Nearly four in 10 (39%) California fifth graders express a need for mental health care, found a new study using data from the 2024–2025 California Healthy Kids Survey. The eye-popping figure includes nearly 7,500 students out of a survey group of 19,000 and suggests that California schools are creating anything but “healthy kids.” Indeed, these data can only be described as disastrous, an utter failure of America’s modern therapy culture.

Academics have pointed out America’s “therapeutic” drift for at least a half century, dating back to Philip Rieff’s 1966 work, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” As theology professor Carl Trueman has pointed out, modern Americans generally conceive of the self in psychological terms, as opposed to economic, religious, or rational.

This therapeutic conception of the self leads to a heavy emphasis on therapy, seeking to reinforce an individual’s psychological self-perception through external validation and praise, never criticism. This is the basis for the “everyone gets a prize” mentality.

Yet such a focus on therapy is “tearing us apart,” lamented psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert in his book, “Therapy Nation,” published earlier this year. Just as the war on poverty has failed to solve poverty over the past 60 years — and may have created more of it — so an obsessive focus on self-validation has led to selves feeling less validated — not to mention a dependency on superficial treatments. Essentially, too much pampering has turned our psyches into spoiled children.

If this problem is evident among adults, then it seems California fifth graders are largely mimicking the same behavior, and the same problems, under the same conditions.

The desperate plight of Americans’ psychology has only been worsened by other factors. The relative anonymity of social media exposes people to crippling amounts of toxic criticism and negative news. Along with other screen addiction, the “doomscroll” gradually cuts people off from real-life relationships to the point that people do not even understand the value of what they are missing.

This loneliness has become particularly acute in the past decade. The study noted an increase of anxiety diagnoses among school-aged children of 29% from 2016 to 2020, while depression diagnoses rose 27%. Speaking of 2020, that was the year when the entire nation — especially California — decided to destroy the social life of every child, for no health benefit at all, and expect no ill effects.

The children whose year in kindergarten was cut short by COVID are the same age cohort as the fifth graders in the California survey.

A final factor disturbing the mental health of young people is the utter void of meaning to life conveyed by the excessive secularism — or, really, Marxism — pushed in public schools. If man is merely a matured monkey, whose position atop the global ecosystem is an accident of random chance, then life can have no ultimate value or meaning. This forces the burden of creating meaning onto the young person’s individual psyche, a burden which he or she was never meant to bear. Radical ideologies can give a form of meaning, but only through an exhausting, rigorous subscription to a project of creating utopia here and now.

As the ultimate expression of secularism in schools, therapy culture was always doomed to failure. What young people need to hear is not that they are enough — a manifestly false proposition — but that God is. Not for nothing does Peter exhort Christians to “cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). God’s omnipotent shoulders are broad enough to bear the weight of all the world’s problems; the individual’s shoulders are not.

Readers have likely heard the first question from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “Q. 1. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

It is relevant to point out that this famous declaration is from a catechism — a tool for teaching children. Kids would memorize this at home! If every student in California schools internalized this truth, how many fifth graders would still need mental health care? Perhaps a few, but not 39% of them.

The difficulty is not in finding the right answer to America’s anxiety. Christianity has the answers. The difficulty is in finding the boldness and perseverance to keep proclaiming the truth in an increasingly hostile world.