Ours is an era of grief counselors, workshoppers, self-esteem facilitators, and traumatologists, all steeped in "therapism," a powerful modern ethos that encompasses several unfounded assumptions, including the importance of emotional self disclosure to mental health; the need for most people, including school children, to seek psychological help rather than ethical guidance; the act of suffering from loss or defeat as a pathology in need of a cure; and vulnerability, not resilience, as a characterization of the American psyche. According to therapism, human beings are weak, dependent, and never altogether responsible for what they do. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence and common sense, AEI scholars Sally Satel and Christina Hoff Sommers roundly reject the central assumptions of therapism and contend that, with few exceptions, human beings are self-reliant, psychically sound, and morally responsible for their actions.

Sally Satel is a resident scholar at AEI in the W. H. Brady Program in Culture and Freedom. She is also the staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She serves on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and addiction medicine and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science. Dr. Satel is the author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine and Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion. She is the coauthor, with Christina Hoff Sommers, of the forthcoming One Nation under Therapy.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI, and she has been a professor of philosophy at Clark University since 1981. She specializes in ethics and contemporary moral theory and has published many scholarly articles in publications such as the Journal of Philosophy and the New England Journal of Medicine. She is the editor of Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life--one of the most popular ethics textbooks in the country. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War against Boys.