I’d say that’s more related to the causes of poor mental health rather than the treatment of it … which brings us full circle back to the point the OP was making.
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It is a learning and discovery tool. The message, in essence, is that thoughts create emotions and emotions drive behaviour. Once you can recognise the pattern of thoughts you are having you can break the cycle.
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If you really wanted to help yourself, you could check it out on YouTube
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The “traditional family” pre ~150 years ago (and going back to the start of human civilization) was “it takes a village” – everyone in the extended family raised all the children together and as the children got older and started to develop independence (like at 4 years old), they began to contribute to the family unit by taking on their own responsibilities. The industrial revolution changed things in the family structure. For the vast majority of the population, mom, dad, and the kids were ALL working in factories while a wealthy few put their feet up and had various hired (or unpaid) help raise their kids for them. There was a blip in human history in the post industrial revolution days where people flocked to the cities away from their family unit and only the husband worked and that was “enough” (if you were a white man with a high school diploma, that is. Keep in mind it’s well-documented that people of color almost always had both parents working at least a full time job each). That lasted through the end of the WWII + baby boomer generation and died out completely by the turn of the millennium (except for “old money” types working only to keep themselves occupied and families with lawyers and doctors and investment bankers)
As far as coping/life skills go, we lost those when we stopped relying on our neighbors for help and started using money to buy away our problems. My parents have few coping skills other than to complain about things. The only reason I learned to solve my problems by doing something about it was that I moved to Taiwan and I was forced to learn to stand up for myself and seek out help by asking for it. In Taiwan, children are seeing a similar model from their parents – complain, scream about unfairness where there is none, stare at screens instead of engaging in conversation, shout at service workers about their incompetence rather than simply asking for what they need (“can you bring me some napkins” gets you much further than “why can’t you properly set the table what the heck is wrong with you”), etc. So they go to daycare and are surrounded by other children (and the modeling adults) that are coming from the same place. Complain loudly enough and you might piss off/embarrass/cause to lose face more people, but have your needs been met?
Oh, and when you spend 12 hours pouring over textbooks and mindlessly repeating back whatever the teacher says, assuming you sleep for 8 hours a day, you’re left with only 4 hours to learn social skills. This is also why it’s embarrassing to see parents pull their children out of school (typically in the US) because there’s “too much focus on emotional and social skills and not enough focus on academics”. So you’ve failed to recognize that the whole point of school is socialization? That if you learn to work with others (as we have throughout all of human history. Like literally we’d all be living in caves without fire or even rocks to pound if we hadn’t learned to work together), we learn things! wow. amazing. groundbreaking discovery!
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That’s possibly the bleakest and most accurate assessment of the last 200 years that I’ve seen condensed into three paragraphs.
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It’s not that bad. I’ve got shit modern life skills and I’ve coped for over half a century. I have no idea how, though.
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This is wrong. It’s also oppressive to women and many many families, including my own, had two working parents that popped out successful children.
Similarly, a lot of families are in difficult financial positions where they may not have a choice. It’s not my place to judge.