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Katie Miller — a noted critic of mental health transparency and intentional family planning — merged two of her interests in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) where she also made some interesting claims about the dangers of therapy... and the history of the Roman Empire.
The conservative podcast host and former Trump administrator’s post — pegged to a recent Wall Street Journal article about the rise of parental estrangement — argued, “Therapy has become incredibly dangerous for societal bonds.”
And not only is this an interpersonal issue for the “1/3 of parents” who apparently blame a therapist’s influence for their children not talking to them, it’s also a more dire issue, in her view: “This is how countries weaken and fall apart.”
Miller went on to say, “Rome didn’t fall primarily because of barbarians at the gates. It fell because loyalty, duty, bonds, and the birth rate collapsed. When the Romans lost the traditional family, its societal structure that fostered mutual support fell.”
She concluded, “Therapists are creating a mental health crisis by actively encouraging patients to cut off their families. When communities are no longer connected, they become unrecognizable to their people.”
Some users on the site had some issues with arguing that the fall of Rome supposedly had so much to do with Miller’s own pet issues — the birthrate and the “traditional family.”
Other users even shared their own stories of family estrangement to attempt to make Miller (and others squinting and tilting their heads at this tweet) better understand the nuanced realities of making such a difficult decision.
HuffPost spoke with a therapist and a historian to help us make heads or tails of Miller’s point.
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First things first, good therapists don’t do that.
As we said, a lot going on here. Yet, arguing that therapy is “incredibly dangerous for societal bonds” due to therapists “creating a mental health crisis by actively encouraging patients to cut off their families” doesn’t feel particularly accurate to a practicing therapist.
Saba Harouni Lurie, a family and relationships therapist based in Los Angeles and founder of Take Root Therapy, told HuffPost, “It’s really disappointing to hear that there’s this fear that therapy is going to ruin relationships and families.”
“I can so appreciate the fear, but I also think that it’s really looking at things from a perspective that I, of course, don’t agree with as a therapist,” Harouni Lurie noted. “Our aim is to actually help relationships develop, help strengthen relationships that are healthy. So what we’re not out there promoting is folks to stop being in a relationship, at least the therapists that are ethical and that are competent.”
While there can be a few less-than-great professionals who aren’t up to the level of competency or may be “behaving in a way that might be questionable,” as in any industry, she said the competent and professional therapists she’s known and encountered understand “that it’s not our role to make decisions for anyone, but to support them and figuring out what’s best for them.”
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The concept of “going no contact,” Harouni Lurie notes, has risen in popularity as a phrase on social media and that might give people the mistaken impression that its “a source of pride, or that there’s some currency” to making this decision.
However, she emphasizes that going no contact is really considered “a last resort” — and certainly not something an ethical therapist will endorse without exhausting literally every other option in order “to develop a relationship that works for them, to have communication that is health, honest and attempts to address things and shift systems.”
“For folks that are approaching [estrangement] thoughtfully and realistically, there’s also an understanding that it’s not an easy choice to make,” she said.
To blame therapy, however, is to blame one of the tools addressing the problem without really examining the problem itself.
“I think [therapists] really are encouraging folks to consider how to be in a relationship in a way that is right for them,” she said. “To have integrity in their relationships, to have compassion in their relationships, to accept their own and others’ shortcomings while still striving to be their best selves.”
The Roman Empire interpretation is also pretty weird and inaccurate.
Claire E. Aubin, historian, YPSA postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and host of the “This Guy Sucked” podcast, notes that “many things are misleading here,” when it comes to Miller’s characterization of the fall of Rome.
“So, there are a lot of historical debates about why Rome fell, but it almost certainly isn’t something as concrete and definite as Miller is claiming,” Aubin told HuffPost via email. “‘Not primarily external threats, but internal decay’ is a false dichotomy — the fall occurred over the course of several centuries of both cultural diffusion, institutional collapse, and military events, rather than being locatable in a singular social cause.”
And the arguments about the “traditional family” — familiar if you’ve been keeping up with Miller’s oeuvre of angry Tweets — can be considered “anachronistic, as Roman familial systems (which were also economic and legal structures that included enslaved people within a household) did not cleanly correlate to today’s concept of the nuclear family.”
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Interestingly, she explains that “the existence of Roman anxiety about declining birth rates was an early (rather than late) imperial elite phenomenon, and actual moments of significant demographic collapse in the late Roman period came out of plagues, famine, and war-related displacement rather than generalized falling rates of reproduction.”
Aubin also notes that the approach to this argument echoes scholarship from the late 19th and early 20th centuries “that was explicitly concerned with contemporary racial and demographic anxieties, ultimately reflecting those backwards speciously onto antiquity.”
And, ultimately, there is something telling about why certain supremacist groups continually go back to ancient Rome as their, well, Roman Empire:
“My view is that since at least the medieval period there has been a long-term elevation of Rome as the ideal social structure, to which supremacist groups in turn compare themselves and their own idealized views of society,” Aubin said. “Projecting their fears about the fall of Rome onto their own precarious social position allows them to use manufactured historical ‘evidence’ to validate both those fears and their often violent responses to them.”
