Abigail Shrier exposes the backlash against Irreversible Damage (2020), including Spotify and Target bans, while critiquing modern therapy’s overuse for kids without severe mental illness—linking it to iatrogenic effects like heightened anxiety. She contrasts Israel’s trauma recovery approach with America’s chronic PTSD labeling, citing resilience as the norm, and warns that excessive medicalization (SSRIs, Adderall) undermines independence, fueling Gen Z’s 42% diagnosis rate and 54% reluctance to leave home. The conversation reveals how permissive parenting and societal fragility traps normalize helplessness, questioning whether therapy or parental overprotection truly builds resilience. [Automatically generated summary]
Every time someone wants to stop discussions, they're wrong.
They're wrong.
Especially when you want to try to stop discussions about a very serious and permanent thing that people are advocating to do to children that is also very profitable.
And it's a dark, weird sort of a scenario that we're in here right now that's unprecedented, that no one's ever experienced before.
And they're using terms like life-saving, gender-affirming care instead of castration and removing breasts and hormones.
It's a very, very strange time.
So I'm glad we had that podcast and I would have a hundred more of them.
I think it's very important to talk about this and I think there's too many people that are scared to talk about it and that's why this stuff is getting so much traction.
And it's scary.
It's scary.
It's scary that people aren't willing to Admit that children are very easily influenced.
And the reason why they want to try to do it is because they know that there's too many people that agree with it and that these people have been silenced before.
So they'd like to bully them into silence.
They like to scare them into silence.
They like to...
Get them cancelled.
And, you know, before Elon purchased Twitter, you used to be able to do that much more effectively.
And they did it because even though they have hundreds of trans celebratory books, hundreds of books celebrating gender transition for teenagers, even one that was critical of it, that was too much for them because they knew it would break their monopoly on the narrative.
You think that everybody who goes through surgery to remove parts of their body because they feel like they're in the wrong gen, you think all those people are going to be happy?
Well, I think that is a part of it, but I don't think the lawsuits are going to solve it as easily as they did, say, the repressed memory scandal of prior eras and the multiple personality disorder, all these people who thought they had repressed memory of various kinds of harm and were imagining childhood molestation that didn't happen.
I think that got reversed through lawsuits in part because they weren't following clear medical, clear protocols of their profession.
The problem with the gender, going after the gender regime through the courts, and I'm in favor of it, don't get me wrong.
But the problem is that the gender therapists, the therapists, the doctors were all following protocol when they transition a kid to, you know, and cut up their bodies in various ways, you know, incapacitated them in various ways.
They were actually following affirmative care, which was the official protocol.
There's so many things that we don't allow children to do because we know that children can't really make lifelong decisions at the age of 11 and 12 and 13, but yet we'll let them in this case.
Yeah, I, you know, when I look back on it, you know, there are a few, I sort of had a few, there were a few sort of lessons of it.
But one of the things that really stood out was that almost in every case, there were medical professionals who should have known better, and very often therapists who should have known better, encouraging a young girl who was a little anxious or had some anxiety, had some depression, encouraging her down this road as the solution.
Hundreds and hundreds of new gender clinics all across the country.
You know, the industry expanded so rapidly with very little oversight.
And it was just how fast could we get these drugs to these kids?
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
There wasn't enough oversight, but there also weren't enough good people speaking up.
A lot of the best doctors who are like, I didn't enter the medical profession to do this, they went silent or they referred to others.
They said, why don't you, you know, let me refer you to a specialist.
Well, actually, the gender surgeons often, you know, weren't even, you know, adequate to the task because it's very, very complicated surgery, you know, involving, you know, transferring peripheral nerves and whatnot.
So it's not easy surgery, depending on which surgery you're talking about.
Very often they weren't even the most qualified surgeons doing the surgery, so you had a lot of, you know, surgeries that didn't go quite right.
I mean, you're creating a new thing, you know, whether you're creating a penis or whether you're turning a penis into a vagina.
This is not like heart surgery.
This is not something they've been doing forever that they have this long history of doing it successfully and they know exactly how to do it correctly.
Yeah, the rates of, you know, all kinds of things going wrong.
I mean, you know, if you talk about the creation of the neophallus, the ones that take a vagina to make something like a penis, the number, you know, getting it to, you know, urine to go in a stream as opposed to a spray.
Or making it so that the person can have an erection, then a strong enough erection to actually penetrate.
These all require separate surgeries very often.
Very often it doesn't go quite right, and there's all kinds of complications with the surgeries.
I mean, I've talked to people who've been really butchered.
When you wrote that book, did you expect the kind of blowback that you experienced?
What did you expect when you wrote the book?
Obviously, you felt the need to express this and you felt the need to share this information because you recognize that there's this contagion, this social contagion that seems to be happening.
It's a big part of what's going on.
And a lot of these kids are very easily influenced.
A lot of them are on the spectrum, and they're being led down this road.
So you write this book.
What did you expect was going to be the reaction to it?
Well, most books get very little attention at all.
So most books write...
I certainly didn't expect the massive reaction that I got.
I mean, the...
Public campaign to ban me from every possible outlet was so hypercharged.
And to some extent, it was successful.
I mean, they kept the book on Amazon.
It was deleted from Target.
You can't find it in a public library in America, no matter how many people try to donate it to their libraries.
So, to some extent, it was successful.
But, you know, the campaign to stifle the book, but because I made it onto places like your podcast, because I made it into Amazon, people got it.
Parents got it.
And for the first time, I think, parents had another source of information besides the activist narrative of, oh, you know, you're either going to have a live son or a dead daughter, this lie that your child's going to kill themselves.
If you don't do exactly what I say and let them transition now.
This lie was the prevailing narrative and I think I was able to break through and I think that's what made people so angry.
There's actually a new study out of Finland showing that, a really good long-term study, I think it came out maybe just this week, showing that the rates when you control for other mental health issues, the rates of suicide among those with gender dysphoria, the discomfort with the biological sex, the rates of suicide are no higher than for the general population.
Well, there's a whole body of research on some of the side effects of therapy, and they include things like alienation from spouse, alienation from parents, worsening of depression, worsening of anxiety, feeling of incapacity, feeling like you can't do things without consulting your therapist.
All those are well-known iatrogenic effects.
Once you have a mental diagnosis, the labeling, feeling limited by that label.
Oh, I have anxiety.
I can't.
So all those things are well known, what they call iatrogenic effects, meaning whenever a medical procedure actually introduces harm, that's an iatrogenic effect.
And we know that, of course, drugs and surgeries always come with, even the life-saving ones can come with some harm.
And what people might not know is that therapy comes with these risks as well.
But I guess the big picture theme here is that therapy with kids and teens is totally different for therapy with an adult, right?
An adult sits down.
First of all, an adult makes the decision on their own.
You know, I really want to work on this.
I'm going to go to a therapist.
And you get the patient buy-in, and they're ready to do the hard work of therapy.
But a child or teenager is usually strong-armed into therapy, so they don't want to be there in the first place.
But more importantly, you know, they can't say as easily to a therapist, listen, I don't really think...
I think I gave you the wrong impression.
I don't think I would call my mom emotionally abusive.
Or...
It's much harder for them to say, listen, I know I was bullied in middle school, but I don't think I have PTSD. It's harder for a kid to say that because they don't have the life experience behind them to know that.
And they don't know if they're getting better as easily.
An adult can say, you know, I've been seeing this therapist for three years.
Yeah, I have never been in therapy, although a lot of people told me I should.
But they all are in therapy, and it doesn't seem to be helping.
But the people that I know that are in therapy, the ones that are in therapy regularly, are the most fucked up.
And I don't see improvement.
I don't...
I mean, maybe it's just a biased sampling of the people that I know that are doing it, but it's the people that, it's not all of them, but the ones that I find problematic are very self-indulgent.
And there's something about going to a therapist and talking about yourself constantly and your problems constantly that sort of reinforces this self-indulgent.
And that's what can lead depression to get worse, sadness to get worse.
As you sit and focus on your pain, if you're not careful, especially with teens and kids, it can make the pain, the worry, the feeling of being harmed worse.
So if you're struggling with a condition of some sort, a phobia, anorexia, OCD, you know, any number of problems that you want to deal with, therapy can be great.
Cognitive behavioral therapy especially can be great.
But if you go, if you're a teen or kid who shows up bummed out, Or just generally kind of anxious.
To a therapist, you have a good shot of having that problem made worse.
Now, I'm not talking about severe major depressive disorder, okay?
When you have severe chronic depression, you may need to treat it with medication or therapy.
But for, you know, low mood, you know, sort of mild to moderate depression, exercise turns out to be better, and it doesn't have those side effects.
But let me give you an example of a teenager I talked to.
So I talked to this girl, Becca, is what I call her in the book.
But she was a high school senior, and she had been in therapy since age six, okay, when her parents divorced.
She didn't have any diagnosed mental disorder of any kind, but she had regularly been in therapy because her parents divorced and they said you got to go to therapy.
So I asked her as a high school senior, so what are you working on with your therapist now?
And she said to me, my therapist is getting me ready to make friends in college.
She's helping me.
So we're rehearsing, we're going through my past experiences and we're talking about how to get me ready to make friends in college.
Do you see, this generation feels that it can't do because they've gotten so much oversight and so much needless mental health intervention that they're questioning themselves all the time.
One is I'm raising three kids in this generation, so I wanted to know, why was the generation that got the most mental health intervention, the most therapy, the most psych meds, the most interventions in schools, the most therapeutic parenting, why were they in the most distress?
And why were they so afraid to grow up?
And we shouldn't see that.
They should be the picture of wellness.
Nobody worried about anybody's mental health more than we worried about their mental health.
And yet they're the picture of despair.
So I really wanted to know what was going on with them.
And also, of course, I had written Irreversible Damage.
And I knew from that experience that very often when a young woman would tell a story about when her life went desperately off track...
It was with a therapist.
And here's the thing.
It wasn't necessarily a gender therapist.
Most often, it was just your vanilla psychodynamic therapist who was there to talk to an anxious or depressed little bummed out teen, you know, mildly depressed teen about their bad feelings.
And lo and behold, during the course of, you know, regular psychodynamic therapy, they would say, and what are your feelings on gender?
And with the therapist, they would go down that route.
I wrote about it in the first book, and Jonathan Haidt, Gene Twenge have been talking about it for eight years now, and they've brought rigor and important research to show that that has – extracting kids from their social world is bad.
And getting them – making them – getting the dopamine hit and the anxious worry about who's going to write me back and when and then getting the dopamine hit when they get that response and that whole cycle.
There's no question that plays on our natural sort of propensities for addiction and makes kids more anxious.
But I think it's part of what we're seeing.
I don't think it's the whole story.
And the reason I don't think it's the whole story is a few things.
First of all, childhood mental health and adolescent mental health has been in precipitous decline in this country since the 1950s.
How do they measure that?
By every measure, by the way.
But let's say between 1955 and 1988, the rates of adolescent suicide quadrupled.
So that's just one measure, but there are many.
I mean, we've seen it from non-suicidal self-harm, suicidal self-harm.
All of these rates have gone up for adolescents.
But they've been in decline for—mental health of teens has been in decline for years.
There's also some other statistics or some other reasons.
I don't think phones explain the whole story.
One of them is that in 2016, the CDC came out with a report and they said that one in six kids between the ages of two and eight, these aren't kids with smartphones, between the ages of two and eight, one in six kids had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.
That's a lot of kids.
That's a lot of kids with a mental health diagnosis, right?
I think adults are absolutely passing on their anxiety to their kids.
And actually, we're seeing that in, you know, Jean Twenge came out with this book, Generations.
And one of the things she said in it is that boys, even though teenage girls have the worst mental health in general, boys from liberal families had worse mental health than girls from conservative families in terms of anxiety and depression.
So why should that be?
We know the girls are on social media more, right?
Boys, you know, that's not their thing, right?
They're into video games or whatever.
But I think part of the reason is what you said.
There are certain families that are passing on anxiety about things like climate change.
But I also think it shows that it's in the environment we're giving them.
We're not giving kids a healthy life, right?
Right?
We think that we can give them an unhealthy life and just pour in the mental health resources and remediate, but it doesn't work like that.
And then the last reason I don't think that phones totally explain everything, or social media, is because in societies where they use just as much social media, it's not great for the kids' mental health, no doubt, but they have much better rates of anxiety and depression than we do, countries like Japan and Israel.
Where kids have more independence, they have more freedom, they're able to take more risks on their own, and they walk home from school, they do all kinds of jobs outside of the house, like run errands for the family, and they get a feeling of, first of all, short-term joy and long-term satisfaction from being able to take risks, see what they can handle, but also a feeling of efficacy in the world.
But one of the many things that we might – first of all, we know it's in the environment at that point.
It's not an organic – whatever these kids are going through, it's not organic, right?
So we know it's something we're pouring into their life.
And I think one of the things might be that, aside from the fact that parents in conservative families may be more comfortable asserting their authority with kids, and that's an old finding.
We've known for generations now that authoritative parenting, meaning not cold parenting, not cruel, not unloving, but rules.
Those kids have better mental health, they're happier, and they're more successful in all kinds of ways.
So it may be something to do with comfort with rules, but also they're less likely to turn their kids' lives over to a mental health expert.
You know, parents today are so quick to put kids in charge.
What do you want?
Where would you like to go to school?
What would you like to eat for dinner?
You know, putting kids in charge.
But we've known since the 1960s, Diana Bomeran did this research years ago, and it's some of the most, it's some of the sturdiest research we have because they've replicated it hundreds of times.
And they've shown that loving parents who are also rule-bound, they call them authoritative, not authoritarian, which is the cold, unloving rule-bound, but the loving and rule-bound parents tend to raise the happiest kids because kids knows there are guardrails.
And here's the thing, the people who are making the rules aren't some expert mom hired.
I mean, there's a lot of really good research on this, but it actually doesn't create more rebellious kids.
By virtually every metric, they do much better in all kinds of circumstances.
And in all kinds of situations and the permissive – what they used to have was permissive parents and authoritarian parents.
Those were the other two extremes.
Permissive parents let kids do whatever they wanted and authoritarian parents said obey at all costs and they were fairly cold.
And their kids didn't end up great in terms of mental health.
But here's – but today we don't even have permissive parents in my view.
I think we have something even worse.
We have permissive parents who are therapeutic, meaning they're always asking kids what they want and they're never asserting their authority, but they're doing something else.
So I think, you know, I'm at the tail end of Gen X, 1978 was the year I was born.
And I think with my, you know, we were the high watermark of divorce.
And I think a lot of, you know, teenagers who grew up when I did, they felt like, you know, my parents were divorced.
They weren't there for me.
I wish I had had someone I could talk to.
And so they sort of naively, and they had good experiences in therapy.
And they sort of naively, you know, watched Good Will Hunting and they thought, you know, therapy is good for everyone.
And they sort of naively turned their kids over to a mental health expert right away.
You know, at the first – I talked to moms who signed their kids up for therapy because a cat died, because their grandma died, because basically anything that would happen in their life, even routine events.
And yeah, look, having your grandparents die is very sad, but that's not – A unexpected trauma that's part of life, right?
And signing up your kid with a therapist might help if they're having a real problem, but it could also introduce other problems.
I mean, obviously, bad feelings can be devastating.
But bad feelings also can let you understand the landscape of the world better and understand what to do and what not to do and what the consequences are of certain actions.
You know, I had some friends when I was growing up that got...
that became addicted to drugs.
And it...
It sealed the deal for me.
Like, with cocaine was a big one.
Like, I've never tried cocaine.
And one of the main reasons is because of my friends that I had when I was in high school.
I saw the negative.
It was horrible.
It was horrible to experience.
It's horrible as a friend to watch all that go down.
But those bad feelings teach you something.
They teach you something very important about what the consequences of certain behavior are.
I think it would be something where you can't—the parent has tried to stabilize the kid, that they have a problem, it's interfering with functioning, and they can't stabilize the kid.
They've tried other methods, and if they still can't stabilize the kid, I think therapy could be absolutely, you know, really helpful.
And I think you should then research the therapist like you would any surgeon.
Okay, so first of all, there is no oversight, which is a huge problem, right?
There's no one – the profession doesn't require it.
They're not measuring harms.
They're not tracking harms.
The medical professions, of course, do require it, right?
They're federally required.
If you have an adverse reaction to a drug, it gets reported.
But with therapy, there is no tracking.
But there's something else, too.
We know that as a treatment enters a population pool and it becomes more accessible and more prevalent, the rates of disease or malady or disorder should go down, right?
We've seen this with breast cancer.
1989 was the high-water mark of breast cancer, you know, death from breast cancer.
As screening improved, As it got more prevalent and more accessible to people, rates of death from breast cancer have plummeted.
So why are the people who are getting the most treatment and the most access to mental health treatment, they're having the worst anxiety and depression?
Why?
It's skyrocketing.
It should be going down.
If the treatment were effective, it would be going down.
But there are those other factors that we talked about, like social media, living in the age of the internet.
This is a bizarre time to be a child.
I think that children today are experiencing unprecedented pressure in a weird way that no one knows how to navigate because no one grew up with it besides them.
No, but there's been really good evidence for the last eight years.
I don't think there's a parent alive who doesn't already know that social media is bad for kids, right?
We've known the phones.
We see what they do.
We see how angry kids get when you try to take them away.
We know that there's like this addictive element and that kids act a little crazed.
We can see it.
And we've known that.
I mean, there's been good research out for eight years now.
Why have the mental health organizations who have been in 2020 warning the Congress about climate change, systemic racism, police tactics, they were quick to announce their views on all those things.
They had nothing to say about the lockdowns.
They had nothing to say about social media.
They'd never called for a ban on social media.
They never issued the same warning that doctors gave about cigarettes.
That seems like the problem with that is it's like trying to put the water back in the dam.
I just don't believe that that would be effective.
Maybe they could have said something about it at the very beginning.
If we knew the consequences of social media, let's go back to like 2005 or something like that, before it was really a thing.
If they started seeing it happen, if they could put the kibosh on it then, But now that it's so ubiquitous, I just, I can't imagine a world where anybody would effectively say, there's a state that's trying, was it Montana that's trying to ban TikTok?
On the screen, dozens of states are suing Instagram parent meta over addictive features and youth mental health harms.
I think they're talking about algorithms.
They're talking about how algorithms target children demand users constant attention.
Meta has profited from children's pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem.
Hmm.
Yeah, that's that lady from New York.
Social media companies including Meta have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable.
So it says, Meta's design choices and practices take advantage and contribute to young users' susceptibility to addiction, the complaint reads.
They exploit psychological vulnerabilities of young users through the false promise that meaningful social connection lies in the next story, image, or video, and that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation.
That seems like a stretch.
I don't think they say that.
No one says that ignoring the next piece of social content can lead to social isolation.
What they do say is that children feel left out if they're not on social media because there's a lot of these little chat groups and they share videos and information.
That's how they find about songs and bands that they like and movies that they like and television shows they like.
I mean, I think there are a couple of reasons why.
One of them is we made no effort to even stop them during the school day, right?
That would have been really easy.
You can be on your phone, just not during the school day.
That's so obvious that it's almost pathetic that we don't have that already in place, right?
Because why do you need to be checking your texts?
You're in school with your friends, right?
So there were things that we could do and could have done, but we didn't do them.
And I think one of the reasons was that I think that mental health experts, I mean, I know there are therapists who allow therapy over text message, right?
You are, but you get none of the benefits of in-person.
So, you know, this they have measured.
And the benefits of being in-person, seeing someone face-to-face, the psychic benefits are real.
Even when you're with someone you don't want to be with, the kids who went home for the lockdowns and were in a big household full of relatives they didn't want to be stuck with when they wanted to be in college, they did better in terms of mental health than the kids who were isolated and stayed in school.
First of all, adults can see therapists for any reason.
And that's totally not only up to them.
I think they have the stand to get – they are in a much better position to possibly benefit from it.
I'm concerned about therapy for kids, especially kids who don't really need it, who are a little bummed out.
But in any case, we know that Zoom therapy or text therapy for the most anxious generation, for the most socially phobic generation, supposedly, well, that's not helpful.
So the thing that gets me about therapy, that I've always talked, the people that I know that are doing it all the time, is I don't know how much you should be thinking about yourself.
I don't know.
I mean, is there a...
Is there a certain amount of time you should allocate to thinking about yourself and your own feelings and problems?
And how much of that is self-indulgent and how much of that feeds that anxiety itself?
But when you're in the school, focusing on school, focusing on seeing your friends and going to recess or whatever it else is, the basketball, whatever the...
The activity is really good for you, as opposed to sitting around and thinking about doing social-emotional learning and thinking about the pain you're feeling right now, the emotional pain.
That's not going to help you get through your geometry test.
And it gives you positive reinforcement that you actually can get through something difficult and that the end result, the feeling of accomplishment, is very valuable.
And one of the hardest, most worrisome parts of this generation is that they have the lowest sense of efficacy.
They report an external locus of control, meaning they don't think they can improve their lives.
See, millennials thought they could do anything, right?
They are the Mark Zuckerberg generation.
And that's why we had so many tech founders in that generation.
We're not seeing that with these young people.
They don't want to be in charge.
They're afraid.
And they don't feel up to it.
I talked to – there's a friend of mine I call every year on her birthday, and she's a research scientist, cell biologist.
And every year she invites kids to her lab for an internship who are top kids, pre-med graduates from college before they go on to med school.
And she said to me in the last decade, when I called her this year for her birthday, she said to me, I can't believe you're writing about this generation.
They are so different.
And I said, tell me why.
She said, I'm seeing the smartest, most prepared kids.
And they're afraid to run their own experiments.
They tell me they're getting ready.
They're working on their skills.
They're not yet up to it.
And they constantly report to me about their mental health, how they're feeling today.
It's weird because as a parent like you want to hear kids out and when they're having like some sort of anxiety and issue you want to talk with them and you want to talk through it you want to give you don't want to tell them hey You're gonna have to suck it up.
I never say that and I probably should I mean I don't know if I should but I mean if I had boys I probably would I think I would probably treat them differently but I think that There's a fine line.
Where is the point of diminishing returns?
Where is it valuable to address feelings and anxiety and thoughts?
And is it irresponsible to do so without giving them tools to mitigate those things?
And along with those tools, to explain to them that there's things that they're going to have to do in this life that are very difficult, but that there's a great reward in doing these very difficult things.
So the problem, as I see it, is not that you're not saying suck it up, it's that no one ever says suck it up, no matter how minor the scratch to these kids, okay?
And sometimes being told, you'll live.
Remember when Dad used to say, you'll live, or, you know, shake it off?
We never hear shake it off anymore.
No one says it.
So they don't know they can overcome even minor injuries.
And the truth is, they can.
They can.
But they recently did these studies on these coping techniques.
They taught coping techniques to over 1,000 teenagers in Australia.
It was called the Wise Teens Program.
And that was the point.
It was just to help them with emotional regulation.
And it turned out it made kids sadder and more anxious.
They measured this.
And the reason was regularly ruminating on your bad feelings can make you feel worse.
So, like, I talked to this one amazing, you know, child psychologist who said to me, I start by having my patients sign a waiver in which they acknowledge that there can be risks.
And the reason I do that is because I don't want them to experience harm.
So if they see that their worries are getting worse, they have to tell me.
When this person gets, this person that you were just describing, if they get someone that comes to them that doesn't have a real problem, do they turn them away?
Well, you can ask, but very often therapists don't turn them away.
That's the problem.
Too many therapists, I mean, you know, I saw, you know, I think back to the first book, and I would ask, like, was there ever, did anyone have a therapist who said, you know what, I don't think the trans identity fits you.
You know, that doesn't seem to make sense to me.
On almost no cases did the therapist stop a girl from going down that road.
No, you don't have gender dysphoria.
Listen, it's mostly little boys.
Okay, it's overwhelmingly little boys, starts with little boys, and you see it in men.
It's overwhelmingly male phenomenon, and it always starts ages two to four.
So you discovering this at age 12, let me tell you something with your friends, it's so unlikely, we don't even need to go there.
That's why stuff like exercise, that's one of the reasons, aside from chemical reasons, one of the reasons that doing anything, you know that running errands is good for your mental health?
Getting out of your house and accomplishing anything?
But sitting around talking and thinking about your problems, that's a bad habit.
And the best cognitive behavioral therapists and others, you know, the dialectical behavioral therapists, the ones who do really well with depression, the first thing they do is try to break that bad pattern.
It's also a luxury that's provided to you by a life that's fairly safe.
You know, people that live in war-torn countries and have very difficult lives, they don't have that luxury of just sitting around all day and doing nothing and, oh, I go outside and run errands.
And I think that there's an expression that someone told me once and I say it all the time.
The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
If it's you got a dent in your car or it's your parents get killed in a car accident.
Either one of those things is the worst thing depending upon the level of whatever stress or anxiety or horrible things you've experienced in your life.
That's your watermark for what you can and can't tolerate.
And, you know, the thing is, the truth is that most kids and most people did.
In other words, that didn't mean that dad didn't lose his job and they were forced out of the, you know, they had to lose their house or these things happen.
They've happened in every family.
And I think one of the many reasons that kids don't know this today is we've cut them off from extended family.
The story of their grandparents is a story of resilience in almost every case, right?
You hear about your family history and you're going to hear a story of pain and survival and resilience and overcoming.
But today you've got teenagers who say, oh, I can't drive past my middle school where I was bullied because of my PTSD. They don't have PTSD. But they think they do.
And so there are benefits to anxiety and there are negative parts of anxiety.
Now, I'm not talking about anxiety disorder.
We don't want anyone to suffer with an anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life.
But a little anxiety and a bad memory, that's not only part of life, but it can have positive effects.
So some of the positive effects of anxiety is it helps with performance.
If I weren't nervous for this right now, I wouldn't have prepared so much to make sure I remembered what I was going to talk about.
And we don't want someone with no anxiety crossing a street because he's not going to look for cars.
And we're going in with medication and we're deleting things like anxiety and depression.
Anxiety helps you make beautiful memories.
You remember Christmas morning because of all the nerves about it ahead of time.
Or you remember your first kiss partially because of things.
That's why the memories are so clear.
And when we go in and we give kids a pill for that, not only are they not developing an emotional musculature they're going to need as adults, but actually they're losing a really important part of the human experience, like feeling low because you were dumped and then seeing you can get over it.
Now, I'm not talking about major depressive disorder that's chronic and needs treatment, of course, right?
But if you have something bad happen to you, you go through a divorce, you go through something hard, okay?
That doesn't mean you should never use meds or therapy if you absolutely need it.
But there can be good.
And here's what can be good, okay?
Depression is adaptive.
And the purpose, I learned this from talking to interviewing a lot of evolutionary psychologists.
And one of the good things about depression is it shuts us down so we don't do anything rash and we think about what change we might want to make in our life.
Because sometimes we need to make a change.
And if we just medicate away the bad feelings, the worst feelings might be dampened, but we also might be locked into that low state and never make the change we need to make.
And there's this – so one of the psychiatrists I interviewed was this man, Paul McHugh, who used to be the head of the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department.
And he looked at vets, combat vets in America and Israel.
And what he wanted to know was why was there less PTSD among the combat vets in Israel?
And one of the things he noticed was that they treat them very differently.
When an Israeli soldier saw something traumatic, a potentially traumatic event, maybe an IED exploding or something, their buddies torn apart and killed, they took them out of battle.
They said, Just so you know, your reaction is totally normal.
We're sending you home for a few weeks.
You're going to feel better.
And then we're going to put you right back.
But you're going to recover.
We're going to put you right back with your men.
And with America, when someone had seen something horrific, they would pull them out of battle.
They would meet with a therapist who would tell them, you have the symptoms of PTSD. Here is PTSD. Your government did this to you.
And it's possible you may be suffering with this chronically.
Which doesn't minimize what people, you know, all the traumatic things.
I mean, some people will have harder time getting back on the horse.
They may need more treatment than other people.
But what's amazing is most people, even who go through traumatic experiences, even most combat vets, the majority don't get PTSD. Because actually, the story of human history, the story of our experience is of resilience.
Vietnam vets, they know what percentage saw combat.
It was something like 12 to 15 percent actually saw combat.
But for whatever reason, when they surveyed Vietnam vets, 30 percent of them were reporting PTSD. That's iatrogenesis.
That means that they've been hearing about the symptoms of PTSD, they were thinking about their friends who've had PTSD, and more people were coming to believe they had PTSD than actually could have had it.
But you're still talking about a small percentage of people who go through some really hard things in combat.
Something like, you know, at 70 to 80 percent, no matter how many traumatic experiences they've seen, you know, four tours in Iraq, they still, for whatever reason, don't have the symptoms.
Yeah, I've talked to friends of mine that are veterans about this, and one of the things they said is that my friend who was a SEAL said that Special Forces guys experience it less, although they do experience it, because they're proactive.
They're acting.
They're doing something.
They're moving.
Whereas, he said, the real people that experience it are sometimes people that are stuck on a base.
There's a lot of ways to be a Navy SEAL. I mean some is the official being a Navy SEAL, an actual Navy SEAL, but there's so many ways to be strong and make a difference in the world and do things.
And that message that your friend mentioned, that's a good message for kids.
And we're lowering the standards and expectations.
I mean, this is the trauma generation, right?
We've told them over and over, you can't handle very much.
Don't worry, I'm going to write you.
And they have these things in schools called anytime passes, where if a kid's feeling a little anxious, they'll get a pass from the school counselor and they're allowed to leave class anytime they're feeling anxious.
Well, how's a kid going to sit through anything if they've been given this pass to leave class, any class they don't like?
Kids who've gone through hard things, and there are those kids, they need high standards, they need expectations, and they need to be told, you can do it.
There's this one woman I talked to.
She was raising three kids out of foster care with her wife, okay?
And these kids had gone through horrible traumatic experiences.
I mean, so bad, so abused by their birth parents that the detective who took them from their home cried on the stand talking about what they had lived through.
And she said to me, I'm trying to get them with actual professionals that I have picked to get through the day and not think about the hard things they went through.
And all these teachers are just asking them about their trauma all day long.
So is the problem that these people that are teachers, they're well-intended, they just don't understand that dwelling on this and talking about it constantly is not beneficial?
The dads will be like, can you give this to my wife?
I mean, sometimes they'll say that to me because I think, you know, the biggest change in the last generation in parenting, aside from the role of therapy sort of taking over, and I think therapeutic parenting take it over, everybody's trying to be a mental health expert with their kids.
But I think the biggest change was dad's.
Dad stopped, you know, I think, being a sort of a backstop and saying, he's fine.
He'll handle it.
I did it.
He can do it.
Or, I did it.
She can do it.
She's fine.
Shake it off.
Go back to the, you know, keep playing soccer.
Whatever it is.
They stopped doing that in part because they didn't feel like we were told.
I mean, in general, we've all been told, right?
The mental health experts tell you how to talk to your children.
They tell you what your child can handle.
They pretend they're experts on the brain.
When the truth is, and I've interviewed a lot of neurobiologists and, you know, academic psychologists and psychiatrists, and they will tell you, we know very little about the brain.
And a lot of these therapists don't know anything about the brain.
We certainly don't know much about emotion in the brain, right?
And so the idea that we need brain science in order to raise our kids is just not true.
It's like looking for things to be bigger than they are.
Taking a very small thing, whether it's someone like rolling their eyes at you or saying something that You know, might be insensitive and calling that insensitive thing a microaggression.
And one of the things I looked at was, are we turning these kids into emotional hypochondriacs?
And what I mean is, I interviewed a world expert, this man, Arthur Barsky at Harvard Medical School, on hypochondriasis, being hypochondriac, what they now call it, illness, anxiety disorder, or somatic symptom disorder.
And what is it?
So it turns out what it is, is people who put hyper focus on the normal pains we all feel.
They're not faking it.
They're just attending to the normal pains and increasing their pain by doing that.
And people who turn their pain into an organizing principle of life, of their whole lives, they have a hard time overcoming it.
It becomes their identity.
And that's what kids are doing today about their emotional pain.
Oh, I have social anxiety.
I had trauma from my breakup.
You don't have trauma from your breakup, okay?
You had a breakup, and it's painful.
But using these psychiatric terms, it's not helping.
It's not.
It's exaggerating the pain, and it's making that pain feel worse.
And I'm not minimizing these kids' pain.
They are in real pain, and they're making it worse.
I mean, I would like to see, you know, look, there are therapists that I've met who I would take my own kids to, who I'm very impressed by what they have to say and what they've done.
But the therapists who claim that everyone needs to talk about their problems, well, no, they don't.
That's not true.
I interviewed a lot of great therapists who tell me that a lot of people who have experienced terrible trauma, they do better by not talking about it.
There are therapists who deal with, and I'm talking about people who work with convicts, people who have unspeakable childhood abuse, actually are very helped by acknowledging, I know you went through some hard stuff, let's talk about what you're doing now.
That turns out to be better for some people.
So this endless rehashing of your pain, this myth that you can only be helped by talking about your pain, it's just not true.
There's no evidence behind it.
And in fact, you know, there's these crazy studies that burn victims, people who've experienced all kinds of first responders, breast cancer survivors, have been made to feel worse by talking about it, by being therapy, in therapy.
They had control groups.
They've done these studies where burn victims, one portion of them went to group therapy, the other portion didn't.
And the ones who didn't go to therapy ended up better with less symptoms After, you know, nine months, I think it was.
Because they did other things that are healing too, like spend more time with family, like get involved in work, like, you know, pick up a phone and call a friend you haven't seen in a while.
Is it something that is in the zeitgeist where people in this culture sort of gravitate towards that sort of thinking that therapy and talking it through is very important?
And that includes, it's like, remember they used to give us with sugar cereals, they used to say like there'd be a bowl of sugar cereal and there'd be like eggs and toast and orange juice and they would say, Frosted Flakes, part of a nutritious breakfast.
And they don't have space for a mom monitoring them.
Or another adult she's hired to monitor them.
Or the recess monitor.
Or my kids have bus monitors.
They have monitors everywhere.
And monitoring is the same as stress for kids.
Wonderful academic psychologist Peter Gray told me this, that when they want to introduce stress to a subject, they introduce monitoring because it's the same thing.
So I think that some parents feel like, you know, it seems to be mostly moms, but some of them feel insecure, like, well, you don't know, you know, my kid really had sensory deprivation issues, so I really did need to see that therapist.
I don't know the situation.
I mean, I think in general, parents know their own kids, right?
And if they have tried other things, the problem is not parents seeking out help.
The problem is it's when it's the first resort.
The problem is not that parents ever allow their kid to get a diagnosis.
The problem is that some parents are going diagnosis shopping because sometimes a neuropsychologist will say, your kids, sorry, they're within normal range, and the parents will keep going.
And they're doing it because they haven't, they don't have, you know, sometimes they don't, they're unwilling to be an authority in their home, maybe because they feel that that's traumatizing.
They're unwilling to impose any kind of discipline.
The kid is disordered.
The kid has a lot of tech.
And then lo and behold, he can't concentrate in school.
And they're sure, and the teacher has a problem with him.
Well, I talked to parents where they said one year my teacher thought my kid had ADHD and the next year they didn't.
What is the number of prescriptions per year of Adderall?
It's something bonkers when you really know what Adderall is.
And essentially, this is like what they were doing in the 1940s with crystal meth in Germany.
They were giving it to soldiers.
They were giving it to people.
They're giving them methamphetamines because methamphetamines make you more alert, makes you more hyper-focused, makes you more productive, makes you more willing to engage in things.
And it's an unnatural stimulant that you're adding to someone's mind and you're getting a result and you perceive those results to be positive because they fit along with what we're looking for in terms of outcomes.
But you're not thinking of the long-term consequences of ramping up someone on fucking amphetamines all day long.
What's the number?
Even worse.
41.4 million Adderall prescriptions were dispensed in the U.S. in 2021, up more than 10% for 2020, according to IQVIA, a health research firm.
What's happening?
Getting a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. By the way, that would have been me.
If this shit was around when I was a kid, I'd never paid attention in school, and I would have probably thought that I had a disease.
Some startups diagnose people with ADHD and prescribe stimulants after 30-minute video calls entirely remotely and much faster than a typical diagnosis from an in-person psychiatrist, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Yes, but the trouble with such rapid diagnosis is that it can be difficult to tell whether ADHD is actually the problem.
Anxiety can present as ADHD and depression can present as ADHD. As Sanford Newmark said, Sanford Newmark, a professor at University of California, San Francisco Medical School.
Of course.
I mean, look, if you give someone stimulants, they're going to feel better.
I mean, you know, there's an amazing piece in the Wall Street Journal by a guy who argued that in the military, in venture capital, where you have to have, you're constantly checking, you know, other companies or constantly looking into, being able, someone who's constantly shifting their focus turned out to be an asset, unmedicated.
They argue that ADHD traits likely evolved in early human environments that rewarded exploration, novelty seeking, and movement such as nomadic and migrating communities.
It's probably how you stayed alive.
And if you were strapped down doing something really fucking boring, that seems completely unnatural, which is part of the problem with children in the first place.
We're subjecting them to eight hours a day of doing something you don't want to do because they say it's for your mental development.
And what they're essentially doing is teaching you how to do something that you fucking hate so that you will be able to do that for the rest of your life.
These are kids who are going to have their sex drive deleted before they ever have a sex drive.
So when they reach the teenagers, because kids do not go off them, they put them on antipressants and they put them on more.
They'll never have had a sex drive.
They won't even know what they're missing.
And that's the problem.
The problem is not, and I'm not saying no medication for anyone ever.
What I'm saying is, when you get in there and change a kid, you put a kid in an emotional snowsuit, not only will they never have the feeling, I overcame that on my own.
I thought I had HD, but I'm so excited about this other thing I got into.
Not only will, they'll never know they could get through a breakup without a pill.
And by the way, of course, the best psychologists would point out those things.
And here's the most important.
If you start such a person on an SSRI, meaning they're feeling depressed because of their circumstances, they might be less likely to make the important change they could make because it takes an acute problem and it turns it into a chronic one.
But I do have to say that I have had friends that were suicidal, that got on SSRIs, and then because they felt better, improved their life and then weaned off of those drugs.
Look at legitimate problems, all sorts of issues that a child might have medically, and then on top of that, psychiatric disorders, and then prescribe medication for those psychiatric disorders?
And if the parents believe the narrative that these medications are beneficial and they believe that this is what this stuff is for and that this pediatrician wouldn't be prescribing this if they didn't know what they were doing.
I mean, parents aren't exercising their authority, and they're not trusting themselves.
They're feeling like, oh, this is above my pay grade.
The second the kid isn't what the teacher wants, they're sure they need an expert involved.
And they never ask their own parents who raised kids to adulthood, right?
Right.
My take is, if you want to talk about a parenting expert, to me a parenting expert is someone who raised successful people to adulthood, meaning people who are good, stable adults, who are productive, who can be dependent on by others.
Look, I know a lot of people today that had terrible parents, and they had terrible grandparents, and they never had an example of someone who raised good children.
They had the occasional child that was exceptional, that made its way out of that fucked up maze, and usually became hyper-successful.
But the other siblings oftentimes are a mess.
And sometimes the parents want to take credit for the hyper-successful sibling.
You know, like, oh, I showed you the way.
Like, no, you didn't do shit.
You know, like that kid figured it out on their own without having anybody as a positive role model or example.
So in those cultures, I think it's a different situation and it is healthier, meaning they have their own ways of doing things and they get a job and they don't leave the home until they're married.
But in this culture, we have always defined growing up as leaving your parents' home, getting some sort of job, supporting yourself in some way, making strong, enduring relationships with others, starting a family.
We have a vision in this culture, and we are not producing that.
And it's so complicated if you're a parent, if you're dealing with this medical establishment that's so quick to prescribe drugs, and you're dealing with this world where therapy is so ubiquitous, and you're dealing with this world where people think that the way to handle things is to constantly discuss all these small problems and so that people can be heard.
You know, we want people to be heard.
I don't know if you've ever seen, there's a hilarious video of this socialist meeting And they're calling each other comrades.
Have you seen this video?
It's a wonderful video.
Because one person says, could everyone please stop making as much noise?
Because I'm easily distracted.
I forget the term that they use.
And then, could you guys please do that?
Just recognize that there's others around here, us, that are...
This is it.
Listen to this.
This is amazing.
unidentified
Socialism.
Thank you so much.
Quick point of privilege.
Quick point of personal privilege.
Guys, first of all, James Jackson, Sacramento, he, him.
I just want to say, can we please keep the chatter to a minimum?
I'm one of the people who's very, very prone to sensory overload.
There's a lot of whispering and chatter going on.
It's making it very difficult for me to focus.
Please, can we just, I know we're all fresh and ready to go, but can we please just keep the chatter to a minimum?
And if you're going to a university and this is a part of the environment, this is a culture that you are existing in, It can't help but have some sort of an effect on you, especially if you're young and impressionable and naive and you don't understand these people are mentally ill.
But you're also dealing with emotionally challenged parents.
Parents could relay that message to children and tell them, hey, you're not the only person on this plane and you are ruining this flight, this experience for a lot of people that are trying to sleep and trying to relax.
You are causing damage.
You're causing a problem.
These parents are fucked up too.
You're not gonna just fix them by having them fix their kid.
Which is part of the problem, is that there's no real test to see if you're emotionally stable enough to have children.
I'm trying to get the message out that actually the best psychological research, and there is good psychological research, shows that the things we're doing with kids are not helping.
They're counterproductive.
And there's a lot of research that shows that, that the old way of doing things, which is don't take a pill if you don't need it.
Don't go to a therapist if you don't need it.
You have a problem, talk to a friend, talk to an aunt, talk to someone who loves you and really cares how you turn out.
But they have no problem passing judgment on the job that the parent's doing to the child.
And by the way, alienation, and I interviewed an expert in parental alienation who is a psychologist, and Coleman was his last name, I think first name Jules Coleman, or no, no, sorry, Coleman first name was, I'm blanking on his first name.
But he said to me, one of the things he said to me was that alienation, very often we're seeing very high rates of parental alienation in this generation, and Very often the stories the therapist, the therapist made the relationship with the parents worse.
But what's fascinating about it is, first of all, it's fascinating seeing how the regulatory bodies get captured by money and about how they just decided to make it normal and normalize this idea of prescribing opiates to people and having them on them all the time.
But also that there were certain doctors that did have integrity.
Where the doctors who had integrity are like, what are you talking about?
Like, what are you saying?
You're saying you want to prescribe heroin to people?
And in the film, in the series rather, they have these women who are hired, these very attractive women who are hired to go to these clinics and talk to these doctors and push this stuff and try to get these doctors to start prescribing this.
And they don't have any medical background.
And one of them has this conversation with this ethical doctor.
It's fascinating because you realize that there are those doctors and if you get lucky that will be your doctor But if you get unlucky you get that doctor that 30 minute video calls gonna give your fucking kids speed You know I talked to this one psychiatrist who told me this story and This guy had come to him, young man, had come to him for years and he was saying, I'm just, I'm really paranoid.
Well, we're also worried because the media is constantly depicting these stories of children getting kidnapped and killed and this and that and predators.
But you can't protect kids from every kind of pain, right?
We are so obsessed with – I've had parents call me about a bad – or I've heard teachers getting upset about bullying.
And what was the bullying?
Someone said something not nice to someone else.
Now, I tell my kids to treat people kindly, of course, but I have to tell you something.
If my kids came to me and said she said something mean to me, I would say, work it out.
It's not going to kill you.
You'll live.
Why?
Because if I make my kids think, and I learned this from the process of writing the book, if I make them think that my job is to make sure they never feel any emotional distress ever, boy, that's a lifelong journey, and it's going to be a losing one.