Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Back in April, a Psychology Today article noted how some people today, especially younger people, are finding their identity in their psychological struggle. For those who do, the point is not to overcome these struggles or to achieve personal growth. Rather, it's belonging by having a disorder.
As the writer put it, quote, we're living in an age where psychological explanations are prioritized above all others. Indeed, TherapySpeak has permeated everyday life. It's taken over conversations and relationships, leading people to claim boundary violations, accuse others of gaslighting, or see narcissists everywhere they go, end quote. It's true, between the rise of a hyper-therapeutic culture and the whole critical theory mood that dominates today, a quick way to achieve social status is to have a kind of condition. Preferably, one that can't be challenged.
There are, of course, real pressing psychological issues that face many, especially in the rising generation. Such people deserve to be taken seriously. But as Abigail Schreier has rightly observed in her recent book, Bad Therapy, the mental health industry incentivizes mental health struggles. It's normalized the need to therapize even the most basic tasks of childhood, like making friends or cleaning your room. The result here is not better health, it's greater dependency.
In fact, the whole cultural drift to valorize victimhood and to medicate almost every behavior is not providing this generation with the thing they need most, hope. In fact, it's the opposite. Despite greater mental health awareness and increased access to care than at any other time in all of human history, our rates of suicide and psychological distress are up while rates of healing are down. But of course, we ought not be surprised when young people believe what they're told, that they're victims, that the world has no ultimate meaning, so they have to make it out of something in order to be their true authentic selves. Essentially, we've placed the weight of making the world on their shoulders and then are surprised when they stumble under the weight of the task.
They're told, live your truth, be yourself, follow your heart, after learning in school that the entire cosmos is just one big accident, and then from social media that they could never stack up to the experiences of others. From their favorite Disney movie, they learn the hero is a villain and the villain is just Misunderstood. And so here they are without any fixed reference points for knowing who they are or why they exist or how they should live. In that context, the therapist that's assuring them that they're the victim here, that's all pretty compelling indeed. Nearly a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that the key factor in human survival, even more than just basic physical and mental health, is hope.
After spending years in a Nazi concentration camp, basically seeing the worst a fallen world could possibly be, he argued in Man's Search for Meaning that people need to believe in something bigger than themselves to endure even the greatest of horrors. From these insights, Frankl developed a style of therapy that was built on the idea that people could in fact get better. He didn't deny their suffering, but he did insist the suffering was not meaningless. His goal was not to keep people dependent on therapy or on medication. He wanted to help people find.
Healing, restoration. That was hope. And hope is at the core of the whole Christian message. Though the biblical view of sin rejects entertaining optimism about the human condition or unrealistic wishful thinking about the future, it does present the Creator putting himself at the center of this fallen world in order to renew and reconcile it and us.
So Christ is making all things new. and that includes those who are lost and hurting. If Frankl was indeed correct, if there can be no healing without hope, then God's people are the ones uniquely positioned today to offer a way forward. For those who don't know who they are, or why they are, or how to live, there is indeed hope. In fact, we know hope by name.
It's Jesus the Christ. For the Colson Center on John Stone Street with Breakpoint, today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download podcasts. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org.
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