Debating Therapy Culture & Gen Z - Abigail Shrier

how would you categorize what is happening with modern mental health oh gosh we're we're making it worse with with too much treatment too much diagnosis uh and and way too much psych meds and convincing people who are otherwise well that they are unwell that they have a mental health problem right yeah apocalyptic apocalyptic start there so take me through how much of this is an adult problem how much of this is a a kid problem is are there cohorts that this is worse and better in sure so I if I have a Prejudice here it's that adults mostly can handle their own lives uh and we can trust them too so if some adults have been made to feel worse by things like therapy they don't need or psych meds they don't need or whatnot uh I I I generally think an adult can say this is helping me or it isn't and push back and and make a change but a child can't so the bigger problem what I wrote my book about is about why putting a child through a culture of therapy through a school system that constantly treats them to various forms of what I call bad therapy therapy that makes your symptoms worse or introduces new symptoms why this is all so harmful this constant feelings Focus this constant convincing children that they've that or young young adults that they've experienced uh CH childhood trauma talk me through a typical timeline of Mental Health for young people like do do three-year-olds need have mental health problems like what's the onset and and kind of what's the what's the Arc of this sure so as of 2016 the CDC which is centers of Disease Control and prevention uh came out with a report this is 2016 one in six American children between the ages of two and eight already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis okay just dig into that for a second for me what does that mean what would that look like um so what mental health diagnoses do they us have what does that what but what does that mean yeah mental health diagnosis every that means a shocking number of little boys have been diagnosed with ADHD or oppositional Defiance disorder if they can't sit in their seat or they're y yelling back at a teacher they have oppositional Defiance disorder uh a shocking number of girls now have an ADHD diagnosis uh they're diagnosing all kinds of kids as on the Spectrum or having anxiety or having now do some of these kids are there there's no question a lot of these kids are sad and a lot of them are lonely and a lot of them are anxious but we are psychopath a whole generation and convincing them that they are unwell so they are behaving like they are unwell right okay so it seems like at least so far there's two problems that you've got one being this overmedicalization or pathologization of uh human emotions some of which get into things like trauma depression anxiety but others are just feeling sad or down or lonely or fearful like that's not necessarily something that the DSM would find but it's it's this concept creep and then the other side of this is the treatments that are coming through and the way that people are dealing with that is that a fair characterization exactly we are introducing new symptoms and making existing symptoms worse okay so normal sadness becomes depression normal worry becomes anxiety nobody no young people even use the word worry anymore it's all or nervous it's all I have anxiety and they think of anxiety as something they have and therefore have to be treated out of or monitored by a therapist or treated by a therapist or medication I should say okay so you mentioned there was those numbers from the CDC in 2016 right have you got any idea what percentage of kids are going to therapy uh being seen by therapists who are therapists seeing mostly at the moment is it adults is it children so it's a it's a great question so we know that 40% of the rising generation has been through a therapist but I think it's much higher because you know what I call you know what I refer to as bad therapy this kind of iatrogenic therapy therapy that makes your systems worth right iatrogenesis is when a Healer makes a problem worse they're getting it in the schools they're being treated to social emotional learning and wellness tips and um all kinds of emotional regulation tips that are supposed to help but I think it's making it worse and I I can explain why but but they're also getting it from parents parents who are treating them based on the bestselling books of neuroschistosomiasis I'd have to look at my notes okay that's the rising generation so is that gen Al genz so we're talking you know people born between the ages of 1995 and 2012 okay the numbers that you found was 40% of those so nearly one in two have seen some form of therapist yeah at some point so yes exactly okay do you think that the issue is kids mental health or the way that therapists are treating it so I think have both issues so I think that kids are suffering from Bad lives that bad things in their lives are making them sad um and they have good reason to be sad uh and and not and feel lonely and feel anxious I think they have good reasons for those things and it has to do with their lives and I think that therapists are going in and asking over and over and it's either the school counselor or an actual therapist or a teacher playing counselor or their parents aping the techniques given to them by by therapists and they're saying tell me how you're feeling monitor your feeling let's talk about your feelings and inevitably it turns to negative feelings a hyperfocus on their feelings will elicit negative responses primarily for any of us by the way and the hyperfocus on the feelings with these kids who don't have the best lives um is making their unhealthy lives worse and making them feel worse is it not a case that the mod world is mentally tough things have changed an awful lot the generation previously which is now trying to raise and understand the world in which gen Z is growing up digitally native always online not seeing as much sunlight obesity rates going up all that stuff is it not just the case that the modern world's mentally tough and people are seeking treatment they just things are harder mentally for people and they're looking for a way to fix that well in a way so you could say that you could say well things are hot tough but it's a question of what we're talking about okay so if you go back Generations we're not living through the blitz they're not facing Nazi Germany right they're not um living through World War Great Depression things that you know traditionally would expect to encourage a great deal of anxiety and kids but there are environmental contaminants right and there are things that naturally make us unhappier like isolation from friends like no touching you know online porn and all these things that are so unhealthy but here's here's the thing to know that if you have an unhealthy life if you're out getting drunk partying every day but every night but not making real Connections in the world okay if you spend all your L Time online with online porn and online friends and you're unhappy if you go and delete that signal you don't have bad mental health that you're unhappy that's good mental health it's a natural signal of the body saying stop we have to fix something about this life you don't want to delete that signal now I'm not talking about major depressive disorder because there are these things that are organic and chronic and severe and have nothing to do with anything you're doing and that maybe should be treated with all kinds of things like psychiatric medication but if you're in a high pressure job and you're feeling anxious and you delete that signal that's not that's not a mental health problem that's your mental health operating correctly just like if you lost a loved one and you felt really sad gosh that's a mentally healthy response but instead we're diagnosing the mental health as illness and we're giving it and we're overtreating it in ways that are really going to make you worse off I remember in Johan hari's book lost connections he talked about how grief is such a reliable uh inducer of depression that I think maybe the DSM or maybe it was just advice for healthcare professionals mental Healthcare professionals that someone who'd lost a close loved one um you basically can't diagnose them with depression I think it was for maybe four weeks and then then it got extended out and then it was eight weeks and then it was it was 12 weeks and they kept on doing this because depression or low mood is a natural response to a sad situation one of the things that I'm struggling to thread the needle off of your thinking here is on one hand we have emotions that are natural and normal they are responses to an environment and the stresses that that environment gives us you're saying it is not good for us to ignore those to try and delete those but surely that is understanding emotions integrating emotions being able to talk about them actually being able to feel your emotions and feel them in a safe way and think okay how am I feeling now I'm feeling Ang I and does that mean that there's something wrong or can I talk to someone in a safe space and actually feel like H well maybe it's because you know Mom sort of said this thing earlier on and it made me feel a little bit of a way it seems to me that a potential solution to having lots of emotions is not deleting them but the uh process of therapy which is being able to talk about them in a safe place with someone who listens so I think it matters whether you're talking about an adult or a child so an adult can absolutely say listen I feel rotten I don't care what you call it I just got through a divorce I feel terrible and I want to take a pill I'm fine with that I'm fine with that not only because I don't consider it my business but also because an adult can start that and stop it and knows and has a life history to know how he's feeling and what he wants out of life and what he wants to do a child doesn't know those things so if a child if you go in and delete a child's sex drive before the child has a sex drive that's a problem you're making a profound change in a child's life that they have no way of evaluating okay so you do that to a teenager and that's what I'm when I say child I include you know teenagers young people people who are just sorting themselves out right an adult who goes through a divorce or a death and feels like they need to take something or feels like they need to talk to someone look by all means they should do it but I want to say an adult can talk to a a therapist for important reasons for severe problems but also for trivial ones and get a lot out of it why because they don't have it they don't face the same risks see if if if you or I went to therapy we probably wouldn't be able to be convinced by a therapist that we were transgender and we probably wouldn't be able to con be convinced very easily that our that our parents were toxic and we should cut them off or that we had experienced childhood trauma when we didn't but a child is very very easy to convince of those things how common is it for therapists I understand that the the conversation around um psychiatric medication I think let's go very steady on that I I don't know any Healthcare professionals that would say that we're like not overdiagnosing um but when it comes to the talk therapy and I think that that's like specifically what I was getting at integrating your emotions understanding something whatever it is 60% of children growing up up in in broken homes um 100x mortality risk if you have a non-biological parent in the house perhaps there's risks of abuse whether that's physical or emotional and it can be sort of really um subtle kinds of abuse like just not showing love in the same way or not paying attention from the the stepparent in the same way not necessarily abuse but neglect you know like very sort of banal normal neglect that no one's ever going to get sent to prison for but could emotionally affect a child I wonder how they are in a much more difficult environment much more broken homes all the rest of it I wonder how they're supposed to regulate that I agree psychiatric medication should be like the 70th thing that you go to unless it's a a really serious scenario but um learning to integrate emotions seems to be quite smart what is the ab absolutely absolutely so the question is what are they going to the therapist for and who are they going to okay so a child in the circumstance you describe may need extra support from an adult okay the question is is the adult going to convince them that they've been through trauma is the go adult going to convince them to regularly rehash their trauma and dwell on their trauma is adult going to leave them with a sense of inefficacy like I can't do for myself without checking in with this adult because those are all side effects of therapy common side effects that can happen through therapy and I think they're especially uh and children are especially susceptible for to them because they have no they don't have enough life experience to push back and the thing is our natural re our natural resources for overcoming even bad childhoods are remarkable so it doesn't mean that extra kids don't need extra support and they certainly need better lives so changes in their lives absolutely and support probably they need that too from an adult the question is what kind right is it rumination is it sitting around think rehashing their their their sad memory of their parents divorce because that could make them feel a whole lot worse so in your opinion does therapy make people better or worse in terms of their mental health depends if they need it and depends who we're talking about so for people who are there for a prescribed problem absolutely it can be very very helpful even life saving okay now for adults who are there to work on on something that can be very helpful too because they're motivated to participate and get to the bottom of things they want to do the hard work of therapy and then there are people who maybe lead high-profile lives or for whatever reason don't feel comfortable share you know unloading to those around them and that can be very helpful too but that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about Mass prophylactic therapy that's being dumped on children who didn't ask for it the difference there is first of all you don't start out with a patient who's game to work right so you have to kind of Pander to them to get them to get them involved because they didn't choose to be there in the first place but second of all they might be doing just fine they might not want to think about their parents divorce or their MO mother's death right now because Tuesdays at 2m might not be a time when they're ready to do that but nonetheless through school counselors casually dabbling in this and even therapists regularly asking about it that's not necessarily helpful and and of course there's a lot of research bearing this out that the that that therapy can make people sadder and feeling less capable in their lives what's the results of that research what did you find sure so they did these great studies with um there's a lot of it um burn victims First Responders to catastrophe breast cancer survivors um all of them uh those dealing with natural bereavement a g freef from the death of a loved one all of those people were LED they had actual control groups so they actually tested this and they were led to feel worse the group that went to therapy felt worse afterwards than the group that didn't go why because we're built to recover from grief from a loved from the loss of a loved one which doesn't mean that every one of us will because some of us might need extra help the majority the default assumption should be that hang out with friends see people love you do some good in the world you know get to work on a project you will feel better do exercise which is remarkably helpful I mean God that we don't start by getting kids to exercise who are sad is is kind of criminal when you see the wonderful benefits of exercise as held up against things like therapy and psychiatric medications yeah there was a great study that came out recently talking about the effectiveness of ssris compared with exercise I'm sure that you saw it you see what the specific modalities of exercise were that they said were the most effective so they showed it was a I believe it was a meta analysis so they used all kinds of exercise did you see what the did you see what the number one of exercise yeah asked me about dancing that was amazing wasn't it yeah the fact that the fact that I've been lifting heavy things in a a sweaty warehouse for the last 15 years I should have just been doing salsa I mean that's right and and how do we not start with that start by asking before we put you on a drug let let's talk about it what exercise are you doing let's start there look I think I I'm completely on board with that if you don't have and this is for a child as well a stable sleep and wake pattern a diet that isn't too full of sugar and processed foods some friends that make you feel like you're a part of something a physical practice and a bit of sunlight you're basically a plant with feelings so you just need to do those things and if you are entering into a serious mental health service without those things in place it to me it's like unless it's I'm on the brink of taking my own life like what are we doing here let's let's let's take you out of that okay so exactly what what are the harms of psychotherapy in your opinion what what are the what are the steps of bad therapy look like so I think the therapy bad therapy is anything that makes existing system symptoms worse or introduces new on so here are some classic things that they're doing thinking constantly about your feelings soliciting feelings diagnosis the classic um side effect of diagnosis is demoralization feeling limited by your diagnosis okay now obviously if you need the diagnosis for goodness sake get it but I'm talking about people getting a diagnosis they don't need but nonetheless now feel permanently limited by because of course they can't they you can overcome shyness but you can't overcome you know major depressive disorder or something you're diagnosed with or ADHD now you need a drug or you need a therapist to help you um um you know treatment dependency feeling like I can't do anything without asking an adult one young woman I interviewed she's a high school student at the time she was a sophomore um no actually this was a a senior that I asked uh who I referred to as Becca in the book but she was telling me I asked her she hadd been in therapy prophylactically since the time of her parents divorce at age six she was now 17 years old and I said what are you working on with your therapist now remember this is not someone who had exhibited mental health problems she simply was put in therapy because her parents were getting a divorced okay and what were they working on at age 17 she was working on how to make friends next year in college so she was rehearsing with her therapist her her attempts that didn't work out and preparing to make friends so you see why this generation I believe doesn't feel like it can take a chance or take a risk or do anything for it self it's be because it's been told Time and Again by parents by teachers by counselors you can't by mental health professionals you can't you need it to check in with an adult first we've made them absolutely frantic that they can't handle a normal life on their own how much of that can you lay at the feet of um over helicopter parenting uh mental health professionals and how much of that can you separate out from social media causes people to spend less time in the real world therefore their social skills are reduced it it seems to me that if a typical I don't know genz I would guess they probably spend six hours to eight hours a day on screens and in some form or another probably maybe more um if one hour a week of that is actually interacting with a real person that seems like it would be a leg up and and and be a benefit as opposed to it's just another hour that I can scroll on Tik Tok abs absolutely they need more that's one of the things they need they need less time online they need less social media but they also need less of one of the things that social media is making worse less diagnosis less self- diagnosis into a feeling of illness the reason I believe this generation doesn't feel up to the challenges of adulthood like learning to drive like you know a sexual experience or a romantic experience or all kinds of sort of Adventure whether they're professional or personal I believe it's because they the same reason that they say over half less than half of them say they're mentally well they are they they are acting like people who are unwell they believe they're unwell so they don't feel up to the challenges and adventure of life one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot recently is the integration of emotions and um the importance of of not hiding away from them you mentioned earlier on not trying to delete emot is not trying to go away from them emotional avoidance causes depression mental health problems it's been linked with bowel cancer heart disease not feeling feelings my concern is that without therapy or without a therapeutic practice I don't know where people who are not familiar with feeling feelings and talking about their emotions I don't know where they go to be able to do that whether you're a child or whether you're an adult like it's important to not emotionally avoid it's important to integrate your feelings and use them to guide your behavior as well you're the stressed CEO that's that's doing the thing um but you also you you also like need to start talking about that to someone like where do you go if if if therapy isn't the thing what is the thing so so my take on that is that what you're talking about is people who were not born in genen z because the rising generation in America does nothing but talk about its feelings every day at school in every public school which is you know our state schools these are these are not Posh schools every kid is being asked relentlessly about their feelings and about their negative feelings and you you say you know well I I believe you said you know where would they have the opportunity to talk about that all the time they're doing way too much of it and here's the problem you mentioned avoidance what is the primary tool of a school counselor it's helping a child avoid something that's hard for them avoidance is what they do so what they do is they March into a teacher and say this child's having a hard time maybe don't make him take his math test and they're doing this over everything not a child who's just gone through something severe a severe you know potentially traumatic event but even over the most trivial things if you say you're you have a bad mental health day in in the eth grade you can get out of your tests okay and that's what the school counselor will assist on they've become tools of avoidance which is the worst thing for mental health but you also have a concern with therapists getting people to ruminate too much on their emotions so it seems like either counselors or therapists are doing both in your opinion are doing both things they're either overv validating and uh getting people to um hyperfixate on them or they're getting them to talk about them too much like it can't it can't be both no no no sorry let me let me clarify so when I said avoidance I don't mean avoidance of emotions they're letting them avoid the hard challenges of life which of course makes things like anxiety worse they're not tools of avoiding their emotions they're obsessing over emotions and by the way this is a generation that's getting their bosses fired over their emotions right their emotions are couldn't be more disregulated that's what we're seeing and by the way that's that's one of the other things that bad therapy does it makes you more disregulated by hyperfocus on your emotions okay so when I say that counselors have become tools school counselors are tools of avoidance I mean avoidance of hard things that kids can overcome like getting through a test and rumination yes they're all encouraging bad patterns of re rumination from the teacher who's playing therapist to the counselor to yes actual therapists I believe are encouraging this in young people there's lots of types of therapy that don't involve emotions CBT it's pretty well tested seems to be pretty robust the guy that made it originally was trying to overcome approach anxiety for chatting up women um it's pretty good at exposure therapy also not necessarily you talking about emotions is is that a modality that you think works I do but I have I have a caveat so in general do I think that's great yes and I think there's a good evidentiary track record for those things and I think they can be very useful but sometimes under the name of cognitive behavioral therapy a lot of bad practices sort of slide in okay so I think the I believe in the rigors of cognitive behavioral therapy for dealing with all kinds of things from phobias and whatnot and dialectical behavioral therapy for dealing with things like depression I think they can be very efficacious and very helpful but um in schools they tried to there were two different studies one in Australia and one in in England and one of the things they were teaching supposedly was emotional regulation techniques and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques now what were they doing in practice they were getting kids to focus incessantly on their bad feelings and in both sets of studies while they did these social emotional exercises with the kids one one set was anti-bullying they did a one was a meta study so it looked at several different things um the the constant focus on kids bad emotions left kids more anxious more depressed and more Al ated from their parents it's interesting it seems to me that the primary problem is with bad therapists as opposed to therapy itself it seems like you're saying that therapy when done right can be very successful but that sneaking through the cracks is um it's advertised to CBT and behind the scenes it's just ruminate about your problems it's advertised as exposure therapy and it's making enemies of your parents and I think at least as far as I can tell and I I wish that I had this when I was a kid there is a difference between validating someone's right to feel an emotion and make them feel safe in feeling the emotion while still stress testing whether that emotion is appropriate or not like that to me seems to be the sweet spot but it's delicate right that's a really delicate balance like you feel this thing right now talk to me about that like where's where's that coming from and do we think that that's an appropriate response and how could that be wrong you like that looks like healthy emotional discourse to me that's brilliant I love the way you put that because you're the first person who's ever said to me that there has to be a balance between you know um tell me about your emotion and also let's talk about whether that emotion is appropriate and I'll tell you why and and no one in I so few therapists in America seem to think that you ever are allowed to say is that emotion appropriate and here's the problem they're directing a lot of parents and and and school teachers and you know what a child who shrieks and screams on a plane because he didn't get the snack he wanted needs to be told that's not appropriate not only is it not appropriate to scream but and when they scream I'm angry you want to say that's not something to be angry about why because it's not an adult you have to actually educate the emotions a little bit which I know is completely verboten in therapy culture but of course you do a child needs to be told it's not appropriate to feel rage at your mother because she made a something for dinner you didn't like or you preferred something else there's there's a time and place for rage but that's not the place for rage and then they sort of think oh okay you know I get it that I should be frustrated but not not full of Fury I think it's a lot of it is regulation uh you know I see I worked in Nightlife for a decade and a half and and one of the most interesting uh Dynamics would be especially a girl that got thrown out so we we run events for 18 to 22 year olds it was a, people they' pay5 pounds each it was one pound Jaga bombs it was like cheap and cheerful young people partying in the UK one of the most interesting things that I would see would be um young girl who gets ejected from the nightclub uh either rightly or wrongly uh the door staff make a decision we're not going to go and check the video Cera to see if it actually was her that swelled some other girl because she looked at my boyfriend over there or whatever it is rightly or wrongly somebody gets ejected they would come outside and they would protest they would start saying no no no it wasn't this thing it was her she's a [ __ ] she's doing that thing or whatever whatever whatever and then you would watch it usually took about maybe 30 seconds of that and then very quickly it would turn into pouring with tears and it was pretty reliable and I could just watch this person and alcohol's involved but I could watch this person just slowly disregulated over time and just move through different emotions and then they would get after the crying had finished they'd move into resentment they'd probably come back and have another swing at anger um I mean some I'm not kidding some people mostly guys guys were more persistent than girls especially because it was the northeast of the UK and freezing cold so uh the girls weren't dressed if you've ever seen girls from the northeast of the UK they don't wear many layers and uh but there's been guys that have stood outside of nightclubs they've been eject Ed from where I'm stood on the door with with the team and and the bounces for like 3 hours just hurling abuse at the door staff telling them why it's wrong explaining to them why it is I'm like look mate it didn't work for the first 5 minutes it's not going to work for the remaining 2 hours and 55 minutes like just you go home or go somewhere else or do whatever like but you're not going to come back in here um but watching that disregulation happen in real time was so fascinating to just see sort of someone grapple with this it's an extreme situation you've had someone's had their hands on you like what other area of life does a big 45y old 55y old Jordy man with massive hairy hands grab a hold of you and say you're now leaving the place that you were in your friends are behind you maybe blah blah blah and then dump you dump you in a different place um but that was really really interesting and I that makes me think about what teachers deal with in in classrooms you know like what an incident occurs and the kids need to learn to regulate they need to learn to regulate their emotions right and the question is do they learn it from a class on regulation which usually means talking about a time when you were sad or in pain or rejected or felt unloved or do you learn it from life you try out for the basketball team you don't make it they let you get cut from the team and you figure out do I really want to play basketball or should I practice harder that's where you learn the emotional regulation everybody ask anybody you know as you I'm sure know it's the failures you learn from right and we all have them and the problem is the rising generation was kept from a lot of failure and so they are completely disregulated they've been told every time they're disappointed that it's the most important thing in the world and now they're showing up in the workplace and they feel disappointed or their feelings are hurt so they think they have to get their boss fired because that to them seems an appropriate response to their emotional injury talk to me about the treatment prevalent Paradox sure so there's a a wonderful study that happened while I was writing my book and it was um about a bunch of researchers who noticed that you know there was this Paradox in the treatment of depression across the West wherever there is great pervasive treatment and great accessibility of treatment we should see Point prevalence rates of any disease or disorder go down okay this is true from everything from Dental Care being more available and seeing less to tooth rotting and tooth decay to um maternal sepsis there all all number of diseases you know um child birth death and child birth things that you would expect to see uh go down uh with or treatment early uh spotting of breast cancer uh you would you know screening you would expect to see uh rates of death from breast cancer go down with better treatment instead across the West with more prevalent treatment of uh depression and more access to treatment for depression that has coincided with a stark rise a rapid rise in rates of depression and the question is why are these two things just coinciding is that just happen stance we know at the very least the treatments don't seem to be effective so my contention is that actually a lot of the TR this what flies under the head you you know the rubric of treatment is actually making things worse where have you drawn that direction of causation from is there any research is there any evidence on that yeah sure so um a few places so um why why do I think um that that it's not just um they're not just coinciding they're making it worse because um the language first of all we've seen um there a few reasons um first of all we've seen a rapid rapid rise in treatment with no dent in uh dep rates of depression but it's more than that it's not just that dep depression isn't going down it's that more people are exhibiting the behavior of depression by talking about their Pain by ruminating about their Pain by sharing and dwelling on their pain that's the biggest symptom of depression and that is exactly what we'd expect to see from people who are induced in the practice of cultural therapy meaning not necessarily you know many of them are getting it from an actual therapist but some of them are just getting it from the their teacher the idea of constantly sharing with uh their their problems but also you see it in their language the way they're understanding themselves and each other you're seeing people who are pathologizing normal life who are seeing themselves as unwell and sick all over the place and when they say they're unwell they sound like amateur shrinks they're using the language of psychotherapy so at the very least what we're seeing I think it very clear is that young people understand themselves each other and their entire lives through the lens of Psychopathology so I think it absolutely is related to the behavior they're exhibiting which is I'm unwell I I feel lack of efficacy in the world I I feel like I can't take a risk I'm full of phobia and anxious these are all things we would expect to seec from too much you know what I call bad therapy these are the classic iatrogenic harms of therapy so I I I don't I don't believe it's an accident I think they're intimately intimately related and as you mentioned on social media these these young people are identifying with their diagnosis so you might say well how do you know that their diagnosis had that impact on them that it really did have that iatrogenic effect of limiting them because they believe it they believe it they're the ones who introduce themselves by their diagnosis that's proof of demoralization meaning the the coming to identify and feeling like you are so limited by your diagnosis is the most important thing about you so I think just listening to their talk and the way they describe their pain and the way they describe their lives is the biggest indication that yes it is therapy that's playing a huge role in all this certainly therapy speak has become a a huge culture online there's a a great psychiatrist called C Chava I had her on the show she is super anti um Instagram therapy self diagnosis therapy culture speak I mean we saw this with uh do you remember Jonah Hill broke up with his girlfriend about six months ago okay these um these screenshots of the breakup were uh oh that's right were released and it was there was kind of this sort of semi therapy speak talk about boundaries and and and and Regulation and and and stuff like that and um I do think that there is definitely a I mean I would 100% agree the pathologization of normal human emotions one of the reasons I believe that that's happening is if you give something bad a name it makes it feel more like it's in control because I'm not sad I have depression removes a good amount of the agency from how you can have contributed to or how you could be in control of getting yourself out of the other side of this I think that huge huge problem right the other side of this toes Steelman sort of the opposite Argent you would say well we know that especially young people's mental health is in Decline whatever it is 60% of 12 to 16 year old girls say they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness and listlessness or whatever some apocalyptic language the CDC released last year um that should if that's the case and if it's let's say it's not because of therapy if it's because of obesity if it's because of economic concerns if it's because of broken households if it's because of these things you would expect to see an increase in facilitation to try and treat that right because you have opened up a market so the two things can happen in unison even if one isn't necessarily causing the other and the the cultural use of therapy speak to me seems a lot like a cope that is being used by people that have never been to therapy I think that that is super prevalent that that may be there many of them may not have been you know to actual therapy that's possible but let's just say they're getting a lot of treatment in various forms I mean the classic when you brought from Instagram yes that's right it might be from Instagram or one of these AI treatment I mean that now there's these you know apps that will treat you through AI That's right but or it's self diagnosing on the Internet or whatever but but you you just brought brought up I I think a fascinating example which is the Jonah Hill I'm setting a boundary so why do I think that therapy is playing a negative role what language is that I'm setting a boundary with you you're not talking to a person now you're talking to a therapist right that's the language Supply to you now you're no longer friend to friend husband to wife whatever spouse to spouse whatever you are you are a therapist and patient right and we're all using we're all playing therapist it's way too much it makes our relationships stilted it alienates you and from from each other but it does something else which you just said um it undermines agency the feeling that I can do anything about it it's horrible thing to do to a young person telling them they have a diagnosis and now it's up to a pill there's nothing they can do yeah this I'm trying to really split apart therapy culture from the impact of therapy because I think I think that there is definitely this this this language that's being used right talk of anxiety talk of trauma talk of codependency okay so let's steal man it for a second so is therapy this wonderful thing like communism that the truest form has never been tried is that what we're saying that there's this wonderful therapy that's out there now I'm not talking about therapy for actual disorders but wonderful preventive mental health care that has yet to be tried I'm doubtful and let let me say I know some wonderful therapists out there and they tend to work with actual Pro people with actual problems and when I say sorry young people adults can go to a therapist for any reason and get something out of it and I have to tell you something I'll sit next to someone on a plane and get something out of that too for a conversation because adults are capable of extracting what they need from social circumstances and what they need might just be a conversation with someone who's willing to listen and trusted yeah trusted the problem with the adult with the adult young person relationship in terms of therapy is the power IM balance is much different so your concern is that um a young person in a therapeutic environment is uh too like malleable and absorbent uh and and can be pushed in a direction by a poor therapist of course and I'll tell you something else uh a with a A you know what if you talk to a bud you talk to a friend who's will you find somebody who's willing to listen let's say your teacher is being an actual teacher not a playing therapist but like let you talk about your problem for a while at some point she'll cut you off at some point your grandmother will say go play now or go do something okay and like enough talking about your problems the problem with sending an adolescent to therapy is the therapist won't say that they will never cut them off yeah that's interesting how much of this is just down stream from smartphones you know Jonathan height was on the show recently his new book fantastic um how much of this can be laid at the feet of Technology screen smartphone use so I think they work together I think they they both are parasitic on the same problem I I mean look the smartphones I I think Jonathan Height's done absolutely wonderful work and I think the smartphones are a huge problem and my last book was about the mental health you know social contagion that was SP spread through the smartphones largely but it was also spread largely through the therapists that these girls went to see because most of these girls who decided they were suddenly transgender in the seventh grade had therapists they were working with on their anxiety okay and the reason I think it goes beyond the smartphones is because of this things like the statistic I cited to you you know one and six American Kids between the ages of two and8 have a mental health diagnosis now that's not a social media problem it's a life problem and that was back in 2016 when they definitely weren't on social media now do this is not just say I'm social media has so many problems for kids it's so inimical to to good you know mental health but one of the reasons it's it's so enemal is because of the things the very bad things that um bad therapy does like um allow you to avoid hard challenges accommodate your every whim those are those are bad things take you further from all the things in life that are actually going to make you feel good like other people and exercise right and Devotion to to something you know bigger than yourself or Focus outward a a a social a smartphone what is the problem with the smartphone the biggest problem with the smartphone is it's a mi device it Focus you constantly on yourself in isolation that's the same thing that all this cultural therapy is doing as well and yes some of it from actual therapists a lot of it um focus on you how are you feeling think about yourself think about what you're doing on and on and on these are terrible habits what do you think about the reason uh quite often put forward that climate change is causing an awful lot of anxiety for young people well I I don't think it is uh not not climate change on its own um maybe as presented to children so in other words yes adults if they scare the heck out of children about climate change children will manifest climate anxiety and then they can go to a climate therapist which there is now a growing climate therapist yeah sure growing number of therapists are now climate therapy therapists and they go around saying wow there's a lot of climate anxiety have I mentioned climate anxiety they're inducing the problem they PL they they are claiming to treat right that's not an organic problem you know we have had so many climate challenges let's call them or environmental challenges over the course of human history and in recent history we've been very aware of them so why is this the first generation that suddenly has climate anxiety it's because we're obsessively telling them they should be terrified because of the climate and there are a lot of Trends going in the right direction by the way on the environment like deaths from natural disaster which are way way down worldwide so the climate itself isn't the cause of the problem it's the way we're scaring young people I would certainly agree that the narrative around climate change is is I understand again to trying and steal man the other side I understand why people who are concerned about the future of the climate want to make it as big of a deal as possible because they think this is the only way that I can Galvanize anyone to care about kind of this unseen issue that uh they believe is going to creep up on us and and and then cause a catastrophe in future the problem I think there's a couple of problems with that um first one it causes people to excessively worry which actually damages the quality of life of the only people we know actually are going to [ __ ] be alive which are the ones that are right here right now second thing is if you overblow like if you're spray painting a Monae painting or if you're gluing yourself to the M25 in London or doing whatever I I think that you cause so much agitation that it it causes people to push back even more so it's the classic um vegan activists park outside of a KFC so people tweet on social media just because of that I'm going to go and eat another Burger it's like that kind of [ __ ] response gets activated so I I I think it's I think the the rhetoric around it totally wrong I also think that we very rarely hear as you alluded to uh the benefits of climate Mastery this is some of Alex Epstein's work where he says the number of climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last 100 years that's good that's a reason for a reason to be hopeful does that mean that there are no problems with the climate absolutely not but the concern of climate activists is if we were to tell people about some of the things that are good that are occurring as a byproduct of the uh Freer cheaper use of energy um that is going to make people less motivated to get on board with my particular agenda which is to do this thing so it's it's nuanced it's a it's a balance between the two I'm not sure it's nuanced because there's a word for what you just described okay not telling people the good because you want them to act it's called lying and it's wrong so I don't think it's terribly nuanced okay what about um economic instability people are worried about economic instability is that causing absolutely oh does it cause you know is that a major driver of young people's I think a couple things first of all the student debt is a big deal I don't dismiss that it's a big deal to leave school with that kind of crushing debt we have real challenges in this country and and throughout the West major challenges okay are they worse than they've ever been maybe some of them are but a lot of them aren't and I will tell I promise you this the most unhelpful response is to say we're all doomed I have so much anxiety I'm now going to sit on my parents couch for the next decade because that's not helping anybody so where are the people who are saying I'm going to help with climate change I'm going to help create they they're glued to the M25 right they're glued to the Mona Lisa claiming they're doing something for the climate now if you believe that that the person who glues herself to the Mona Lisa does so because she cares so deeply about the earth I forgive my skepticism you know that's certainly not a way to behave if what you care about is the climate what about an externalized locus of control that seems to be if you were to describe much of the language like semantically if you were to probably do a an analysis there is very much this I don't get to impact my future I have very little agency in the world I am at the mercy of forces that I have no control over that's right and you know what you why they have so little agency because they believe they're unwell people who believe they're sick don't believe they're up to the challenges of life because when we're sick we're not up to the challenges of life right even normal things that we could fix and we could make better and that's the most disturbing thing of all of this generation the lack of agency and do I think that's just because of social media no I think social media plays a role but another huge part is they think they're unwell but they're not unwell they're it's their life that's the problem not a diagnosis and we're way way overtreating kids who have lives that need improving I think that the the the one area I would really love many areas I'd love to sort of stress test some of this research on but one of the areas I'd love to look at is to try and track what's happened with mental health with what's happened with broken homes uh I think that it is such a sleeping sort of giant factor in this because no one really wants to point the finger at single mothers like God this poor woman who's working two jobs to pay two children maybe the father is or isn't involved like in terms of physical support maybe they are or aren't involved in terms of financial support like who wants to do that no it's the the least popular thing on the internet would be to say um this is because you chose wrong like you chose the partner that was wrong and that what's that woman supposed to do go and unpregnant herself like go and go and like put the baby back that's not something that you can do but that that sort of toxic compassion which is we don't want to tell you what may be a big contributor to this because we don't want to make you feel bad it's important like look at what's happening with climate change the point with climate change is to climate change activists we will focus on the things that are bad in order to warn us and steer us toward a a better route for the future that's their their sort of rubric the same thing has to be true in other areas as well and I think single parent households like so reliably must I I've not seen any research about what it does emotionally in terms of mental health out comes but it has to have a huge impact especially on young girls I had animin on the show who did a a phenomenal book about the importance of fathers in the raising of children and you often hear about how important it is for uh fathers to be in the lives of boys to sort of regulate their aggression and and and and teach them how to do Rough and Tumble play uh and it does seem to be very important that fathers are in the lives of boys up to sort of their teenageers but the really important period in her research was sort of 11 to 16 for girls that that was a really important time to have Dad around so I would love to try and uh work out what is the impact and could you track some of these mental health Trends along with the declining uh dual parents household and and sort of decline of increase in divorce okay so I didn't look at the increase of in divorce per se to be able to tell you what what eras it started and and what rate we're at now but here's what I'll say would I deny anything that you're saying no of course not I totally agree of course um all those things are contributing factors but here's the difference how do we deal with them I have met parents and I think we all know these people who are raised by single mothers and are remarkable adults strong good people they are reliable employees they're not taking mental health days off of work they're showing up so can you raise a good a good child to adulthood in very difficult circumstance an es absolutely but can you do it if you told the child he's been traumatized and he'll always be living with trauma Maybe not maybe now you're making it impossible to raise him to do much of anything certainly having a child being raised in a single parent household by a mother or father that needs to work more which means that they give them less time and then saying oh by the way you don't have any control over the outcomes in your life and the climate's going to kill you and you're never going to be able to own a house no no no I mean that's there a breeding ground for people to be unhappy what do you mean when you talk about social emotional meddling like what is that so these are the you know they have the social emotional programs in schools and England as well as America but it's all over America and it's in in theory the idea is that they're going to teach emotional regulation uh through a series of discussions about emotion we'll intr produce concepts of emotion and we know things like having a big vocabulary about emotion is a good thing right it's good for people to be able to separate frustration from anger so that they can realize oh I'm not really angry right now I'm just frustrated which is different right so with this theory in hand they're making a lot of problems for kids why because in practice however it was intended in practice in order to get going a discussion of emotional regulation what teachers are doing is saying okay let's talk about a time when you were happy not much to talk about in terms of emotional regulation right no one's worried about regulating people's happiness now let's talk about a time when you were bullied sad left out when you felt lonely when you felt like neglected now we're cooking so they spend a lot of time inducing rumination and kids this bad pathological practice of rehearsing your past pain and there's something worse too when you go into a school and you get kids to talk about their pain not only are they going to naturally try to one up each other with pain not only are they going to likely to misremember a things a past events as worse than they actually were but who was in charge of keeping them safe naturally it leads to the conclusion that Mom or Dad failed me in some way so you're also this is the reason you're seeing kids leave these programs more alienated from their parents that's interesting so that's one of the one of of the first things that I think um seems to be an obvious difference between an adult doing therapy and a child doing therapy if you have a relationship it seems to me that reminding a child that their parent is there to protect them and to keep them safe while they're still in their care that seems like a smart idea obviously you don't want to pull the wool over their eyes they are abusive you know whatever it's called action action things where you need to actually get the child out of the home and put them with grandparents or whatever um but certainly as an adult you can talk about what happened in childhood with distance because you no longer need to believe that this you know benevolent hous leader person they're not still in control of your life so certainly while you're a child degradating degrading the um quality of trust from child to parent I think is super dangerous because you're asking a young person who is going to be struggling to rationalize this self-regulation isn't really going to be there in as good of a quality and like the one place that they want to be able to feel safe is at home with Mom and Dad mom or dad and if you I think that that's a that's certainly a big difference between dealing with children and dealing with adults if you're 25 and have moved out of the house and are no longer relying on that and had a complex relationship with your parents you can you give yourself not only like temporally geographically emotionally you give your self- distance you can look at that and you don't need to still be at the mercy of that relationship but if you are a child and that relationship between yourself and your parents gets degraded or um you start to lose faith faith in them and stuff like that I can see how that would cause them to be more fearful and just be well I no one I can't trust any adults anymore at all uh that would increase fear because if you think convincing a child who has okay parents not even great parents okay parents just good enough parents that their parents are no help to them and might have let them get hurt if you get them to mistrust their parents on the idea that the school counselor is going to be there for them you're setting them up for a lot of pain why because a child may have a problem over the summer or during spring break or million other times that the school counselor is not there for them it's it's so it's such a lie that the the school systems are there to save kids from neglectful slightly neglectful parents now in an extreme circumstance of abuse of course you need to go in there and get the child out but that's not what we're talking about right we're talking about this dumping of therapy on every child but I'll say something else that occurred to me Chris when you were talking about you know how good therapy can be for an adult look it also really depends on the adult because a lot of young adults there's no question therapy is participating in their alienation young adults the the oldest members of jenzi are alienated at parents and cutting them off in higher numbers than they've ever we've ever seen before and they're doing it for reasons not because they were physically or sexually abused or anything dramatic or severe but usually like I felt I wasn't emotionally supported by my mother it's things that gosh you know you raised children of your own you might think that you could excuse because it's really hard to raise kids actually it's pretty hard and it's really hard when you have a job and you've got you know things you've got so many worries of your own to constantly be there for every single CH thing your child may or may not need in the future it's hard it's a hard job and therapy therapists have been participating in convincing uh young adults to cut off their parents in higher numbers there's something else too Chris you know you talked about how wonderful therapy was for you and I and I just and and I can tell you I found it very very useful at different times of my life but here's the thing it also is because of you so I have a feeling you're the sort of guy who could get a lot out of talking to a bus driver for an hour too right or talking to a your grandfather or anybody else you'd probably get a lot out of that so the question is the therapist as a profession are they doing more help than harm well with kids I think they're doing more harm than good what about the use of the term trauma we see this banded around on the internet a lot it's it's maybe the worst thing to happen to this generation is the overuse of the word trauma uh there's a wonderful new study out by this woman Kathy weam Who does these brilliant prospective studies I believe she's British but I don't know and she does these brilliant yeah uh prospective studies which are the most rigorous kind and she looked at kids who had documented instances of abuse as children and then she waited and followed them and we checked in again 10 15 years with researchers who are blinded as to which group they fell into were the the kids who actually experienced a trauma traumatic event or potentially traumatic event or those who didn't and what she found was the most important factor in whether they had adult psychop pathology adult mental health problems was whether they thought the childhood incident was whether they made that part of their narrative for the adults who didn't think it was significant even when they went through something entally traumatic as children they had great mental health as adults and the ones who had built it into their narrative even events that weren't do may not have occurred those people were suffering in adulthood so it turns out the way we describe Our Lives is really really important to whether we Thrive or not would good trauma informed care not try to unpack that and then teach you that you are a person that's outside of that to transcend whatever it was is is trauma informed care not about casting that off from you well you know I interviewed a a wonderful physician in England who deals with um uh EXC convicts or uh in Plymouth uh who many of whom experienced unspeakable abuse as children and one of the things he said to me was the problem with this so-called trauma unformed care is it presumes inappropriately that everyone is helped by talking about their traumatic experience some people are able to put it behind them and you're only or exacerbate pain it's this again it's this interesting blend right between perpetuating something revisiting it causing yourself to to ruminate and make it worse and also realizing that there can be certain blockages emotionally psychologically that up until you decide to unpack that and actually see it see it for what it is deal with the emotion right deal with the anxiety why was that there why is it that you have this particular pattern why do you feel unsafe whenever anybody disagrees with you it's like well well I I don't know but up until the point at which you actually start to work that out I think that people continue to repeat their patterns and in the same breath you can also say that dwelling on and reinforcing events from your past as a part of the narrative there are people that the more that they talk about it I imagine the more that that cements itself into their character and it's this it's this balance it's it's this sort of very Nuance thing and again it's the thread that I'm continuing to see here is that like good capable dextrous therapy and therapists probably a fantastic helps for the right people bad therapists for the wrong person is like a a [ __ ] curse right and here's another problem look nobody's tracking side effects nobody's measuring them or following them no one's seeing Improvement measuring it testing it making sure you're improving it see the medical profession does that you see if the rash goes away you check the X-ray to see if the cancer is getting worse or receding and then you change your treatment accordingly that's not happening with therapy that's a huge problem and the reason it is is because they did do research and what they found was even when people were getting worse they tended to feel purged and better after they left a therapist office so even that's interesting so there's an acute sort of relief like scratching the itch type thing but potentially could damage it I wasn't aware of that well I mean one one of the things you you mentioned before about um sort of mindfulness practices and stuff in school mindfulness seems to be a pretty well uh evidence-based solution for regulating emotions for understanding yourself for probably even if nothing else just giving yourself a little bit of downtime to parasympathetically unwind I would hope that even bad mindful I I don't know if there is such a thing as bad mindfulness it's like hey sit and do your sit and focus on your breath for for 2 minutes kids like we're going to do mindfulness minute on Tuesday or whatever I'm shy of kids using that as an opportunity to punch someone while everyone's eyes are closed I would like to think that the potential side effects that bad side effects Downstream from mindfulness should be basically zero and the upside could potentially be quite good well I'll tell you why I don't think they're zero because kids understand the message and the message is we think you're terribly disregulated your mental health is a mess we need to constantly talk about Monitor and work on your mental health because mental health is a Continuum from from the raving person screaming at at at the supermarket to you who's nervous before a test you're all on the same spectrum of mental health a mental and and mental illness in some sense and you have to constantly think about it and work on it that is an unhealthy message for kids it is because they're already obsessed with their mental health now if you went back in time if we took a time machine right back you know 50 years a 100 years and introduced mindfulness maybe it would be really helpful if you introduce therapy maybe it would helpful too but you're talking about a totally different time where is the repression today I keep hearing about the potential for you know repression there's no repression there's too little repression everything that goes through these kids' hearts and minds they want to express and complain about and that's problem they don't know that some amount of disappointment and distress is normal healthy move on how much of this do you lay at the feet of modern parenting Styles it's a big part of it it's a huge part of it what I would say is the re the the reason to the extent that I sympathize with parents is I believe that parents have been so undercut by the mental health establishment that convince them that they're not up to the challenge because they don't understand their child's amydala it's a ridiculous assertion by the way most of these people don't understand the amigdala either but the idea that you have to have studied the fight or flight impulse and the you know instincts and the lizard brain you have to memorize all these things before you can raise a child is so Preposterous it's so untrue and by the way most of their claims are just neurot trash it really is a bunch of nonsense how so well um there are a few there are few ways that we that that that I would say this um they use very often what they're doing is relying on things like pet scans or even fmri scans of combat veterans to make claims about children who have experienced ordinary distress like being teased or picked on now those are totally different neurological events now first of all we don't know very much about what's going on in your brain when you have PTSD our ways of understanding the brain are incredibly crude and we don't know whether the neural structures that may have made you more susceptible to P TSD were that they made you more vulnerable because you had a smaller hypoc campus we don't know which way the causality runs or whether the PTSD CA you the traumatic incident the IED blowing up your body caused a change in your brain but it's very it it seems likely that it may be the former but let's just say we don't know nonetheless yes we know nothing about what's going on in a kid who's picked on based on that why because the grinding torment of being teased over and over is just a different kind of neurological event than a sudden shock to the system of seeing your bodyy blown up your brain can habituate as hard as it is to be teased in Middle School your brain actually habituates and we are actually built to be resist resilient to a certain amount of that teasing as unpleasant as it is so the claim that you know what's going on in a kid's brain because you've studied combat vets and when you've measured the flow of oxygenated blood in their brains which itself is astoundingly crude it is just it's really a claim without good backing talk to me about permissive parenting sure so um there's these studies going back to the 1960s that say uh really amazingly sturdy studies cuz they been replicated hundreds of times by this woman Diana band and she looked into parenting methods and she found that parents in America basically use three different methods they were either authoritarian now this is remember 1960s now cold and unloving but rule-based so obedience was the highest virtue basically it doesn't exist in America today at all as far as I can tell uh authoritative which just means parents are in charge they have rules but they're but they're loving permissive which is anything goes kind of no rules affirming a kid being his buddy now today um and they found again and again when they found that authoritative rule-bound but loving is the best for kids mental health success in life and relationship with their parents now permissive I don't think it really exists in America today unfortunately in a certain sense even though the outcomes weren't great and here's what I mean there was one virtue to permissive parenting it gave kids genuine Independence today you have this surveillance parenting which is so much worse parents are acting like therapists with their kids affirming and recognizing their every emotion never enforcing rules never saying no never punishing and not giving their kids any genuine Independence that they could learn from that's interesting yeah I one of the one of the thoughts I had in my mind is whether or not kids being in charge is good or bad and it seems like what you're saying is kids are given the illusion that they're in charge when it comes to sort of enforcement emotionally but the important stuff the agentic freedom to be able to learn is actually being taken away so it's kind of like some of the some of the bad things and not many of the good things that's right they're and they're also constantly being conned by by these you know therapeutic infused um parenting methods like well I'll let you dye your hair purple or green won't that be fun I mean in other words they're given these trivial relatively trivial choices I'll let you choose the red shirt or the blue shirt they're never given you know they don't have much control in the world and they're certainly not having any abilities in the world developed which comes from Independence and a certain amount of trusting them to do hard things and face hard things but then they're confused with these really trivial choices all the time that are meant to make them feel good and and sort of I think d dist ract them from from have distract them so the parent doesn't have to punish them because because these parents don't don't want to punish yeah it's this again another delicate balance like permissive parenting gentle parenting some parents want to be emotionally attuned with their kids maybe they're just not that authoritative as people but there's a big difference between being gentle with your kid and allowing it to do whatever it wants well you can be as gentle as you want but you can't divest yourself of a Authority you can't tell the kid you're not in charge if you want to do that by being as gentle or thoughtful as you can be that's fine as long as you're still in charge and that's what the research shows so it doesn't say anything about how much sort of sympathy you you can have for your kid or what they're going through but ultimately you don't put a three-year-old in charge which which also means that if a child is having a fit you don't stop the entire family Thanksgiving celebration to ask the child what's wrong and endless let them vent right and and that that's what we're seeing and that's why we're seeing such lousy results the final Horseman of the Apocalypse I guess which kind of Falls in line from your last bit of work is over medication yes these kids are way overmedicated I mean the generation's way over medicated in all kinds of ways that we're seeing uh but but again you know I I think the worst of it is that you know and I want want people to know it's not the same as an adult choosing to take a Xanax whatever you think about the an anti-anxiety medications it's totally different when you get in when the child's trying or the young teenagers trying to develop emotional musculature and you get in there and delete their bad feelings and introduce all kinds of scied effects that's that's a problem because now you're interfering with their ability to grow up when they could just be dancing what yeah they could just be done what what is the um right have you got any stats around the the percentage the number of kids that are on some kind of psychiatric medication it's a good question I don't it's much harder to track in in the us because we don't have centralized medical care but we know it's been going up a lot we know that Lexapro in the last year was just approved for seveny olds what a pro sorry oh sorry it's an anti-depressant it's an SSRI okay seveny old s that's a big deal it's a really strong drug and we know that you know the New York Times ran an article I think two years ago now or a year ago on you know the number of young people on 10 different psychotropic drugs and if you interview any doctor today any doctor in any specialty they will tell you they cannot believe how many psychiatric drugs their average young patient is on why are they prescribing them then well very often they aren't sometimes they're the OB they're not the ones prescribing they're just showing what's an OB sorry obstetrician uh gynecologist so a young uh 14-year-old 15-year-old 16-year old girl shows up at her gynecologist office and for you know a regular exam or whatever it is and um uh the doctor can see what she's on or the 21y old see they can see what she's on and the answer is a lot of psychiatric medication and they look at it a guest like who put you on all this and very often the answer is the pediatrician outside of the um nerfing of emotions and the lack of opportunity to learn how to self-regulate what are the other dangers of kids being on medication obviously this is something that you looked at in a slightly different Vector previously but with with these kinds of drugs these categories what are the dangers to developing brains and young people being on them right so all these different categories of drugs are different obviously but let let's take an anti-depressant so not only you're interfering let's just take drive so there's all kinds of problems to deleting a Young Person's sex drive when they're just developing it they don't even know what they're missing and of course there's some indication that's come out recently that it may be permanent but but but here's something else too uh that I learned when I was doing a interview totally separate from all this um I interviewed a surgeon a transgender surgeon and what she told me was she had worked on uh victims of female genital mutilation and one of the things she told me was that when you remove uh someone's sex drive it turns out you also interfere with their ability to make Intimate Relationships you're interfering part of our drive to form close relationships comes from a sex drive they go together so these are profound I mean I just give you one example but that's a profound intervention with a young person who doesn't yet have very many Intimate Relationships or romantic relationships they might not know what they're missing and then there's the whole can I handle my life question an adult who chooses to go on an anti-depressant at least knows that they've gone through some hard things and that they probably can but a teenager who starts on an anti-depressant may never know if they can handle life and that's the worst thing of all in a sense you have this sort of butus psychological support structure pharmacological support structure that means people never actually realize the robustness of their like their own capacity yes yes if you know that you can do things in the world if you've grown up if you have overcome a certain amount of distress and handled it if you have been rejected and failed to make the team and live and moved on and you're an adult now you've held it and now you want to choose whatever it is you're in such a better position to do it whether it's Psychotherapy or or medication but if you're a child who doesn't yet know those things you may never get to know them because you may never believe you can the bottom line is that young people's mental health is not good and something presumably needs to happen to do that so what is a good route forward to improve young people's mental health in your opinion subtraction of all the bad stuff so less Obsession about their mental health less Focus On Wellness less focus on feelings more exercise more getting out into the world more human connection less time spent on Tech more connections with extended family with people who genuinely love them and care if they show up more involvement in a project bigger than themselves and contributing to the community what in whatever way they can all that stuff exercise all that stuff is so so good for you that's what they need to be doing have you thought about how to operationalize this or how you would implement it is this something that needs to happen at a governmental level is this something that needs to be implemented hardcore in education and for schools to follow is this something that's the responsibility of parents like who does who does this fall on when it comes to I I think it cut falls on parents mostly they're the ones I trust the most to make a helpful change the problem is is they're the only ones totally devoted to how their children turn out everyone else has a self-interest in getting involved everyone so do I think the government's going to sweep in with a brilliant intervention I I have a little bit of skepticism there yeah Jonathan Heights book's got some interesting stuff in it I think he wants to basically kind of put a like an age limit on uh access to social media or on access to phones there's this suggestion of cart telling uh families together so that you speak to the parents of your child's friends and you say if we all stand firm the only reason it's like a tragedy of the commons thing right if if the way that everyone's communicating is by using phones if none of our kids are exposed to them before the age I think he wants it's maybe 12 or 14 for phones and then 16 for social media something like that but then he wants other some other bits and pieces I mean it's all good stuff and I hope it's successful um do I think that you know I I I think it's ghastly that the mental health industry hasn't put something like a blackbox warning on social media or come out with that kind of uh uh claim or or recommendation I should say but do I think it's a collective action problem not exactly see my understanding of a collection active problem is uh nobody can move until everybody decides to move together well I'm not sure that that's the social media problem right why because if you get six families in a class of 60 to stop with social media they will see an immediate Improvement and you know what they'll have someone else to talk to in the class and their grades will be better and they'll be generally happier kids and then other parents will will have the strength to do the same so I'm not sure the answer is legislation I think it's really just parents stepping up what would you say to parents that are listening that are worried about their child's mental health yeah I would say a few things if you could get through something hard your kids can too your kids can too and they need to hear that message they need to hear your faith that they can face adversity and get over hard things whatever that hard thing is because they can that's the story of humanity but also the thing to do is if before you go down the road of accommodation ask one question you know whether it's an accommodation a testing accommodation in school or any other will this make my child stronger if the answer is no don't do it don't do it stop obsessing about their happiness start focusing on their strength will I make my child stronger and absolutely part of it is taking away the tech limiting that I don't know if there's you know you know a quick fix to that other than parents asserting their Authority and saying no Abigail Shri ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to keep up to date with the work that you're doing and check out your stuff uh I'm on substack under uh my substack is the truth fairy and I'm on Twitter Abigail shrier Abigail I appreciate you thank you likewise thanks so much CH if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch