Is the United States a nation of emotionally damaged citizens in ever-increasing need of therapy, or rather is the notion of self-reliance being steadily undermined through the over-diagnosis of emotional trauma? In their new book One Nation under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance, AEI’s Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel confront a doctrine they call “therapism,” which “valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption, and the sharing of feelings” and takes for granted that most Americans need therapists, grief counselors, and self-esteem educators for emotional well-being.

The authors criticize in particular the tendency to “pathologize and medicalize healthy children,” noting that teachers and academic administrators now favor building self-esteem at the expense of educating students. Sommers and Satel describe the work of “sensitivity and bias committees” that strive to expunge any words and topics students might find distressing from textbooks. Many educators no longer teach about American exceptionalism and shy away from information that does not represent all cultures as morally equivalent. Whereas children used to explore the world around them from the classroom, Sommers and Satel fear that classrooms have become laboratories geared toward having children “find themselves.”

Competition has come under fire in schools, with sensitivity to feelings now vying for priority with--and sometimes overtaking--academic achievement. Some schools even prohibit games like dodgeball and tag for fear that students may feel uncomfortable being called “out” or “it.”

“Therapism” stresses emotional openness for adults as well. The authors consider a “trauma industry” whose chief goal is to exorcise suffering through talk therapy. Therapists and grief counselors often descend upon scenes of disaster, such as Manhattan after 9/11 or Sri Lanka and Indonesia after the tsunami in December 2004, intent on making everyone feel better and presuming to know just what is needed, rather than allowing legitimate fear to run its natural course. These practitioners too often consider grief-stricken individuals incapable of handling their emotions, but Sommers and Satel insist that by “exhorting victims to vent, counselors can cause more harm than good.”

The authors conclude that while therapism seems like “a compassionate and caring philosophy,” it in fact “enfeebles those it seeks to help” rather than encouraging individuals to summon the strength and courage to overcome adversity on their own. Sommers and Satel charge that therapism elevates self-expression over self-control, posits non-judgmentalism as “the essence of kindness,” and considers pain a “pathology in need of a cure.”

To fight these tendencies, the authors urge parents to demand “knowledge-based instead of feelings-based classrooms” and psychologists to “correct the myth that we are a nation of afflicted Hamlets and Ophelias.” They ask: “Will Americans actively defend the traditional creed of stoicism and the ideology of achievement, or will they continue to allow the nation to slide into therapeutic self-absorption and moral debility?”