Americans used to be resilient. Little things didn’t get them down. What didn’t kill Americans used to make them stronger. Now if one’s feeling a little blue, it’s off to psychiatrist who prescribes one of a myriad of medications and all is well, or at least, calm. Therapism for one and all. The psychiatric industry is turning America into a bunch of whiny, self-absorbed wussies.
One in ten Americans is taking medication for psychiatric disorders.
What happened? Whose fault is this? Forget Freud, according to Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers are at fault. In their book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance, they point out that Freudian psychoanalysis is just too time consuming and expensive. That’s for the rich and famous. To pull the middle class into the psychiatric treatment tent, there must be another way.
Of course 15 minute sessions and trips to the pharmacy for prozac, paxil, and who-knows-what-all turns psychiatry into a growth business. And everyone is a potential client as we are all trying to achieve the pinnacle of Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ pyramid. A person requires high self-esteem to achieve maximum creative and moral development. So it is the authors’ view that Maslow and Rogers (the “Father of Self Esteem”) influenced an entire generation into believing that success in life begins with self esteem, when it’s the other way around
via Comforting Ourselves with Drugs | Laissez-Faire Bookstore.
