials paper3.
- 20% of patients can experience harm according to a paper confined to CBT4 (she doesn’t call out that this is only one therapeutic approach)
- “Therapy can lead a client to understand herself as sick and rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis.” this is based on a single article5 from The American Journal of Psychology which reads like a letter, maybe a meta-analysis, but certainly not an RCT
- Family estrangement, increase marital stress, compromise resilience, undermine self-efficacy, more depression, “render more traumatized” all comes from Schermuly paper4
- Create dependence on the therapist which cites5
- Therapy isn’t for everyone - she cites2,3,6
1. Rona, R. J. et al. Post-deployment screening for mental disorders and tailored advice about help-seeking in the UK military: A cluster randomised controlled trial. The Lancet 389, 1410–1423 (2017).
2. Lilienfeld, S. O. Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2, 53–70 (2007).
3. Jonsson, U., Alaie, I., Parling, T. & Arnberg, F. K. Reporting of harms in randomized controlled trials of psychological interventions for mental and behavioral disorders: A review of current practice. Contemporary Clinical Trials 38, 1–8 (2014).
4. Schermuly-Haupt, M.-L., Linden, M. & Rush, A. J. Unwanted Events and Side Effects in Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Cognitive Therapy and Research 42, 219–229 (2018).
5. Boisvert, C. M. & Faust, D. Iatrogenic symptoms in psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy 56, 244–259 (2002).
6. Bonell, C., Jamal, F., Melendez-Torres, G. J. & Cummins, S. ‘Dark logic’: Theorising the harmful consequences of public health interventions. J Epidemiol Community Health 69, 95–98 (2015).