Therapy is making kids ill

What would really help children’s mental health is talk about resilience, strength and recovery

Helen Joyce

IF YOU DON’T HAVE WORDS TO EXPRESS a thought, can you even think it? The idea that language shapes cognition is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, and almost a century after it was proposed, it’s still controversial. Many thoughts aren’t really linguistic — they’re more like visual or other sensory impressions — and anyway, if thinking follows language, how, then, does language arise? But the twenty-first century has brought with it a new test for the hypothesis that language at least shapes cognition, even if it doesn’t entirely constrain it: the rise of therapy-speak and its impact on mental wellbeing. More than a century ago Sigmund Freud gave the world the subconscious, phallic symbols, the Oedipus complex and much more —…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2024

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