On Therapy Culture

A woman in her 20s at your church has an Instagram bio that reads, before her name, before a single photo: ADHD. Anxiety. CPTSD. Not what she loves or enjoys. Just a diagnosis to frame her life.

The rising generation has received more therapy than any generation before it. The journalist Abigail Shrier spent two years inside America's mental health machinery for her book Bad Therapy. Nearly four in ten young people have now been treated by a mental health professional, up sharply from their parents' generation. More than four in ten carry a current diagnosis. One in six children between two and eight years old has a diagnosed disorder. American kids are given ADHD diagnoses at roughly double the rate you'd expect from population surveys done elsewhere in the world.

The results are not subtle. This generation dates less, drives less, works less, gathers with friends less than any before it. They are more afraid than the children of the Great Depression. They are more afraid than the children who watched their fathers ship out to WWII. Something has gone wrong in the most comfortable, most treated, most diagnosed generation America has ever produced.

None of this means therapy cannot help. It can. But consider what happens when treatment itself becomes the wound. Police officers who debriefed after a plane crash were found, eighteen months later, more hyperaroused and disaster-haunted than officers who never debriefed at all. Burn victims who went through therapy came out more anxious than those who didn't. Women with breast cancer left support groups feeling worse about their diagnosis than the women who skipped them. Soldiers facing PTSD often do better without long-term therapy than with it.

I believe this issue isn’t therapy as much as how we are doing it. All treatment is theological and ministerial. No therapist can run from being an evangelist to their way of looking at the world. They all work from a worldview and accumulated wisdom. And so something about the treatment itself is off and can deepen the very thing it means to heal.

I have personally benefitted greatly from outside professional help. To sit with a trained believer can really open your eyes to blind spots. Therapists are just part of the body of Christ, but not the only part. God designed us to bear it inside a body. "Carry each other's burdens," Paul told the Galatians, "and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed."

What our therapeutic culture has done is take suffering that was meant to be shared and made it exclusively private. It has taken a wound that was meant to be carried by many hands and handed it to one credentialed person who is otherwise absent from your life. Isolate the pain. Professionalize the care. Then wonder why a generation raised on this arrangement is the loneliest and most afraid we have ever produced.

This is not an argument against therapists. Some wounds need a trained hand. I don’t want email replies from my trained therapist and counselor friends who hear me saying their vocation that God has called them to is wrong. Nor do I want people who have gone to therapists to hear me say you did something wrong.

But it is an argument against a whole culture that treats diagnosis as identity and symptom management as salvation, while the body of Christ, purchased for exactly this kind of burden-bearing, sits unused down the street. We were not made merely to feel better. We were made to know God and enjoy him forever, and that joy was never meant to be pursued alone.

I think of that girl again, and her bio. What would it read if her identity came from the family that raised her, the church that recognizes her, and the God who wove her into both before she could choose either? Not "ADHD. Anxiety. CPTSD." But a name. A people. A God who has never once treated her from a distance.