Bad Therapy – A Wake up call
We are in a cultural moment where therapy is being embraced with near-religious fervour. Schools are rolling out counsellors and mental health screenings; youth groups are centring emotional check-ins; and across society there’s a growing belief that every child needs therapeutic support to thrive. In the midst of this enthusiastic embrace, Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up arrives as a bold and necessary corrective.
Shrier challenges a core assumption that now underpins much of our educational and pastoral work: that more therapy equals more wellbeing. She flips the question and asks something far more uncomfortable—what if the very systems designed to help children are, in fact, harming them?
One of the most striking parts of the book is Shrier’s critique of how therapy culture has infiltrated schools. She expresses deep concern about the growing trend of universal mental health screening, which she argues often pathologises normal emotional experiences. Instead of teaching children how to cope, schools are increasingly teaching them that discomfort is danger. As she puts it, “We’ve taught them that pain is a sign of damage, not growth. That vulnerability is a permanent identity, not a passing state.”
Through a series of real-life case studies, many drawn from well-meaning, upper-middle-class American families, Shrier shows how children identified through school-based mental health initiatives often find themselves swept into cycles of over-diagnosis, medication, and self-identification with psychological disorders. What begins as a school’s concern becomes, she argues, a “conveyor belt” into therapeutic dependency. “A child’s brief sadness becomes anxiety, becomes depression, becomes disorder. And once the label sticks, childhood is reinterpreted through it.”
Although focused on the American context, Bad Therapy is equally important for readers in the UK, where, despite a marked increase in school-based mental health provision and funding, we are seeing worsening outcomes in children’s wellbeing. This should provoke serious reflection: what if our solutions are not only insufficient but, in some cases, counterproductive?
Shrier is not wholly against therapy. She makes a careful distinction between necessary, clinical interventions for acute issues like trauma or suicidal ideation and the much broader, uncritical expansion of therapeutic thinking into the daily emotional life of ordinary children. Her target is what she calls the “therapeutic industrial complex”: a growing network of professionals, products, and programmes that thrive on diagnosing fragility and turning it into an identity.
In schools, this shift has also subtly undermined parental authority. Shrier argues that therapists now occupy a quasi-priestly role in children’s lives, offering not only emotional guidance but a moral framework, often without accountability or transparency. Parents who resist therapeutic language or decline intervention are increasingly viewed with suspicion, even as barriers are erected around what they are allowed to know or challenge.
Churches, too, are not immune. While compassion and care for mental health are important, Shrier’s work challenges us to consider whether we have become too quick to outsource discipleship and pastoral care to therapy. Are we equipping young people with resilience and meaning or simply echoing secular messages of fragility and perpetual self-focus?
This book doesn’t offer neat answers. But it does ask urgent questions that educators, pastors, youth leaders, and parents alike must consider. In a world where feelings have become diagnostic and discomfort is medicalised, Bad Therapy is a bracing reminder of the value of grit, meaning, and ordinary growing pains.
I would strongly recommend Bad Therapy to anyone raising children or working with them especially church and school leaders. Whether or not you agree with all of Shrier’s conclusions, the questions she raises are too important to ignore. In a time when we are reshaping childhood through the lens of therapy, her book is an essential wake-up call.
