As someone who in college majored in psychology and family and child counseling, I’m a proponent of therapy as an intervention in the case emotional difficulties. However, I am starting to question the potential overuse of therapy. Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic about a study in which Australian teens with no history of mental health challenges were given therapy and actually saw negative outcomes as a result.
Russell Moore picks at the notion that opposites attract in a recent newsletter. That’s one reason many people love to find out their Enneagram number or Myers-Briggs type—or even to take one of those “Which Marvel character are you?” quizzes online. If nothing else, those things can offer a baseline caricature for, say, why my wife and I react so differently when we hear that a friend is in the hospital after surviving a car accident.
Matthew Kaul writes about our anxious age in a post on The Good Teacher Substack. He brings up, as many are now, the crisis of anxiety among teenagers, but also more broadly among the general population. Kaul takes a stab at the source of this increase in anxiety by referencing Kierkegaard. It’s at least in part a crisis of meaning. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard talks about anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.
I’ve been thinking about the ways we abandon the things that keep us healthy in times of busyness. I once read an apocryphal account of a Buddhist monk who insisted to a man that he should meditate thirty minutes each day. When the man countered that he didn’t have time to meditate thirty minutes a day, the monk told him that he should meditate sixty instead.
As someone with an educational background in counseling, one of the most fascinating subjects to me is the rise in mental health problems, particularly in younger people. It has had my attention for years, and occupies even more of my mind share now that the trend has accelerated. Quite a few writers have pondered potential answers about why things are getting worse. Derek Thompson writes for The Atlantic about the various theories attempting to explain teenage anxiety.