One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance [Hardcover]

Christina Hoff Sommers (Author), Dr. Sally Satel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312304439 | ISBN-13: 978-0312304430 | Publication Date: March 10, 2005 | Edition: First Edition

Americans have traditionally placed great value on self-reliance and fortitude. In recent decades, however, we have seen the rise of a therapeutic ethic that views Americans as emotionally underdeveloped, psychically frail, and requiring the ministrations of mental health professionals to cope with life's vicissitudes. Being "in touch with one's feelings" and freely expressing them have become paramount personal virtues. Today-with a book for every ailment, a counselor for every crisis, a lawsuit for every grievance, and a TV show for every conceivable problem-we are at risk of degrading our native ability to cope with life's challenges.

Drawing on established science and common sense, Christina Hoff Sommers and Dr. Sally Satel reveal how "therapism" and the burgeoning trauma industry have come to pervade our lives. Help is offered everywhere under the presumption that we need it: in children's classrooms, the workplace, churches, courtrooms, the media, the military. But with all the "help" comes a host of troubling consequences, including:

* The myth of stressed-out, homework-burdened, hypercompetitive, and depressed or suicidal schoolchildren in need of therapy and medication

* The loss of moral bearings in our approach to lying, crime, addiction, and other foibles and vices

* The unasked-for "grief counselors" who descend on bereaved families, schools, and communities following a tragedy, offering dubious advice while billing plenty of money

* The expansion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from an affliction of war veterans to nearly everyone who has experienced a setback

Intelligent, provocative, and wryly amusing, One Nation Under Therapy demonstrates that "talking about" problems is no substitute for confronting them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Cancer patients who talk about their ordeal in therapy groups do not live longer," write Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?) and Satel (P.C., M.D.) in this suck-it-up polemic. For them, the pervasiveness of therapeutic thinking and practice in American life provides not healing catharsis but enervating psychic drag and evasion of responsibility. The authors marshal a litany of studies from a variety of perspectives, aiming to convince readers that taking one's lumps with as much equanimity as possible is far preferable to exploring one's feelings via an "unwholesome therapism"--or, worse, using one's "therapized" feelings as an excuse for bad behavior. Placing themselves in the tradition of Christopher Lasch and Allan Bloom, they begin with "The Myth of the Fragile Child," decrying the creeping prohibitions on dodgeball and tag (seen by some as too aggressive and competitive) on the nation's playgrounds as coddling. The next chapter, "Esteem Thyself," takes direct aim at the ideas of Abraham Maslow and self-actualization advocate Carl Rogers, while the following chapters chronicle the descent from "Sin to Syndrome" and "Pathos to Pathology," and track the enforcement of "Emotional Correctness." While basically a one-note book with little grace in its description of its foes, or in its insistent call for taking responsibility for one's own actions, Sommers and Satel's jeremiad will likely generate debate.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Philosopher-turned-controversialist Sommers and psychiatrist Satel argue as forcibly against contemporary psychotherapeutic notions and nostrums as Sommers did against radical feminism in Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War against Boys (2000). The American Enterprise Institute colleagues question five pet doctrines of contemporary therapy by presenting the research evidence for and against them. That is, they review the relevant literature, letting its conclusions speak for themselves; though they are critical of the five shibboleths, they don't have to apply spin to be convincing. Properly conducted research doesn't, they show, back up the fashionable dogmas that (1) children are psychologically fragile and mustn't be stressed, (2) self-esteem is the sine qua non of psychological health, (3) what moralists call sins are expressions of mental illness, (4) the emotional effects of trauma must be acted out, and (5) all war and disaster witnesses suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Sure, some kids are hypersensitive, self-esteem isn't unimportant, PTSD is a real condition, and so forth. Folly and worse result, however, when the five dogmas are generalized as they are in current practice, a point Sommers and Satel drive home--anent dogmas 4 and 5, in particular--in the long sixth chapter, "September 11, 2001: The Mental Health Crisis That Wasn't." Well-written, well-informed public affairs argumentation. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (March 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312304439
• ISBN-13: 978-0312304430
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #888,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

186 of 215 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Please, no guilt by association, May 2, 2005

By 

J. W. Bush (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (Hardcover)

Reviewers have noted that the authors are affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. I suggest that no one take this as having any bearing, pro or con, on the merits of the book. As a unabashed liberal in most matters, I am appalled by what has happened to this country since 1980 and am embarrassed to share a middle initial and surname with the current President. Yet as a clinical psychologist I can confirm much of what Sommers and Satel say about the blight of "therapism" that has overtaken us in the last 30 or so years. Painful as it may be to admit, every now and then there comes a conservative who gets something right. Sommers and Satel are two such. The case they make deserves to be taken quite seriously.

61 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that needs to be seriously looked at, May 9, 2005

By 

Brooklyn reviewer - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (Hardcover)

I believe that the review by Hara Marano, posted by another reader, misstates much of what the book has to say. Interestingly, the authors are not at all against psychotherapy per se. They are against a culture which medicalizes certain disorders so as to reduce the sense of individual responsibility for the choices that people make. At the same time, they are against a species of one-size-fits-all turnkey psychotherapy promulgated and administered by what I, for many years, have referred to as the "trauma mafia." This term may be unfair as many of these individuals are caring and well-meaning. Sommers and Satel maintain that many of these interventions are unnecessary and sometimes have unintentional negative effects in that they may interfere with help naturally present in community and psyche.

Some reviews have mainted that trauma counselors, whom the authors criticize, no longer use those methods that the authors are critical of. Were this only the case! I would personally advocate a worldwide moratorium on the training of both trauma and grief counselors.

As a psychotherapist, supervisor, and teacher with over thiry years of professional practice, I would say that a good part of my experience and that of my colleagues jibes with much of what the authors have to say. We fortunately did not see what we were told we would see after September 11. Many believe that PTSD is a relatively rare disorder which usually resolves without specific psychological intervention.

Marano states cognitive behavioral therapy has been extensively studied and has been found to be as least as effective as medication for many disorders. But a closer reading of psychotherapy outcome studies leads us to interpret claims of effectiveness with the utmost caution. The same can be said about much drug research. Although the problems with this research are beyond the scope of what I wish to write about here, the literature is there for those who would like to review it.

Any book that makes the leap from patterns of thought (e.g., the human potential movement) to gross issues tearing at the very fabric of society is bound to take some liberties and may not always apply so neatly. However, One Nation Under Therapy in my view is not glib, and is extensively documented. Whether what the authors call "therapism" weakens society is open to debate, but the authors make some important points which should not be ignored.

It's unfortunate that some here have dismissed a thoughtful and coherent thesis on the basis of presumptions about the authors' politics. I think that one can safely let the message speak for itself.

34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging, provocative, and excellent book, May 2, 2005

By 

Richard J. McNally (Cambridge, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (Hardcover)

Contrary to the misreadings of some reviewers, Sommers and Satel are not attacking therapy. Indeed, the second author practices psychiatry in an inner city drug abuse clinic. Rather, the authors provide a refreshingly trenchant critique of the inappropriate extrapolation of the therapeutic ethos to settings where it does not belong and may, in fact, be harmful. More importantly, their conclusions are well-grounded in empirical research, as anyone perusing their abundant endnotes can see. "One Nation Under Therapy" will doubtlessly incite powerful emotional reactions, both pro and con. But if it also stimulates critical thought about "therapism" in our culture, it will count as a resounding success.