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Feb. 27, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
38:32
Exposing How Mental Health Services Are Doing More Harm than Good | Abigail Shrier
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abigail shrier
26:51
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dave rubin
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abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
The most important thing with the psychotherapy is people don't even know it carries risks.
So, actual researchers know this.
There's a tremendous body of research actually showing that, for instance, people who went to grief therapy after normal bereavement, so, you know, the loss of a loved one, ended up worse off, more depressed than those who didn't go to therapy.
Burn victims, first responders, There have been all kinds of situations, the DARE campaign in schools, in which the idea behind the campaign was to make people better, but actually what they had gone through was fairly normal.
People are fairly resilient.
On average, they're overwhelmingly resilient.
And these psychological interventions actually made those people feel worse about their condition, or in the case of the D.A.R.E.
campaign, you remember that?
D.A.R.E.
does say no to drugs.
That introduced more drug use.
We now know that there have been many studies on this, and kids were more likely to be interested
in drugs after the program.
unidentified
♪♪ I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a journalist
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
who I don't have to use air quotes for, a New York Times best-selling author
and author of the new book, Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up,
Abigail Schreier from Los Angeles, dare I say it.
How are you, my friend?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I'm doing great.
How are you, Dave?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I'm doing just fine.
It's good to see you.
We were compatriots in LA.
I left you there, as I've left many of my former guests.
But you're fighting the good fight, aren't you?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I am.
I'm doing my best.
But there's a good group of us out here, so we take care of each other.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
So, I'm super interested in talking about this book, actually, because one of the driving points of the book is not to sort of mock the young people, which is very easy for us to do.
It's very easy for us to say, oh, they have purple hair, and they're constantly screaming and all of that stuff, and I'm not saying I'm not above it, because I hit some of the low-hanging fruit sometimes, but the real purpose of the book Is to show that there's an entire industry that is in many ways designed and set up to kind of make them anxious and upset and angry and miserable.
Was that a fair recap?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
That was.
And you know, I really, I appreciate that you said that because I worked very hard to take seriously.
I began from a point of taking seriously their pain.
There's a generation, a lot of people look at them and say, oh, they have no reason to be upset.
Um, and you know, they've lived through no world war, no great depression.
Why should they be so bummed out?
Um, but we have a generation that is lonelier, sadder, more depressed, more anxious than anyone we've ever seen.
And interestingly, they've also gotten the most mental health resources.
They've had the most therapy of any generation for nearly 42% have been in therapy.
Huge numbers are on psychiatric drugs and the question is then why aren't they the picture of mental health?
unidentified
Instead, they're the picture of despair.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
So, okay, so I want to get into the flaws in therapy, which you talk about, and the flaws in the drugs, and a few other things, but let's go to the one that I think most people can most obviously point to, which is social media.
Because you and I are Gen Xers, we grew up in a time when we did not have that stuff.
I don't hate technology, I'm not anti-technology, but we all know that technology is doing something
to young people that seemingly was an unintended consequence.
Perhaps it was intended by some people.
But what do you make about that first?
That they're all walking around with the world in their pocket and the connectivity in their pocket
and yet feel alone.
I mean, it feels like an oxymoron to some degree.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I mean, let me just say, the social media isn't good.
It's bad.
We all know it.
We've known it for the last eight years.
I don't think there's a parent in existence that doesn't know that social media is bad for kids.
But do the smartphones explain the whole story?
And I think the answer to that is certainly not.
There are four reasons that smartphones don't completely explain what's wrong with this generation, why they're suffering, and why they don't want to grow up.
The first is that adolescent mental health has been in steady decline since the 1950s.
Okay?
This is not a news story.
Second, small kids, and this is really important, kids aged two to eight, okay?
These kids don't have smartphones.
As of 2016, one in six had a mental health diagnosis.
Now, they don't have smartphones now, but they certainly didn't have them in 2016.
So why did one in six of them have a mental health diagnosis?
There are two other reasons.
Teen boys, this is a new finding this year out from Gene Twenge, teen boys from liberal families suffer more, they're in worse distress than conservative girls.
What that says to me is that this is environmental.
It has something to do with the way the kid's getting raised.
These teen boys are not on social media more than the girls from conservative families.
We know that girls are on way more social media than boys.
But somehow teen boys are in more distress if they come from liberal families.
And then the fourth thing we know is that in countries like Japan and Israel, where cell phone use, smartphone use is just as prevalent, and even more prevalent in the case of Israel, among teens, mental health is much better.
So we know that other countries are doing something we're not, or maybe we're doing something we shouldn't be.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
All right, so let's go backwards there.
So in the case of Japan and China, I think probably just hearing those two, people can deduce certain things about culture, but is it as simple as that?
A culture, a society with a sort of, I don't want to quite say uniculture, but something like that, is just able to deal with the madness of social media more easily?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Well, let me tell you, I really looked at countries like Japan, Israel, and Russia with the help of a cultural psychologist who I talk about in my book, Yulia Chantsova-Dutton.
And one of the things she told me is that kids need independence.
Kids need autonomy.
That means taking risks that involve danger and paying the consequences to some extent.
And I'm not talking about running into traffic.
There are two other things that kids really need that they have lost in America.
Parental authority.
This is something we've exercised with kids truly since the beginning of human history.
those things, God forbid, but I'm saying a certain amount of risk and danger and
independence, we've taken that away from kids, but they need it and they thrive
with it. There are two other things that kids really need that they have lost in
America, okay? Parental authority. This is something we've exercised with kids
truly since the beginning of human history. We've known that parents need
that kids do best when kids, when parents are in charge, which doesn't mean
unloving parents, but loving and rule-based parents, so-called authoritative parents have produced the happiest kids, the
most successful kids, and the most mentally well kids.
And we've known this now for generations.
This is one of the most stable psychological findings we have.
And then the third thing kids need that they're not getting is stable relationships, stable loving relationships over time.
We have replaced grandparents, cousins, siblings in this country, the neighborhood kids, with friends parents have selected, and a series of adults who oversee the kids every activity.
That's just not the kind of thing that promotes healthy, you know, attitudes and habits and feeling of well-being over a lifetime.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Do you find it weird, or I guess, did you find it weird when you were writing the book that, sort of, nothing you've said to me so far, it's not mind-blowing, right?
Like, these are things that we all sort of intuitively know.
You're obviously getting the research and talking to people on the ground about these things, but like, we all know these things, one way or another.
Have the nuclear family, have some extended community, don't stare at phones all day, don't outsource parenting, okay, blah, blah, blah.
We all do it, though.
I mean, that seems to be the disconnect.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
Actually, and here's the piece that I think we were missing.
The mental health professionals have been participating in the problem.
Okay?
So why did parents give up their authority?
Because they outsourced it to mental health experts.
They became so convinced that they could traumatize a child if they ever smacked their hand or yelled at them.
That they could cause trauma.
They said, you know what?
We're not expert here.
We don't really know how to raise our kids.
Let's bring in a mental health professional and maybe they can explain what's wrong with my child.
And we did that again and again.
I think that mental health experts were absolutely a major source of the suffering of the kids we're seeing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Okay, so I definitely wanna hit on that, because that I thought was one of the really great points of the book.
But you mentioned this thing about teen boys in liberal families.
And it's interesting, because you said there's sort of like a social contagion there.
Your previous book, Irreversible Damage, was about the social contagion as it relates to gender confusion, but you were mostly talking about teen girls, or I guess even prepubescent girls, who then thought they were boys.
So there's some strange connection there, right?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I think so.
I think what we're seeing is a lot of social contagion.
Um, some of it coming through social media, some of it just peer to peer, and some of it coming from the mental health professionals that march in the door and try to teach every kid that they are disordered, that they, they never say they're shy anymore.
They say they have social phobia.
They don't say they're afraid.
They say they have anxiety.
They never say they're sad.
They say they're depressed.
They never say they're hyperactive or inattentive or bored in school.
have ADHD? Where did they get the idea that they were all disordered? And the thing about
these mental health diagnoses, if you say you're shy, you can say to someone, well,
look, you're shy. Get out there, you know, make new friends.
I know it's hard, but do it. But if you have a mental health diagnosis, it's much
harder to fix yourself. Certainly you can't without a professional or a medication.
It's a limiting thing for a child to hear.
And unfortunately, they're buying into these limitations.
And it's why for the first time we're seeing, you know, 86% of Gen Z says they have menu anxiety.
They have trouble ordering in a restaurant from a menu by themselves.
We've convinced a whole generation that there's something mentally really wrong with them.
And so it's playing out.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
How much do you think COVID and the lockdowns and the years lost there and the speech delays and the litany of other things that we now know have happened is playing into all of this?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
The lockdowns were terrible for mental health.
We know that.
We knew it.
But you knew this.
I knew this.
Guess who didn't know it?
The mental health experts did not issue any or not one of their organizations issued a single warning as our schools
went into a second year of lockdowns.
The APA did show up to Congress to protest police tactics, the affirmative action ruling from the Supreme Court.
They have gone to speak about to warn Congress about climate anxiety and climate change and the danger of that
to mental health.
But somehow these so-called professionals completely failed to give any warning as in 2020,
in the fall of 2020, we headed into a second year of lockdowns.
If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know, it should at least make you wander.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
How much of this do you think is coming from the parent?
You know, it's interesting because you mentioned the liberal parents of young boys.
I suspect that the liberal parents of young girls are still also involved in the social contagion part from your previous book more.
But how much of it is just parents that have sort of accepted all of the wrong ideas?
Like when you mentioned climate anxiety and that sort of thing.
No kid actually believes that or has that.
They've been infected by that AOC saying we have 12 years to live.
That was four years ago, so the clock's a-tickin'.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
That's exactly right.
And it's a great statistic.
It's not mine.
It's from Jean Twenge.
She's a liberal researcher.
There's no agenda behind the finding.
But what it shows is that the crisis, the so-called mental health crisis, is not organic.
These aren't kids with schizophrenia by and large, although we have that problem.
And they're not kids with bipolar disorder.
These are bummed out kids because of the unhealthy childhood we've given them.
And one of the things we've done, as you mentioned, is pass on our anxiety to our kids.
We know anxiety is highly contagious, and we're passing on our worries to our kids, just as you said.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Did you ever see the video, it's gone viral, a couple different versions of it where it's Jordan Peterson talking about the proper way to parent and that what you really want to do is send your kid out to the playground or the backyard or whatever it is until they are exhausted.
So at the end of the day they have dinner and then they go to bed and that so many of the problems are We're keeping them cooped up, they're watching TV all day, or they're on their iPad or whatever else, and then their bodies are wigging out, like they have an energetic, innate need to move, and perhaps that is a lot of it too, so it's not just the wrong ideas, it's what that's doing to them physically by not getting out some of the proper stuff.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
There's no question.
And I, you know, I talk about in the book surveillance parenting, we became surveillance.
It isn't just that kids need, I mean, as Dr. Peterson said, look, we do need, you know, running around, but they also need that independence, taking risks, doing things that are a little dangerous, without an adult to give them warning.
Look, in my kid's school, We have recess monitors.
We have bus monitors.
There are adults who are there to warn you if the monkey bars are slick with rain.
You never get the consequence of your own judgment.
And you know what's interesting?
See, I learned this when I was researching the book.
In Japan, and these are kids who are, they're raising much healthier kids in Japan in terms of anxiety and depression.
They actually prize independence in kids like they do in Israel.
And they actually create in their preschools in Japan, areas that adults can't see.
They have rocks, they have boulders, they have streams.
They don't want kids to have an adult run up to them every time they scrape a knee.
Because they want kids who can pick themselves up after they scrape a knee and realize they're gonna live.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
You know, you haven't visited us here in Miami yet, but I think you'd be very proud at how we're parenting
because we kind of let them do their thing and let them explore and they can fall a little bit
and their knees are getting nicked up already.
And we're trying to balance that.
And it's a constant balancing act, but you have to do it.
I will give you some credit because I've met your three beautiful kids a couple times now.
And I've never seen an iPad or a phone at the table.
So you're not just preaching this stuff, you're actually putting it into action.
Where do you think the mental health community, is there a moment in time that they went off the rails?
Or is this just an extension of like, oh, well, we dole drugs out to people and we need patients that show up every week.
So yes, of course, we're gonna look to scale regardless of the damage it's doing to society.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's a great question.
I mean, there are essentially two so-called mental health crises going on at the same time.
There's the very real crisis of schizophrenics on our street, of bipolar patients.
These are people suffering greatly, who are undertreated and under cared for.
And we don't wanna give them the resources cause it's really, really hard to help them.
It's much easier to do what we're doing now.
Look at them and say, wow, lots of people are suffering and then throw preventive mental health resources.
And ever since the second world war, we've done this.
Soldiers came home, some of them were really emotionally shaky, some had PTSD.
And we thought, you know what we need?
Preventive mental health care.
We're going to start treating the well.
And since that time, the APA membership in the American Psychology Association from 1946 to I think in the 1980s has quadrupled twice.
And we started shifting our focus to seeing what psychologists or mental health experts could do with already healthy kids.
Maybe they could improve them a little.
And that's when they introduced problems.
They actually made, well, kids sick.
And by giving them unnecessary treatments.
You know, people ask me, are you against therapy?
And I say, I'm no more against psychotherapy than I am against chemotherapy.
But chemotherapy for people who need it, people with cancer, you don't give it to someone who's well.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
It's interesting, because after writing this book, were you able to sort of figure out, well, is it the talk therapy and the behavioral therapy that's worse, or is it the psychotropic drugs and the overindulgence of every behavior, we're just gonna numb it, industry?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Both of them are bad and there's a lot of research to show that, first of all, the most important thing with the psychotherapy is people don't even know it carries risks.
So, actual researchers know this.
There's a tremendous body of research actually showing that, for instance, people who went to grief therapy after normal bereavement, so, you know, the loss of a loved one, ended up worse off, more depressed than those who didn't go to therapy.
Burn victims, first responders, There have been all kinds of situations, the D.A.R.E.
campaign in schools, in which the idea behind the campaign was to make people better, but actually what they had gone through was fairly normal.
People are fairly resilient.
On average, they're overwhelmingly resilient.
And these psychological interventions actually made those people feel worse About their condition, or in the case of the D.A.R.E.
campaign, you remember that?
D.A.R.E.
does say no to drugs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, oh yeah.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
That introduced more drug use.
We now know that there have been many studies on this, and kids were more likely to be interested in drugs after the program.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
So was the reasoning for that because they basically put it into every school so kids who were not thinking, I mean, that's sort of what I remember.
Do you know the years of D.A.R.E.
off the top of your head by chance?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
It was the 1980s and 1990s.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, so that's when you and I were elementary school, middle school, and I do remember, I had no knowledge of drugs in sixth or seventh grade, and then next thing you know, they brought in some guy, and it was under the dare thing, I remember it vividly, in the gym, and he's talking about smoking crack, and we thought it was hilarious, but then we knew about crack, I guess.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
And also, there are many theories as to why.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
It sounds crazy to think about.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I mean, it is, but it was a total failure.
We know it was a total failure.
It followed the techniques of a very famous psychologist.
And the idea was to go into schools and just get kids to open up about drug use.
And somehow that encouraged drug use.
We don't know if it's because it hadn't occurred to them or they felt like afterwards it was widespread.
Some people think they went home and had conversation with the parents.
and parents opened up to them about their drug use and that encouraged it.
But for whatever reason, all this discussion in a population that overwhelmingly hadn't yet tried drugs
encouraged it. And we're doing the same thing with distress, with anxiety and depression.
We're marching into schools and we're telling everybody about suicide all the time.
We're telling everyone about depression and anxiety all the time.
The mental health staff of schools are doing this.
And lo and behold, we have a generation over half, you know, 60% of them does not believe their mental health is good.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Did you find there are any prescriptions to defeat the prescriptions?
I mean, I suppose family and some of the things you referenced right up top, but I mean, systemically, when it comes to all of the institutions that are pushing all of this stuff, the schools that are pushing all of this stuff, the pharmaceutical companies that are pushing all this stuff, like, it's almost, in some ways, it's like too big to defeat in a bizarre sense.
unidentified
It is.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
We need less of it.
We need to shrink it.
So if we shrink mental health staffs in schools, then the school counselors will be forced to deal with the kids who actually have problems.
Right now they have the resources and they're increasing.
They're presenting themselves as the solution.
So they're talking to every kid about their trauma.
And that's what the problem is.
It isn't that drugs are never appropriate.
It's that we're showering them.
Do you know teachers are the number one source of referral for ADHD medication?
Now, that tells you a lot.
Teachers are sort of conflicted, right?
Because they want a child bolted to their seat.
Now, I've talked to parents who say, one year my teacher told me my kid had ADHD, the next year they said he was a great student.
And no one says, to be honest, I'm not a very good teacher.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Or, back in our day, it's like, you had a kid in your class who was a little kinda nutty, and they dealt with him as they had to deal with him, but you weren't drugging everybody.
I mean, that's the fundamental.
But what do you do in a time when these institutions have become so politicized, they've all gone so woke?
You're not gonna get someone from the teacher's union to come in and be like, all right, we're firing half of the mental health experts because they believe that stuff.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Right.
I mean, you have to start with the idea that parents know best.
First of all, parents need to remember that they know a lot more than they think, and it's completely ridiculous to think, as many mental health experts will tell you, I talk about it in my book, the Daniel J. Siegel, the very you know, well-known popular book begins with, one of them
begins with the idea that parents just don't know enough about their children's
brains. Well, I interviewed a lot of neurobiologists, neuropsychologists,
and academic psychologists and they will be the first to tell you, none
of us knows very much about the emotion regulation of the brain.
And the idea of making parents feel that they aren't adequate to raising a child because they aren't neurobiologists or neuropsychologists is ridiculous.
So I would start from the idea that parents actually do tend to know what's best for their
kids.
But the other thing is, kids and human beings are phenomenally resilient.
Most kids actually exposed to truly traumatic experiences will recover just fine.
That's been the story of human history.
And if you think back to your grandparents, that doesn't mean that it's fun to go through the death of a loved one or anything else, you know, traumatic.
But if you look back, the story of human history has been one of resilience.
And when researchers look into this, like George Bonanno did, The 9-11 victims.
He found overwhelmingly that people who had lost loved ones in the Twin Towers, people who had witnessed the attacks, overwhelmingly the story was one of resilience without any psychotherapy or medication.
If we leave people alone, if they surround themselves with loved ones, if they do things in the world, they tend to repair themselves just fine.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Well, with that being said, did you learn anything about the inability for people to have functioning families now while you were researching this?
Because that, I guess, is ultimately what this comes down to.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
That has been really tough on kids.
There's no question.
And here's the thing.
Parents have been replacing grandparents they don't like, or maybe who say the wrong things, with experts.
Oh, you know, here's a soccer coach I've hired for you.
Here's a therapist I've hired.
Here's... to sort of babysit their kids all day long.
And the problem with all these hired helpers, the speech therapist, the, you know, the, you know, various forms of physical therapist the kid may or may not need, if they need them, fine.
But it's no substitute for family because they're being hired to take care of you.
Kids know that.
But with grandparents, grandparents don't always say the right thing, cousins don't always do the right thing, but the love is actually real.
And kids feel that and they know that.
And when they grow up with those stable relationships, they're so much more solid.
Then if you manage and you get the perfect nanny, and they might be the perfect nanny, but after a year or two they go back to graduate school and then you're stuck again.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
How much do you think is that people just had no idea what technology was going to do?
So, you know, we sort of hit this, but like at the beginning, it was like, oh, it's going to connect you to all of these people.
We're just going to give it to you.
Have a computer in your room, have an iPad in your bed, really with the best of intentions, having no idea.
The amount of adult stuff, and illegal stuff, and all of that, you leave that to them, a kid is just gonna go down that rabbit hole, where now maybe there'll be a shift just because we know what the internet is, we know the nature of the internet a little bit more, so maybe the next generation after Z gets some other version of all of this.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I definitely hope so.
But I will say that, look, Gene Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have done a lot of work to show how bad the smartphones have been for kids.
They undeniably have been.
This is something we've known now for eight years, was when they first alerted the public to this.
My own book talks about the dangers of social media influencers.
This was four years ago with spreading the gender dysphoria contagion.
So this is something we've known about.
Why haven't parents felt like they could do anything about it?
Well, for one, the mental health professionals have actually undercut their ability.
Many of them warn the public about, you know, warn parents not to undercut their relationship with their kids, to be afraid to exercise their own authority in their home because the kid may experience trauma or loneliness without their phones.
They feel that they can't, but there's something else too.
The folds are bad, but do you remember when we were kids, they used to advertise things like Frosted Flakes,
and they would have this bowl of sugar cereal, and then you'd have on one side the hard boiled egg,
and on one side the wheat toast, and they would say Frosted Flakes,
part of a nutritious breakfast.
And we all knew it wasn't good for you, but it was part of a nutritious breakfast,
because the other stuff was pretty good.
And the problem is, in the last generation, we've swapped out all the other stuff that was good.
So yeah, the cell phones are bad, but you know what else is bad?
Kids don't have independent time that isn't overseen by their parents.
Kids aren't allowed to take any risks.
They aren't walking home from school.
They aren't hanging out for hours with friends, riding their bikes around without a parent overseeing it or tagging them with an Apple tag or whatever.
I talk to teenagers whose parents track their every move on an app on their phone with Life 360.
These kids have no freedom.
And then, of course, social media.
Now, every mistake they made is broadcast.
We need to go back.
We need to get rid of a lot of the stuff, including parents hovering surveillance of their kids.
And we need to teach them right and wrong so that, you know, and that requires parental authority.
They need to tell them what's right and wrong and then let them exercise their own judgment.
The problem is parents aren't exercising authority, so they don't have kids with judgment.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
And now they have... Doesn't it also...
Yeah, well, it also seems like there's a compounding problem.
So you watch your kid all day long.
So now you're putting this kid in a controlled environment.
They're not being able to take the risks.
That's a problem.
You're watching them.
So they're being trained to be part of a surveillance state, basically, all day long for their whole life.
But then also the day that you no longer, when they're 18, or you probably extend it now into the 20s, but like the day that that app shuts off and they're free, they're going to all go bananas.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, that's what we're seeing in schools.
So one of the wonderful psychologists I talked to, this woman who runs the Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, and she looks at why are kids so much more dysregulated in America?
Why does she have American college students who, when they list things they're afraid of and things they make them anxious, they cite normal, routine incidents of life, like seeing a stranger give them a weird look as they walk down the street.
But in other cultures, when they mention things they're afraid of or dangers, they list actual dangers, situations that are actually more dangerous.
And part of the reason that they're not able to regulate, they're not able to evaluate dangers, is because we surveil them throughout their childhood completely.
We manage them.
I refer to it as a veal calf life.
They're sort of trapped in our little cages and then we leave them completely for college and they have a nervous breakdown the first time a professor gives them a bad grade or the first time they're rejected.
They have no ability to handle it because we never let them have a thousand normal shocks of a healthy childhood.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Right, although then we also hand them off to a college that not only completely infantilizes them, but then, if you're white or more particularly Jewish, then they're allowed to call it for genocide against you, then you might really have some mental problems.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, and then they have the mental health staff.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Or some insecurities, let's say.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Right, and they tell you to go see the mental health staff.
That's what they say.
You have a problem?
Why don't you go see one of our counselors?
They're treated like they're mental health patients, so they're behaving like them.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Are you hopeful that we can fix some of this stuff?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I mean... Believe it or not, this stuff I'm really hopeful about, because I think the problem is the experts.
I think they are now presenting themselves as the solution.
They've presided over a disaster.
It's very obvious that they aren't the solution.
And if parents just go back to our instincts, if we go back to our traditions of parenting, which involves a certain amount of knock it off or shake it off, you're going to be fine.
If we go back to teaching our kids that we have faith that they're going to survive that heartbreak.
Yes, she dumped you or he dumped you or whatever it was, you're going to be fine.
We're not going to run interference with every teacher who's mad at you.
We're going to let you handle it.
If we go back to those things, it's amazing.
We are built to be resilient and kids can absolutely go back to that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Does some of this just strike you as kind of where we would end up naturally as a society, that you're in the nascent stage of a technology, we're watching sort of 200 plus years of America change and how the internet changes, that no matter what we were gonna get here, it's not that it can't correct, but we were gonna get to a pretty precarious place literally with our children.
In your previous book, which I reference on my show probably twice a week, Like, the fact that we let so many people, let the expert class, quote-unquote, decide what gender their children are, it's like, it's insane, but in another way, it feels sort of obvious to me.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I think parents stop, I mean, one thing that the two books have in common is that parents stop trusting their own instincts with their kids.
You know, almost, one of the amazing things about my last book is that when I went to interview, and I probably talked to, by the end, a thousand parents, because after I wrote the book, you know, I had talked to probably hundreds, and then, In the years after the book, so many parents kept reaching
out to me, so I probably talked to a thousand American parents.
And one of the things I learned was how completely parents had come to rely on experts to fix
whatever was wrong with their kids.
But another thing, too, nearly every one of the girls who went off track, who decided
she was transgender.
They had an expert already.
They were seeing a therapist and it wasn't a gender therapist.
That's the thing.
It wasn't an activist.
It was a normal vanilla therapist.
They took their daughter to for anxiety and her depression who sat through exploratory therapy and said, huh, do you think what could, what else could be wrong?
We talked a lot about your mom.
Let's talk now about your gender.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I saw a study, hopefully getting this right, that 1 in 10 Americans are on prescription drugs at this point, you know, some sort of psychotropic drugs.
So let's say that's roughly right.
I mean, that's now.
You take these kids and then now scale that up?
I mean, it can't be good for a society.
Even for whatever percentage of this is legitimate, for the people that legitimately have those issues which you're referencing, that cannot be good for a society at scale.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
And here's the thing, here's the problem with It's the problem with therapy.
It's the problem with psychiatric medications.
Kids aren't in a good position to push back against the excess.
Kids can't say, I don't, I don't feel right.
I know what my sex drive was before and now I have none.
I don't like that.
Okay.
Adolescents are not in a position to say that.
They just don't have a sex drive.
And they don't know any different.
They see that they gain weight.
They go through all kinds of emotional blunting.
And they don't know, they can't reference a time when they felt better.
Adults can.
So adults can make those adjustments.
But children who have never gone through the experience of being dumped, or being cut from a team, or failing at something, and recovering, they don't know what they can handle.
And then we put them on these drugs and they get to adulthood
and they don't believe they can ever handle routine incidents of adulthood.
And unfortunately, because we never let them develop that emotional musculature, they may be right.
They can't handle it.
We never let them try.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Do you think that the people who either locked the kids down
and the teachers unions, and then the people who drug them or then confuse them about their gender
or did some combination of all of those three, Do you think they need some come up in?
I know you think they need some comeuppance, but what needs to happen to these people?
Or let's just do the gender one for a second.
What should happen to these doctors who have done all of this, and the therapists who have confused all of these kids, and everything else?
Is it just about having their license taken away?
What really has to happen to set us right?
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I don't see licenses taken away because they were, this is the thing, they were acting very much in accord with what the advice of their own professional organizations was.
See, that's the thing.
They were acting according to protocol.
The protocols were bad.
These groups, these professional organizations had no idea what they were doing and they weren't following any of the research.
And I see that again and again.
When I interviewed, I interviewed dozens and dozens of academic psychologists and psychiatrists and I, you know, we dove into the research on anxiety and depression in adolescents.
But we also dove into the research on therapy and the harms of therapy, including increasing anxiety, increasing depression, Alienating you from family members, feeling of incapacity, feeling like you're dependent on an adult or a therapist to give you the answer because you can't trust yourself, okay?
These are all things we're seeing in the rising generation.
But when I talk to the researchers, this is all well known.
When I talk to the therapists, they either denied or minimize it, which tells me that the clinicians don't even know the risks of the therapy they're giving.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Again, it just strikes me like the conditions are not, or the pressures are not right.
Like if you're a therapist and now you've got somebody for seven years, they started with, they're seven, now they're 14, like the chances that you'd be like, all right, well, we really did wrap up that thing and you're 14 now, so go out and conquer the universe.
You still want the check.
This is a problem.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Right.
I mean, listen, let me tell you, I talked to some great therapists and you know, obviously I'm not talking about people whose children are in crisis and they can't stabilize the child because those people, those kids absolutely need help.
There's not a question about that to me, but I've also talked to really good therapists who I quote in the book and I talked to one of them is Camilo Ortiz.
I was a professor of, of, of psychology and, and also a clinician.
And one of the things he does at the beginning of therapy, and he treats kids with discrete disorders, he specifically is there to attack their obsessive compulsive disorder or their phobias.
And he starts the therapy by assessing it and then saying, we're going to need X number of sessions.
He doesn't treat children as an annuity.
He doesn't say, oh great, this is a new income stream for me for the rest of your life.
Because he knows that kids can become totally, adolescents can become totally dependent on a therapist, even as they're trying to emerge into an adulthood.
And they'll be afraid to do things on their own.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
So that's the type of guy, basically, that we need writing out the next version of all of the regulations around this.
Let me ask you one other thing, a pure hypothetical, which is, let's say you had an 18-month-old son named Justin, just purely hypothetically, and he was a great eater, but then suddenly you put the strawberries, you put the cheese, and you put the chicken in front of him, and he only wants to eat the strawberries and refuses the cheese and the chicken.
What do you do?
Sometimes throwing it at you, by the way, the chicken.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
Well, I mean, he's only 18 months, but I would say this.
I talk a lot about gentle parenting in the book, which is all the rage.
You know, this is the therapeutic style of parenting where you never assert your authority with the kids and the kids never face the consequences of their action.
There's no punishment.
They call it consequences, but there really is no punishment.
And at a certain point, a kid needs punishment, right?
Now I'm not talking 18 months where they can't even register it.
But at a certain point, you know, I read stories of parents who are getting hit and kicked and bitten by kids who are five and six years old or older.
And that these are kids who are never sent to their rooms.
And I know this because they say that on their parent chats.
They say, you know, we're a no punishment family.
We have a calming corner.
It's not working.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
We're a no punishment family with a calming corner.
Then the parent is locked in the basement getting fed fish heads once a week and the kid's upstairs raising hell.
Abigail, my friend, it was a pleasure seeing you.
The link to the book is right down below and I hope you and Zach make it to the free state of Florida one of these days so you can judge my parenting skills at 18 and 16 months.
abigail shrier ▲ ● ▼
I'm sure they're amazing.
Thank you so much and I'll see you soon.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
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