Are the kids all right? Abigail Shrier says you should stop asking them

 https://www.thejc.com/life-and-culture/are-the-kids-all-right-stop-asking-lhsgy4p9

America is in denial, says Shrier, but all the data suggests that therapy culture carries strong “iatrogenic effects” — when the healer makes things worse. “In 2016,” Shrier says, “one in six of children aged two to eight had a mental health or behavioural diagnosis. Those kids weren’t on smartphones… those were very young kids, they don’t generally have a smartphone now in America, but back then they certainly didn’t. What they had was a tremendous amount of diagnosis. Which meant a tremendous amount of mental health professional oversight. And we have seen this for more than a generation. These kids have been flooded with mental health interventions. They should be the picture of mental health, right? If preventive mental health care worked, these would be the healthiest kids we’d ever seen. But preventive mental health care doesn’t work. Now that of course doesn’t apply to people who actually are in desperate need of treatment, which is not preventive care, [they’re] people who are being treated because they have mental illness and that’s necessary. But right now, mental health professionals are holding themselves up, especially in America, as the solution to the suffering of this generation, just when we have every reason to believe they have only been making things worse for a generation. To me, that’s a very big problem. It’s the idea of the firemen have actually been starting the fire.”