THE appetite of Americans for therapy to boost their self- esteem and combat stress is being challenged by a book that takes on the nation’s narcissistic culture and billion-dollar mental health industry.
A Gallup poll last autumn found that 88% of Americans described their emotional well-being as excellent or good. The latest research shows that rates of depression and teenage suicide are falling, along with child poverty and juvenile crime. Yet more and more Americans are buying into the myth that they are an emotional mess from childhood.
“There is an entire network of self-esteem workshoppers, traumatologists and crisis counsellors who are there to treat this condition called being a human,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, co-author with Sally Satel of One Nation Under Therapy. They blame the “helping culture” for eroding self- reliance.
The American Girl Scouts, formed to foster a spirit of independence, offers a “Stress Less” badge for girls aged 8 to 11, which they can earn by practising “focused breathing” and keeping a “feelings diary”.
A California school principal has banned the game of tag during break because it has “a ‘victim’ or ‘it’ that creates a self-esteem issue”. This is not merely the concern of one oddball: the Department of Education promotes a game called Circle of Friends, in which nobody is “out”.
“It starts even in daycare, where the mildest setback, such as not getting a chair in a game of musical chairs, is treated as harmful to a child’s wellbeing,” said Hoff Sommers, who is a fellow of the right-of-centre American Enterprise Institute.
As children progress through school, less than an hour’s homework is described as “overwhelming” and sports coaches are disciplined for telling parents’ little darlings that they need to lose weight.
In adolescence, bullying among girls, such as that portrayed in last year’s film Mean Girls, is seen as a new and troubling phenomenon. “There is no youth crisis,” said Hoff Sommers. “The Mean Girls phenomenon is just the crisis du jour. First it was boys, then it was girls. Soon there will be no more groups to pathologise.”
Americans have often satirised their fondness for shrinks, from the 1950s Hollywood comedy Oh, Men! Oh, Women! with David Niven as a debonair psychiatrist and Ginger Rogers as his patient, to Analyze This in 1999 with Robert De Niro.
The evidence, however, is that the nation’s mental health has rarely been better. Suicides in the 10-19 age group are down 25% in the past decade, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A study at the University of California in Los Angeles found that rates of depression for first-year students had decreased for the fifth consecutive year. In 2003, only 7.4% of freshmen reported frequent feelings of depression, compared with 10.6% in 1988.
Yet stress-busting workshops and “stress-free zones” on campus are proliferating. Students at Wisconsin University are encouraged to take part in “napping events” during finals where they can get a backrub or draw pictures with crayons.
At Duke University in North Carolina, over-anxious undergraduates are offered massage therapy. College administrators, however, felt obliged to post the salutary warning: “No hooking-up with a partner at the programme”.
The authors began their book in earnest after being shocked by the assumption that the attacks of September 11, 2001, would lead to a national mental health crisis.
The Red Cross and other charities pumped $100m into therapy for beleaguered New Yorkers, who showed little interest in receiving help.
“Americans did feel bad after September 11. That was normal, but they didn’t panic and they didn’t need therapy,” said Hoff Sommers. “Most people do not become mentally unstable because of adversity.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a genuine medical condition, the authors say, but “post-traumatic growth is more likely after a life-shattering experience”.
The obsession with therapy can have negative consequences, they warn. A 1989 study, reported in the medical journal The Lancet, revealed that women with breast cancer could live up to two years longer if they attended group therapy sessions.
This led patients to feel they had to attend intrusive sessions, and soon became a staple “fact” of self-help books, which extended its message to all kinds of illness. Yet in 2001 a larger follow-up study of 235 patients showed that those who attended group therapy survived only nine days longer than those without it.
The authors blame Daniel Goleman, the bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, for persuading Americans that they are emotionally inadequate. “Nobody has been more successful in making a career out of alleged national anguish,” they write. “His 1995 book described a nation suffering from a profound ‘emotional malaise’ and in the grip of ‘surging rage and despair’.”
Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence has spawned an “empire”, according to Hoff Sommers. Companies such as L’Oréal, American Express and even the US Air Force have spent millions of dollars training managers and recruiting and assessing staff on the basis of their EQ (emotional intelligence quotient).
Goleman said he suspected he was the “straw man” for the authors’ theories. “Emotional intelligence cultivates self-reliance because it equips people to be self-confident, adaptable and able to seize opportunities.
“Some people can be too obsessed with therapy — women’s magazines are particularly culpable for stoking anxiety — but one needs to be a little more discriminating between an unhealthy preoccupation with therapy and people’s need for help.”
