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An Insubstantial Book for a Weighty Problem

March 12th, 2024 | 8 min read

By Matthew Loftus

I have been looking forward to reading Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy for a while. I’ve personally dealt with mental illness for a long time. I’m a family physician whose primary professional focus for the past several years has been delivering mental health care to people who previously had no access to it. I’m a parent trying to raise my kids in a cultural milieu that’s… well, a bit crazy. I’ve been observing cultural currents about concepts from psychiatry making inroads into the church for a while. So I was intrigued by a book promising to explain how and why “therapy culture” is making kids these days more fragile and less capable of dealing with the world, so I bought it the week it came out.

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Matthew Loftus

Matthew grew up in a family of 15 children and completed his medical training in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2015, he and his family have lived in East Africa, where he currently teaches and practices Family Medicine at a mission hospital. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, and Mere Orthodoxy and his first book is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.matthewandmaggie.org.