A Cold Compassion

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, Peggy Noonan considers the heartlessness of our media and therapy culture:

I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn't kept up with the number of tragedies. "A nation mourns." "Our prayers are with you." The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?

And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: "Oh no." "I am so sorry." "I'm sad." "It's horrible."

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

A Voice Crying Out in the Therapeutic Wilderness

Amidst the biological or sociological reductionism and denial of human depravity that characterize so much of the thinking coming from mental health professions, this essay by Dr. Richard Friedman in today's New York Times is a refreshing oddity. Swimming against the tide of searching for mental illness behind every conceivable instance of bad behavior, Dr. Friedman suggests that in many (if not most) cases, the cause is something that psychiatry can neither diagnose nor cure - meanness.

When have you ever heard of a therapist telling a patient that he is mean or bad? Probably never. It’s not fashionable in our therapy-friendly nation, where people who behave obnoxiously are assumed to have a treatable psychiatric problem until proven otherwise. Nothing in the human experience is beyond the power of psychiatry to diagnose or fix, it seems. But even for me, an optimist and a proponent of therapy, things have gotten a little out of hand.

Dr. Friedman later asks whether we must "turn everything we don’t like about our fellow humans into a form of psychopathology?" That's a very important question but I don't think the tendency to boil everything down to psychopathology is primarily motivated to explain away the misbehavior of our neighbor so much as it is to excuse and justify ourselves. Psychiatric and psychological theories easily become sophisticated tools which we employ to aid us in our suppression of the truth.

From the Couch to the Crib

Infant psychotherapy is on the rise (HT: Jeff Burton):

A widely used mental health and development diagnostic manual for infants was revised last year for the first time since 1994 to include two new subsets of depression, five new subsets of anxiety disorders (including separation anxiety and social anxiety disorders) and six new subsets of feeding behavior disorders (including sensory food aversions and infantile anorexia).

Can fruit-flavored, infant-formula antidepressants be too far off?

The Tyranny of Therapism and Some Surprising Roots

I've almost finished reading One Nation Under Therapy, a book I referred to here, here, and here. Last night I came across an essay by the authors, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, called "The Tyranny of Therapism." "Therapism" is a phrase they coined to describe the constellation of assumptions about human nature and well-being promoted and perpetuated by many helping professionals. (The book isn't a rant against mental health professions per se as Satel is a practicing psychiatrist.)


As they describe it, therapism:

....extols openness, emotional self-absorption, and the sharing of feelings. It encompasses the assumption that vulnerability rather than strength characterizes the American psyche and that suffering is a pathology in need of a cure. Therapism assumes that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, work-shoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it though the trials of everyday life. Children, more than any group, are targeted for therapeutic improvement.

Hoffman and Satel state that therapism has many historical and ideological roots among which is the philosophy of Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Freudian psychoanalysis and the human potential movement popularized by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are more recent contributing factors. Secularists don't bear the whole brunt of responsibility, however. The authors also claim that the current preoccupation with feelings "can be traced to nineteenth-century evangelical movements that offered nostrums for liberating their followers from negative emotions." Ouch!

The Real Me

I continue to make my way through One Nation Under Therapy when I'm not doing required reading. I'm currently in a chapter titled "From Sin to Syndrome" which deals with the various ways in which violent and immoral behavior is either medicalized or explained in terms of some psychological deficit. The authors quote Anthony Daniels, a British psychiatrist who works with prison inmates:

That criminals often shift the locus of responsibility for their acts elsewhere is illustrated by some of the expressions they use most frequently in their consultations with me. Describing, for example, their habitual loss of temper, which leads them to assault whomever displeases them sufficiently, they
say, "My head goes," or "My head just went."

Sommers and Satel go on to say that Daniels has observed that many of the convicts he works with share a distinct theory of the self that he calls the doctrine of the "Real Me":

The Real Me has little or nothing to do with the self who breaks into houses, uses drugs and alcohol, and beats his wife and children. "No, the 'Real Me' is an immaculate conception, untouched by human conduct: it is the unassailable core of virtue that enables me to retain my self-respect whatever I do."

This morning at World Net Daily, I read an article about Mary Carey, a porn star (whose real name is Mary Ellen Cook). You may recall that she was among a host of unlikely candidates in the running to become California's next governor following the recall of Gray Davis. Now she's in the news because she is scheduled to attend next week's President's Dinner and Salute to Freedom, a $2,500 per plate event sponsored by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Carey says that it would be an honor to meet President Bush with whom she'd like to talk about freedom of speech and the crackdown on the adult film industry. She'd also like to get some pointers from the Commander in Chief as to how she might advance her political career.

Carey claims to be a Christian whose daily routine consists of Bible reading and prayer. She dismisses the thought that her lifestyle is at odds with her profession, saying:

"I probably have less sex with those guys than any college girl [typically has]. It doesn't make me less moral," she said. "I'm sure a lot of Christians have had sex before marriage. God reads my heart. I'm a good person. ... I think I have more morals than the politicians in office. I don't rob, steal, hurt, or lie - a lot of politicians do that."

That Carey adheres to the doctrine of the "Real Me" is evident in her reaction to a question about how her pornographic occupation is consistent with the biblical prohibition of adultery: "Bill Clinton committed adultery. [Doing] adult movies is acting, portraying a role. It's not Mary Ellen Cook, the real me."

Interesting that Ms. Carey uses everyone but God as her moral point of reference - promiscuous college coeds, politicians, and, last but not least, former President Bill Clinton. She has established a self-righteous system that allows her to soothe her conscience by telling herself she's not as bad as those "truly evil people."

Of course, we don't have to go to prison inmates and porn stars to find instances of this kind of self-justifying activity. Proverbs tells us that it's universal: "Every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts" (21:2). Each of us is prone to self-deceptive pride that entices us to preserve the illusion of a pristine "Real Me" while attributing our wicked actions to factors outside our selves.

I hope Mary Carey does read the Bible every day. Likewise, I hope she'll soon read and consider Jesus' teaching in Mark 7:21-23: "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

Carey's right. God does read our hearts - but he doesn't compare them to the texts of other lives. He judges them by the standard of his own moral purity. This is why we need the Savior.

Calibrate Your Me-O-Meter

Low self-esteem is a secular counterpart to Christianity's doctrine of depravity. Many are persuaded that it is the spring from which all kinds of corruption flow despite the absence of evidence in support of that conviction. In a recent USA Today opinion piece, Christina Hoff Summers, co-author of One Nation Under Therapy (to which I've referred previously), illustrates the consequences of this deeply ingrained cultural belief for the education of children. Here are some examples:

The National PTA recommends a cooperative alternative to the fiercely competitive "tug of war" called "tug of peace." Some professionals in physical education advocate activities in which children compete only with themselves, such as juggling, unicycling, pogo sticking, and even "learning to... manipulate wheelchairs with ease."
The Girl Scouts of America recently launched a major campaign "to address the problem of low self-esteem among 8- to 14-year-old girls." (Never mind that there is no good evidence these girls suffer a self-esteem deficit.) With the help of a $2.65 million grant from Unilever (a major corporation that owns products such as Lipton and Slim Fast), its new program, "Uniquely ME!," asks girls to contemplate their own "amazing" specialness. Girls are invited to make collages celebrating themselves. They can play a getting-to-know-me game called a "Me-O-Meter."
One normally thinks of the Girl Scouts as an organization that fosters self-reliance and good citizenship. Me-O-Meters? How does that promote self-reliance? And is self-absorption necessarily good for young people?

Yes, say the mental health experts at Girl Scout Research Center. The Uniquely ME! pamphlet tells its young readers, "This booklet is designed to help boost your self-esteem by celebrating YOU and your uniqueness. ... Having high self-esteem ... can help you lead a more successful life."

Now, wasn't this just an excellent post? I'd sure feel good about myself and would probably treat others a whole lot better if you'd leave an affirming comment. Wow! That therapeutic mindset really is contagious.

OD'ing on Oprah & Therapism

Steve Salerno, author of the forthcoming Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, writes on the side effects of the empowerment movement in today's National Review Online:

The larger point is that, with the gods of empowerment cheering in the background, society has embraced concepts like confidence and self-esteem despite scant evidence that they're reliably correlated with positive outcomes. The work of legitimate psychology notables Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman indicates that often, high self-worth is a marker for negative behavior, as diagnosed in sociopaths and drug kingpins. Furthermore, self-esteem may be expressed in the kind of braggadocio -"I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" - that actually inhibits personal growth.

Read the rest of "Overdosing on Oprah" here.

I'm reading a related book in snippets - One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance. Its authors, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., reject what they call the doctrine of "therapism" which:

....valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings. It encompasses several additional assumptions: that vulnerability, rather than strength, characterizes the American psyche; and that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, workshoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it through the trials of everyday life. Children, more than any group, are targeted for therapeutic improvement (p. 5).

I'm still in the first chapter ("The Myth of the Fragile Child") in which the authors also cite the research conducted by Roy Baumeister et al. The study found no significant connection between feelings of high self-worth and academic achievement, interpersonal relationship, or healthy lifestyles. Sommers and Satel write:

On the contrary, high self-regard is very often found in people who are narcissistic and have an inflated sense of popularity and likeability. Such self-aggrandizing beliefs, said the authors, exist "mainly in their own minds." Furthermore, those with exaggerated estimates of self-worth often become hostile when others criticize or reject them. "People who have elevated or inflated views of themselves tend to alienate others," the authors concluded (pp. 31-32).

I think a persuasive case can be made that therapism has invaded the church and, in many cases, has become the hermeneutic lens through which we understand the gospel. It is therapism that leads some to insist that implicit in Christ's commands to love God with our whole selves and our neighbor as ourselves is the mandate to love ourselves. Therapism leads us to believe that unmet needs rather than craving hearts are the cause of our sins. Therapism advocates forgiving primarily because of its therapeutic benefits contrary to the Bible's emphasis on our extending forgiveness because we have been mercifully forgiven by a thrice-holy God through the blood of His Son's cross.

Therapism is a powerful expression of the spirit of our age which we must understand if we are to heed the call not to be conformed to it. The following quote from Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions evidences that the world is watching:

Although many, if not most, religious books are published by religious presses and speak to subcultures of believers, especially conservative Christians, they partake in prevailing mainstream notions about goodness, health, selfhood, and social relations (p. 123).