One Nation, Under Therapy

To claim most people would benefit from a sport or a hobby more than they would therapy is a belief somewhat sacrilegious. Because we’ve upheld our “mental health” as worthy of incessant worship, evaluation, and even respect, it’s understandable that reducing mental health treatment down to, say, weightlifting, seems overly simple. CrossFit won’t cure bipolar disorder, after all.

But what if it did? What if changing our eating habits and making subtle shifts to our lifestyle was enough to put many of our most distressing symptoms into remission? Are we that dazzled by the mental health industry that we’ve condemned sunshine, balanced food, and exercise as tactics only for the privileged, only for those who “feel up to it”?

Modern behavioral health practices have mastered the craft of marketing. Our scorn for basic-practices-as-treatment further confirms this point. As a practitioner in the field, I’ve found the bulk of what’s packaged as “mental health service” or “behavioral therapy for autism” or the like is akin to Big Pharma’s mass assault on man’s greatest weaknesses (i.e., intolerance for pain or discomfort) through direct-to-consumer marketing. Ever-increasing swaths of adults clamor to the headline that is “our children’s mental health crisis”, hopeful that fields like mine are the missing link in managing their child’s unruly behavior. Allow me to be the one to tell you this: it is largely a lie.

The behavioral and mental health industries have successfully sold an entire generation on the idea that their very routine, normal problems are those only manageable by a professional, and that therapy is just another form of compassionate self-care, no different from a bubble bath or a hike. While great therapy can result in great outcomes, Mind Your Motion believes it misses a crucial factor: skill development. Without acquiring skills to better manage life, in pursuit of “processing how a person feels”, we’re only teaching them to rehash negativity and remain fixed in a pattern of doubting their abilities, depending on others to manage difficult emotions, and isolation from others because of their inappropriate behavior. Allow me to illustrate via example. I once worked with a family on a non-verbal autistic teenager with very peculiar, rigid ‘rules’ for everyone and everything in his environment. The mother grew increasingly concerned that he insisted all the blinds and windows be open at nighttime, as this is a clear safety concern. She had clearly been trained by the behavioral health industry for many years; she asked me, “What are some strategies we can use to get him to stop opening the blinds? What do I say? Should we do a social story?”

No, no, and no. The answer is no. No, you cannot open the blinds. Yes, you are free to throw yourself on the floor and engage in every inappropriate behavior known to man, but yes, the blinds will remain closed. See what I mean, by awesome marketing of very routine, common-sense problems? Do not allow professionals like me to encourage severance from common sense.

This brand of marketing targets a parent’s deepest insecurities, most of which pertain to how you discipline your children, or what will become of them should you fail to feed them organic grape juice from the vineyards of Italy, or opt for participation in a sport instead of the 10+ strains of child therapy replete with laminated visuals and psychiatric medications and timers. Your pediatrician has likely been captured by this concept of therapy for all, making quick referrals for a Ritalin-dispensing psychiatrist and/or behavior therapy should your son have a few quirks or ants in his pants. It’s also doubtful either professional will shed light on such topics as quality sleep, balanced nutrition, daily exercise, and frequent time spent outside. The most-basic-but-effective strategies are treated as afterthoughts--- mostly because they’re not profitable.

It should come as no surprise, then, that insurance-funded child therapies 1) require your child to remain disabled and dependent for the paychecks to keep coming and 2) profit primarily off of the undermining of your parental authority. Perhaps we should have prefaced this entire piece with our belief that therapy is not inherently damaging. There are a handful of wonderful therapists who thoroughly explain the purpose behind child therapy, describe the mandatory role of the parents as the primary change agents, and aim to keep families in treatment for as short a time as possible. This is the overall goal of any therapy of any kind, spanning across all human-service fields: to help people back into their lives as quickly and efficiently as possible with tools to manage their problems (whether physical or emotional) independently. If this point isn’t emphasized at the outset of treatment, it’s likely you’ve signed you and your child’s souls to a soulless agency who only wishes to bill for 30 minutes for explaining how to tell your child “no.”

Children, more than any group, have become easy targets for “therapeutic” involvement. Take the education system, which has employed extreme measures to protect children from most any normal feeling of childhood roughhousing: anger, hurt feelings, the sting of scrapes and cuts, the supposed burning anxiety that is being hit with a ball during dodgeball. Want to play tag? Nobody can ever be “out”, because it’s anxiety-provoking. Want to play soccer? Just make sure there’s no goals or goalies, because some kids don’t handle losing very well. It’s a Broadway, real-life sequel to Lord of the Flies, except the children are apparently too jittery to exhibit any skill required for survival. Their adult staff are not faring much better.

But then there are other services which, by virtue of the child's disorder or disability, require extensive services, services in which the overall goal or outcome is indistinct. Some moderate to severe forms of impairment require dependence on services for an individual’s entire childhood and adult life. Disabilities like autism have garnered aggressive attention in the past few years with the advent of Love on the Spectrum and, recently, with RFK Jr.'s pledge to reform research and treatment efforts toward root-cause versus mere symptom management. There appears to be a moral initiative with certain childhood disabilities (namely autism) that’s unseen in other disorders or even disabilities, making families ripe for cheap, vapid advice, like the great condemnation of discipline for “nervous system dysregulation” and personal plucking of all obstacles so as to obtain their child’s permission before making them upset.

We've projected and assigned so much distorted, moral reasoning to the "mental health" of today's youth that we cannot understand why a preventative measure would even be necessary. The incentive to remain ill, then, reigns supreme, with proponents for health like Mind Your Motion or MAHA deemed the crunchy caucus of the well. Again--- awesome marketing.

Mind Your Motion sees health and “treatment” of our youth a little bit differently. We believe this concierge therapy, or the ‘your kid has a problem, we have a therapist for that!’ doctrine erodes a child’s competence through the excessive “assistance” forced upon them by adults. What if we led with the belief that children, regardless of diagnosis or disability level or symptoms, could tolerate the inevitable discomforts of real life? What if we taught their parents that not all signs of negativity or distress are crises to be managed, or that stress is an imperative experience for our overall growth and development? At Mind Your Motion, we find modern psychology, behavioral health, and education systems culpable in the mass sentencing of our children as victims of their own experiences. We highly suggest watching the below video of one of MYM’s most favorite individuals, Lenore Skenazy, who allowed her 9-year-old to take the subway home and was labeled “World’s Worst Mom” for doing so, amongst other things. She now has a TedTalk on the importance of allowing kids to engage in risky play--- and their parents being cast out of the role of protector/facilitator/pinch-hit psychologist.

 Mind Your Motion stands firm in its principles, principles which we believe could be adopted by K-12 schools and all agencies for children and the adults tasked for teaching them. We uphold resilience as the ultimate antidote to this supposed “mental health crisis”, a lifelong skill we teach primarily through sport, exercise, debate, and service to others. We do not consider feelings to be emergencies. We equip staff with a replacement for modern SEL, an approach grounded in neuroscience, behavior analysis, nutrition science, strength and performance literature, and environmental design which draws about those very skills often suppressed in modern day.

What if resilience, mental well-being, and healthy lifestyle habits weren’t just units in “PE” or “health education”, but parts of everyday life in your program? We are trying to future-proof your agency’s curriculum, your agency’s philosophy and mission, and, most importantly, those you serve.

They medicate. We educate.

And we’d love to hear from you.