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Review of Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age by Frank Furedi:

'Every culture has a story about the human subject – the values it expects people to aspire to', explains Furedi. 'Our culture's story is of a weak, feeble person, who is continually at risk, and for whom the chances of things going wrong are very great.' Therapy culture represents a shift from the view of the robust, independent person, capable of great individual and collective achievements, to the notion of the fragile, powerless victim in need of continual professional support. 'Far less is expected of humans in the twenty-first century than was expected in the nineteenth', says Furedi. 'Today's society operates around the belief that people can't cope on their own, or face the challenges of life.'

Perhaps this partially answers a certain awfully cynical query by Philip Greenspun.