I’ve been reading a book by the American journalist Abigail Shrier – Bad Therapy – which describes just how demented our obsession has become with unbuttoning the stiff upper lip. Nearly 40 per cent of American children have received treatment from a mental health professional, she says. Going by the number of kids I know who are on the waiting list here, we’d be approaching that proportion too if the NHS was functional.

The desires of children came second to the desires of adults, and whingeing was frowned on

What the book makes painfully clear is that all this 21st-century medicalising of normal emotion, the endless therapy, is worse than useless. How can it be working, if so many adolescents in the Anglosphere describe themselves as anxious or depressed? Last week, the psychologist Jean Twenge revealed that for the first time since such data started being recorded in America, more young men are committing suicide than middle-aged ones. Our own Office for National Statistics data shows a steep rise in suicide by young men in Britain too. What do you think they need? More therapy?

The worst of it is that if Shrier’s right, the therapeutic approach to child-rearing seems to actively create the problems it’s seeking to alleviate – it’s iatrogenic. You send a child to a therapist because they seem depressed and that’s what the other mums do; because you’re anxious yourself, it’s much easier to buy help than to summon the........

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