#773 - Abigail Shrier - Debating Modern Therapy Culture & Gen Z

28:16Like that to me seems to be the sweet spot, but it's delicate, right? That's a really delicate balance. Like you feel this thing right now. Talk to me about that. Like where's that coming from? And do we think that that's an appropriate response? And how could that be wrong? You know, like that looks like healthy, emotional discourse to me. That's brilliant. I love the way you put that because you're the first person and who's ever said to me that there has to be a balance between, you know, tell me about your emotion. And also, let's talk about whether that emotion is appropriate. And I'll tell you why.

28:48And no one in a so few therapists in America seem to think that you ever are allowed to say, is that emotion appropriate? And here's the problem. They're directing a lot of parents and schoolteachers. And you know what? A child who shrieks and screams on a plane because he didn't get the snack he wanted needs needs to be told, that's not appropriate. Not only is it not appropriate to scream, but when they scream, I'm angry. You want to say, that's not something to be angry about. Why? Because it's not an adult. You have to actually educate the emotions a little bit, which I know is completely verboten in therapy culture.

29:27But of course you do. A child needs to be told, it's not appropriate to feel rage at your mother because she made it something for dinner you didn't like, or you preferred something else. There's a time and place for rage, but that's not the place for rage. And then they sort of think, oh, okay, I get it. I should be frustrated, but not full of fury. I think a lot of it is regulation. I worked in nightlife for a decade and a half. And one of the most interesting dynamics would be, especially a girl that got thrown out. So we ran events for 18 to 22 year olds. It was a thousand people. They'd pay five pounds each.

30:11It was one pound, yeager bombs. It was like cheap and cheerful young people partying in the UK. One of the most interesting things that I would see would be a young girl who gets ejected from the nightclub, either rightly or wrongly, the door staff make a decision. We're not gonna go and check the video camera to see if it actually was her that swirled some other girl because she looked at my boyfriend over there or whatever it is. Rightly or wrongly, somebody gets ejected. and they would come outside and they would protest and they would start saying, no, no, it wasn't this thing, it was her, she's a bitch, she's doing that thing or whatever, whatever, whatever.

30:43And then you would watch, it usually took about maybe 30 seconds of that and then very quickly it would turn into pouring with tears. And it was pretty reliable and I could just watch this person and alcohol's involved but I could watch this person just slowly dysregulate over time and just move through different emotions And then they would get after the crying had finished, they'd move into resentment, they'd probably come back and have another swing at anger. I mean, I'm not kidding. Some people, mostly guys, guys were more persistent than girls, especially because it was the northeast of the UK in freezing cold.

31:17So the girls weren't dressed. If you've ever seen girls from the northeast of the UK, they don't wear many layers. But there's been guys that had stood outside of nightclubs, they've been ejected from. I'm stood on the door with the team and the bounces. But like, three hours, just hurling abuse at the door staff, telling them why it's wrong, explaining to them why it isn't. I'm like, look, mate, it didn't work for the first five minutes. It's not going to work for the remaining two hours and 55 minutes. Like, just go home or go somewhere else or do whatever, like, but you're not going to come back in here.

31:48But watching that dysregulation happen in real time was so fascinating to just see sort of someone grapple with this. It's an extreme situation. You've had someone's had their hands on you. Like what other area of life does a big 45 year old, 55 year old, Jordy man with massive hairy hands? Grab a hold of you and say you're now leaving the place that you were in, your friends are behind you, maybe blah blah blah, and then dump you in a different place. But that was really, really interesting. And I, that makes me think about what teachers deal with in classrooms, you know, like an incident occurs and the kids need to learn to regulate.

32:29They need to learn to regulate their emotions. Right. And the question is, do they learn it from a class on regulation? Which usually means talking about a time when you were sad or in pain or rejected or felt unloved? Or do you learn it from life? You try out for the basketball team. You don't make it. They let you get cut from the team. And you figure out, do I really want to play basketball? Or should I practice harder? That's when you learn the emotional regulation. Everybody ask anybody, you know, As you I'm sure know it's the failures you learn from right and we all have them and the problem is the rising generation was kept from a lot of failure And so they are completely dysregulated they've been told every time they're disappointed that it's the most important thing in the world And now they're showing up in the workplace and they feel disappointed or their feelings are hurt So they think they have to get their boss fired Because that to them seems an appropriate response to their emotional injury Talk to me about the treatment prevalence paradox.

33:28Sure. So there's a wonderful study that happened while I was writing my book. And it was about a bunch of researchers who noticed that, you know, there was this paradox in the treatment of depression across the West. Wherever there is pervasive treatment and great accessibility of treatment, we should see point prevalence rates of any disease or disorder go down. Okay, this is true from everything from dental care being more available and seeing less tooth rotting and tooth decay to maternal sepsis. All number of diseases, you know, death and childbirth, things that you would expect to see go down with or treatment early spotting of breast cancer.

34:16You know screening, you would expect to see rates of death from breast cancer go down with better treatment. Instead, across the West, with more prevalent treatment of depression and more access to treatment for depression, that has coincided with a stark rise, a rapid rise in rates of depression. And the question is why are these two things just coinciding? Is that just happenstance? We know at the very least the treatments don't seem to be effective. it. So my intention is that actually a lot of the truth is what flies under they had you know the rubric of treatment is actually making things worse.

34:56Where have you drawn that direction of causation from? Is there any research? Is there any evidence on that? Yeah sure. So a few places. So why do I think that that it's not just they're not just coinciding they're making it worse? Because the language, first of all, we've seen, there are a few reasons. First of all, we've seen a rapid, rapid rise in treatment with no dent in rates of depression, but it's more than that. It's not just the depression isn't going down. It's that more people are exhibiting the behavior of depression by talking about their pain by ruminating about their pain, by sharing and dwelling on their pain, that's the biggest symptom of depression.

35:46And that is exactly what we'd expect to see for people who are induced in the practice of cultural therapy, meaning not necessarily, you know, many of them are getting it from an actual therapist, but some of them are just getting it from their teacher. The idea of constantly sharing with their problems. But also you see it in their language, the way they're understanding it themselves and each other. You're seeing people who are pathologizing normal life who are seeing themselves as unwell and sick all over the place. And when they say they're unwell, they sound like amateur shrinks. They're using the language of psychotherapy.

36:22So at the very least what we're seeing, I think it's very clear, is that young people understand themselves, each other, and their entire lives through the lens of psychopathology. So I think it absolutely is related to the behavior they're exhibiting, which is, I'm unwell. I feel lack of efficacy in the world. I feel like I can't take a risk. I'm full of phobia and anxious. These are all things we would expect to see from too much, you know, what I call bad therapy. These are the classic Iatrogenic harms of therapy. So I don't believe it's an accident. I think they're intimately, intimately related.

37:03And as you mentioned on social media, These young people are identifying with their diagnoses. So you might say, well, how do you know that their diagnosis had that impact on them? That it really did have that anatrogenic effect of limiting them. Because they believe it. They believe it. They're the ones who introduce themselves by their diagnosis. That's proof of demoralization, meaning the coming to identify and feeling like you are so limited by your diagnosis, it's the most important thing about you. So I think just listening to their talk and the way they describe their pain and the way they describe their lives is the biggest indication that yes, it is therapy that's playing a huge role in all this.

37:47Certainly therapy speak has become a huge culture online. There's a great psychiatrist called C. Ruck Chavla. I had her on the show. She is super anti -instagram therapy self -diagnosis therapy culture speak. I mean, we saw this with, do you remember Jonah Hill broke up with his girlfriend about six months ago? Okay. These screenshots of the breakup were... Oh, that's right. ...were released. And it was kind of this sort of semi -therapy speak, talk about boundaries and regulation and stuff like that. And I do think that there is definitely a... I mean, I would 100 % agree the pathologization of normal human emotions.

38:33One of the reasons I believe that that's happening is if you give something bad a name, it makes it feel more like it's in control because I'm not sad. I have depression. Removes a good amount of the agency from how you can have contributed to or how you could be in control of getting yourself out of the other side of this. I think that huge, huge problem. Right. The other side of this, to steal man, sort of the opposite element, you would say, well, we know that especially young people's mental health is in decline. Whatever it is, 60 % of 12 to 16 year old girls say they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness and listlessness or whatever.

39:20So, my pocket -lipped, dick language, the CDC released last year. That should, if that's the case, and let's say it's not because of therapy, if it's because of obesity, if it's because of economic concerns, if it's because of broken households, if it's because of these things, you would expect to see an increase in facilitation to try and treat that, right, because you have opened up a market. So the two things can happen in unison, even if one isn't necessarily causing the other. And the cultural use of therapy speak to me seems a lot like a cope that is being used by people that have never been to therapy.

39:58I think that that is super prevalent. That may be, many of them may not have been, you know, too actual therapy. That's possible. But let's just say they're getting a lot of treatment in various forms. I mean, the classic when you brought up in Instagram. Yes. That's right. It might be from Instagram or one of these AI treatment. I mean, now there are these, you know, abs that will treat you through AI. That's right. But or it's self -diagnosing on the internet or whatever. But you just brought up, I think, a fascinating example, which is the Joan of Hill. I'm setting a boundary. So why do I think that therapy is playing a negative role?

40:36What language is that? I'm setting a boundary with you. You're not talking to a person now. You're talking to a therapist, right? That's the language supply to you. Now you're no longer friend to friend, husband to wife, whatever spouse to spouse, whatever you are, you are a therapist and patient, right? And we're all, we're all playing therapist. It's way too much. It makes our relationships stilted and alienates you and from each other, but it does something else, which you just said, it undermines agency, The feeling that I can do anything about it. It's horrible thing to do to a young person, telling them they have a diagnosis and now it's up to a pill.

41:19There's nothing they can do. Yeah, I'm trying to really split apart therapy culture from the impact of therapy because I think that there is definitely this language that's being used. Talk of anxiety, talk of trauma, talk of co -dependency. Okay, so let's steal, man, at first. So is therapy this wonderful thing like communism that the truest form has never been tried? Is that what we're saying that there's this wonderful therapy that's out there? Now I'm not talking about therapy for actual disorders, but wonderful preventive mental health care that has yet to be tried I'm doubtful and let me say I know some wonderful therapists out there and they tend to work with actual people with actual problems.

42:03And now when I say, yeah, sorry, young people, adults can go to a therapist for any reason and get something out of it. And I have to tell you something. I'll sit next to someone on a plane and get something out of that too for a conversation because the goats are capable of extracting what they need from social circumstances. And what they need might just be a conversation with someone who's willing to listen. And trusted. Yeah. And trusted. The problem with the adult, with the adult, young person relationship in terms of therapy as the power imbalance is much different. So your concern is that a young person in a therapeutic environment is too malleable and absorbent and can be pushed in a direction by a poor therapist.

42:45Of course, and I'll tell you something else. You know what, if you talk to a buddy, you talk to a friend who's with you, find somebody who's willing to listen. Let's say your teacher is being an actual teacher, not a playing therapist. But like let you talk about your problem for a while. At some point, she'll cut you off. At some point, your grandmother will say, go play an hour, go do something. Okay? Like enough talking about your problems. The problem with sending an adolescent to therapy is that therapists won't say that. They will never cut them off. Yeah, that's interesting. How much of this is just downstream from smartphones?

43:23You know, Jonathan Height was on the show recently, his new book, fantastic. How much of this can be laid at the feet of technology screen smartphone use? I think they work together. I think they both are parasitic on the same problem. Look, the smartphones, I think Jonathan Heitz had done absolutely wonderful work and I think the smartphones are a huge problem. My last book was about to mental health social contagion that was spread through the smartphones largely. But it was also spread largely through the therapists that these girls went to see. because most of these girls who decided they were suddenly transgender in the seventh grade had therapists.

44:00They were working with on their anxiety. Okay? And the reason I think it goes beyond the smartphones is because of this, things like the statistic I cited to you. You know, one in six American kids between the ages of two and eight have a mental health diagnosis. Now that's not a social media problem. That's a life problem. And that wasn't back in 2016 when they definitely weren't on social media. Now, this is not to say, I'm a social media has so many problems for kids. It's so inimical to good mental health. But one of the reasons it's so inimical is because of the things, the very bad things that bad therapy does, like allow you to avoid hard challenges, accommodate your every whim.

44:47Those are bad things to take you further from all the things in life that are actually going to make you feel good, like other people and exercise, right? And devotion to something bigger than yourself or focus outward. A smartphone, what is the problem with the smartphone? The biggest problem with the smartphone is it's a me device. It focuses you constantly on yourself in isolation. That's the same thing that all this cultural therapy is doing as well. And yes, some of it from actual therapist, a lot of it. Focus on you. How are you feeling? Think about yourself. Think about what you're doing on and on and on.

45:27These are terrible habits. What do you think about the reason quite often put forward that climate change is causing an awful lot of anxiety for young people? Well, I don't think it is. Not climate change on its own. Maybe as presented to children. So in other words, yes, adults, if they scare the heck out of children about climate change, children will manifest climate anxiety and then they can go to a climate therapist, which there is now a growing... Climate therapist. Yeah, sure. Growing number of therapists are now climate therapy, therapists. And they go around saying, wow, there's a lot of climate anxiety.

46:05Have I mentioned climate anxiety? They're inducing the problem. They are claiming to treat, right? That's not an organic problem. You know, we have had so many climate challenges, let's call them, or environmental challenges, over the course of human history, and in recent history we've been very aware of them. So why is this the first generation that suddenly has climate anxiety? It's because we're obsessively telling them they should be terrified because of the climate. And there are a lot of trends going in the right direction, by the way, on the environment, like deaths from natural disaster, which are way, way down worldwide.

46:42So the climate itself isn't the cause of the problem. It's the way we're scaring young people. I would certainly agree that the narrative around climate changes is, I understand, again, to try and steal man the other side, I understand why people who are concerned about the future of the climate want to make it as big of a deal as possible, because they think this is the only way that I can galvanize anyone to care about kind of this unseen issue that they believe is going to creep up on us and then cause a catastrophe in future. The problem, I think, it is a couple of problems with that. First one, it causes people to excessively worry, which actually damages the quality of life of the only people we know actually are going to fucking be alive, which are the ones that are right here right now.

47:33know. Second thing is, if you overblow, like if you're spray painting a Monet painting or if you're gluing yourself to the M25 in London or doing whatever, I think that you caused so much agitation that it causes people to push back even more so. It's the classic vegan activists park outside of a KFC. So people tweet on social media just because of that I'm going to go and eat another burger. It's like that kind of fuck you response gets activated. So I think it's, I think that the rhetoric around it totally wrong. I also think that we very rarely hear as you alluded to the benefits of climate mastery.

48:17This is some of Alex Epstein's work where he says the number of climate related deaths have declined by 98 % over the last 100 years. That's good. That's a reason for a reason to be hopeful. Does that mean that there are no problems with the climate? Absolutely not. But the concern of climate activists is if we were to tell people about some of the things that are good that are occurring as a byproduct of the freer, cheaper use of energy, that is going to make people less motivated to get on board with my particular agenda, which is to do this thing. So it's nuanced. It's a balance between the two.

48:51I'm not sure it's nuanced because there's a word for what you just described, okay? Not telling people the good because you want them to act. It's called lying and it's wrong. So I don't think it's terribly nuanced. Okay, what about economic instability? People are worried about economic instability. Is that closing? Oh, does it cause, you know, is that a major driver of young people's? I think a couple of things. First of all, the student debt is a big deal. I don't dismiss that. It's a big deal to leave school with that kind of crushing debt. We have real challenges in this country and throughout the West.

49:28major challenges, okay? Are they worse than they've ever been? Maybe some of them are, but a lot of them aren't. And I promise you this, the most unhelpful response is to say we're all doomed. I have so much anxiety. I'm now going to sit on my parents' couch for the next decade, because that's not helping anybody. So where are the people who are saying I'm going to help with climate change? I'm going to help create a new... They glued to the M25. Right. They're glued to the Mona Lisa, claiming they're doing something for the climate. Now, if you believe that, that the person who glues herself to the Mona Lisa does so because she cares so deeply about the Earth, I forgive my skepticism.

50:13You know, that's certainly not a way to behave of what you care about is the climate. What about an externalized locus of control? That seems to be, If you were to describe much of the language, like, semantically, if you were to probably do an analysis, there is very much this. I don't get to impact my future. I have very little agency in the world. I am at the mercy of forces that I have no control over. That's right. And you know what you, why, they have so little agency because they believe they're unwell. People who believe they're sick don't believe they're up to the challenges of life because when we're sick, we're not.

50:51up to the challenges of life, right? Even normal things that we could fix and we could make better. And that's the most disturbing thing of all of this generation, the lack of agency. And do I think that's just because of social media? No, I think social media plays a role. But another huge part is they think they're unwell. But they're not unwell. It's their life that's the problem. not a diagnosis and we're way, way over treating kids who have lives that need improving. I think that the one area I would really love, many areas, I'd love to sort of stress test some of this recession, but one of the areas I'd love to look at is to try and track what's happened with mental health, what's happened with broken homes.

51:37I think that it is such a sleeping sort of giant factor in this because no one really wants to point the finger at single mothers. Like, God, this poor woman who's working two jobs to pay for two children, maybe the father is or isn't involved, like in terms of physical support, maybe they aren't involved in terms of financial support. Like, who wants to do that? No, it's the least popular thing on the internet would be to say, this is because you chose wrong. Like you chose the partner that was wrong. And what's that woman supposed to do? You could go and un -pregnant herself, like go and go and put the baby back.

52:20That's not something that you can do. But that sort of toxic compassion, which is we don't want to tell you what may be a big contributor to this because we don't want to make you feel bad, it's important, like look at what's happening with climate change. The point with climate change is to climate change activists, we will focus on the things that are bad in order to warn us and steer us to what a better route for the future. That's their sort of rubric. The same thing has to be true in other areas as well. And I think single -parent households like so reliably must, I've not seen any research about what it does emotionally in terms of mental health outcomes.

52:57But it has to have a huge impact, especially on young girls, had animation on the show who did a phenomenal book about the importance of fathers in the raising of children. You often hear about how important it is for fathers to be in the lives of boys to sort of regulate their aggression and teach them how to do rough and tumble play. And it does seem to be very important that fathers are in the lives of boys up to sort of their teenagers. But the really important period in her research was sort of 11 to 16 for girls, that that was a really important time to have data around. So I would love to try and work out what is the impact and could you track some of these mental health trends, along with the declining dual parents household and sort of decline of increase in divorce.

53:44Okay, so I didn't look at the increase of divorce per se to be able to tell you what eras it started and what rate we're at now. But here's what I'll say. But I deny anything that you're saying, no, of course not. I totally agree. Of course, all those things are contributing factors, but here's the difference. How do we deal with them? I have met parents and I think we all know these people who are raised by single mothers and are remarkable adults. Strong, good people. They are reliable employees. They're not taking mental health days off of work. They're showing up. So can you raise a good child to adulthood in very difficult circumstances?

54:27Absolutely. But can you do it if you've told the child he's been traumatized and he'll always be living with trauma, maybe not. Maybe now you're making it impossible to raise them to do much of anything. Certainly having a child being raised in a single parent household by a mother or father that needs to work more, which means that they give them less time. And then saying, oh, by the way, you don't have any control over the outcomes in your life and the climate's going to kill you and you're never going to be able to own a house. No, no, no, no, I mean, that's, It's a breeding ground for people to be unhappy.

55:03What do you mean when you talk about social emotional meddling? What is that? So, these are, you know, they have the social emotional programs in schools in England as well as America, but it's all over America. And it's in theory, the idea is that they're going to teach emotional regulation through a series of discussions about emotion. We'll introduce concepts of emotion and we know things like having a big vocabulary about emotion is a good thing, right? It's good for people to be able to separate frustration from anger so that they can realize, oh, I'm not really angry right now, I'm just frustrated, which is different, right?

55:42So with this theory in hand, they're making a lot of problems for kids. Why? Because in practice, however, it was intended in practice in order to get going a discussion of emotional regulation what teachers are doing is they're saying, okay, let's talk about a time when you were happy, not much to talk about in terms of emotional regulation, right? No one's worried about regulating people's happiness. Now let's talk about a time when you were bullied, sad, left out, when you felt lonely, when you felt like neglected. Now we're cooking. So they spend a lot of time inducing rumination in kids, this bad pathological practice of rehearsing your past pain and there's something worse too.

56:23When you go into a school and you get kids to talk about their pain, not only are they going to naturally try to one up each other with pain, not only are they going to likely to misremember things past events as worse than they actually were. But who was in charge of keeping them safe? Naturally, it leads to the conclusion that mom or dad failed me in some way. So you're also, this is the reason you're seeing kids leave these programs more alienated from their parents. That's interesting. So that's one of the one of the first things that I think seems to be an obvious difference between an adult doing therapy and a child doing therapy.

57:04If you have a relationship It seems to me that reminding a child that their parent is there to protect them and to keep them safe while they're still in their care, that seems like a smart idea. Obviously, you don't want to pull a wall over their eyes that are abusive, you know, whatever it's called, action, action things where you need to actually get the child out of the home, put them on grandparents or whatever. But certainly as an adult, you can talk about what happened in childhood with distance because you no longer need to believe that this benevolent, house leader person, they're not still in control of your life.

57:47So certainly while you're a child, degrading the quality of trust from child to parent, I think is super dangerous. Because you're asking a young person who is going to be struggling to rationalize this, self -regulation isn't really going to be there as good of a quality. And like the one place that they want to be able to feel safe is at home with mum and dad, mum or dad. And if you, I think that that's certainly a big difference between dealing with children and dealing with adults. If you're 25 and have moved out of the house and no longer aligned on that and had a complex relationship with your parents, you can, you give yourself not only like temporally, geographically, emotionally, you give yourself distance.

58:34You can look at that and you don't need to still be at the mercy of that relationship. But if you are a child and that relationship between yourself and your parents gets degraded or you start to lose faith in them and stuff like that, I can see how that would cause them to be more fearful and just be like, well, I know what, I can't trust any adults anymore at all. That would increase fear. Because if you think convincing a child who has okay parents, Not even great parents, okay parents, just good enough parents that their parents are no help to them and might have let them get hurt. If you get them to mistrust their parents on the idea that the school counselor is going to be there for them, you're setting them up for a lot of pain.

59:20Why? Because the child may have a problem over the summer or during spring break or a million other times that the school counselor is not there for them. It's such a lie that the school systems are there to save kids from neglectful, slightly neglectful parents. Now in an extreme circumstance of abuse, of course, you need to go in there and get the child out. That's not what we're talking about, right? We're talking about this dumping of therapy on every child. I'll say something else that occurred to me, Chris, when you were talking about how good therapy can be for an adult. Look, it also really depends on the adult.

1:00:00Because a lot of young adults, there's no question therapy is participating in their alienation. Young adults, the oldest members of Gen Z are alienated at parents and cutting them off in higher numbers than they've ever seen before. They're doing it for reasons not because they were physically or sexually abused or anything dramatic or severe, but usually I felt I wasn't emotionally supported by my mother. It's things that, gosh, you know, if you raise children of your own, you might think that you could excuse because it's really hard to raise kids, actually, it's pretty hard and it's really hard when you have a job and you've got you know, things you've got so many worries of your own to constantly be there for every single thing your child may or may not need in the future.

1:00:41It's hard. It's a hard job. And therapy therapists have been participating in convincing young adults to cut off their parents in higher numbers. There's something else too, Chris. You talked about how wonderful therapy was for you. I can tell you, I found it very, very useful at different times in my life. But here's the thing. It also is because of you. So I have a feeling you're the sort of guy who could get a lot out of talking to a bus driver for an hour or two, right? We're talking to your grandfather or anybody else. You'd probably get a lot out of that. So the question is, the therapist as a profession, are they doing more help than harm?

1:01:25Well, with kids, I think they're doing more harm than good. What about the use of the term trauma? We see this banded around on the internet a lot. It's maybe the worst thing to happen to this generation is the overuse of the word trauma. There's a wonderful new study out by this woman, Kathy Wydom, who does these brilliant prospective studies. I believe she's British, but I don't know. And she does these brilliant, yeah, prospective studies, which are the most rigorous kind. And she looked at kids who had documented instances of abuse as children, and then she waited and followed them. And we checked in again, 10, 15 years with researchers, who were blinded as to which group they fell into, were the kids who actually experienced her trauma, dramatic event or potentially dramatic event or those who didn't.

1:02:07And what she found was the most important factor in whether they had adult psychopathology, The adult mental health problems was whether they thought the childhood incident was whether they made that part of their narrative. For the adults who didn't think it was significant, even when they went through something potentially traumatic as children, they had great mental health as adults. And the ones who had built it into their narrative, even events that weren't, may not have occurred. Those people were suffering in adulthood. So it turns out the way we describe our lives is really, really important to whether we thrive or not.

1:02:46Would good trauma -informed care not try to unpack that and then teach you that you are a person that's outside of that to transcend whatever it was, is trauma -informed care not about casting that off from you? Well, you know, I interviewed a wonderful physician in England who deals with exconvicts or in Plymouth, who many of whom experienced unspeakable abuse as children. And one of the things he said to me was the problem with this so -called trauma -informed care is it presumes inappropriately that everyone is helped by talking about their traumatic experience. Some people are able to put it behind them and you're only re -traumatizing by making them talk about it.

1:03:32So what he does with with with adults who've been through a lot is some he's waiting and takes their lead and some of them He acknowledges that they went through something hard and moves on and then they talk about today and the future But endlessly rehearsing your your your past injury even when it was an injury even was something significant Again, you can reintroduce or exacerbate pain. It's this, again, it's this interesting blend between perpetuating something, revisiting it, causing yourself to ruminate and make it worse, and also realizing that there can be certain blockages, emotionally, psychologically, that up until you decide to unpack that and actually see it for what it is, deal with the emotion, deal with the anxiety.

1:04:19Why was that there? Why is it that you have this particular pattern? Why do you feel unsafe whenever anybody disagrees with you. It's like, well, I don't know, but up until the point at which you actually start to work that out, I think that people continue to repeat their patterns. And in the same breath, you can also say that dwelling on and reinforcing events from your past as a part of the narrative, there are people that the more that they talk about it, I imagine, the more that that cements itself into their character. And it's this balance. It's this sort of very new one's thing. And again, it's the thread that I'm continuing to see here is that like good, capable, dexterous therapy and therapists, probably a fantastic helps for the right people.

1:05:08Bad therapists for the wrong person is like a fucking curse. Right. And here's another problem. Look, nobody's tracking side effects. Nobody is measuring them or following them. No one's seeing improvement, measuring it, testing it, making sure you're improving it. See, the medical profession does that. You see if the rash goes away. You check the X -ray to see if the cancer is getting worse or receding, and then you change your treatment accordingly. That's not happening with therapy. That's a huge problem, and the reason it is, is because they did do research. What they found was, even when people were getting worse, they tended to feel perched and better after they left a therapist's office.

1:05:47That's interesting. So there's an acute sort of relief like scratching the itch, but potentially could damage it. I was nowhere of that. Well, I mean, one of the things you mentioned before about mindfulness practices and stuff in school, mindfulness seems to be a pretty well evidence -based solution for regulating emotions, for understanding yourself, or probably even if nothing else, just giving yourself a little bit of downtime to parasympathetically unwind, I would hope that even bad mindfulness, I don't know if there is such a thing as bad mindfulness. It's like, hey, sit and do your, sit and focus on your breath for two minutes kids.

1:06:25Like we're going to do mindfulness minute on Tuesday or whatever. I shy of kids using that as an opportunity to punch someone while everyone's eyes are closed. I would like to think that the potential side effects, that bad side effects downstream from mindfulness should be basically zero and the upside could potentially be quite good. Well, I'll tell you why I don't think there's zero because kids understand the message. And the message is we think you're terribly dysregulated. Your mental health is a mess. We need to constantly talk about monitor and work on your mental health because mental health is a continuum from the braving person screaming at the supermarket to you who's nervous before a test, you're all on the same spectrum of mental health, a mental and mental illness in some sense, and you have to constantly think about it and work on it.

1:07:17That is an unhealthy message for kids. It is because they're already obsessed with their mental health. Now, if you went back in time, if we took a time machine, right, back, you know, 50 years, 100 years, and introduced mindfulness, maybe it would be really helpful. If you introduced therapy, maybe it would help, too. But you're going to have a totally different time. Where is the repression today? I keep hearing about the potential for repression. There's no repression. There's too little repression. Everything that goes through these kids' hearts and minds, they want to express and complain about.

1:07:54And that's a problem. They don't know that some amount of disappointment and distress is normal. Healthy, move on. How much of this do you lay at the feet of modern parenting styles? It's a big part of it. It's a huge part of it. What I would say is the reason to the extent that I sympathize with parents is I believe that parents have been so undercut by the mental health establishment that convinced them that they're not up to the challenge because they don't understand their child's amygdala. It's a ridiculous assertion. By the way, most of these people don't understand the amygdala either. But the idea that you have to have studied the fight or flight impulse and the instincts and the lizard brain, you have to memorize all these things before you can raise a child, it's so preposterous, it's so untrue.

1:08:44And by the way, most of their claims are just neuro -trash. It really is a bunch of nonsense. How so? Well, there are a few ways that we, that I would say this. The use very often, what they're doing is relying on things like pet scans or even FMRI scans of combat veterans to make claims about children who have experienced ordinary distress like being teased or picked on. Now, those are totally different neurological events. Now, first of all, we don't know very much about what's going on in your brain when you have PTSD. Our ways of understanding the brain are incredibly crude. And we don't know whether the neural structures that may have made you more susceptible to PTSD, that they made you more vulnerable because you had a smaller hempo campus.

1:09:40We don't know which way the causality runs. or whether the PTSD, the traumatic incident, the IED blowing up your body, caused a change in your brain. But it's very, it seems likely that it may be the former. But let's just say we don't know. Nonetheless, we know nothing about what's going on a kid who's picked on based on that. Why? Because the grinding torment of being teased over and over is just a different kind of neurological event, then it's sudden shock to the system of seeing your body blown up. Your brain can habituate as hard as it is to be teased in middle school. Your brain actually habituates and we are actually built to be resilient to a certain amount of that teasing, as unpleasant as it is.

1:10:27So the claim that you know what's going on in the kid's brain because you've studied combat vets and when you've measured the flow of oxygenated blood in their brains, which itself is astoundingly crude, it's really a claim without good backing. Talk to me about permissive parenting. Sure. So, there's these studies going back to the 1960s that say really amazingly sturdy studies because they've been replicated hundreds of times by this woman Diana Bommerend and she looked into parenting methods. And she found that parents in America basically used three different methods. They were either authoritarian.

1:11:07Now this is, remember, 1960s now. Cold and unloving, but rule -based. So obedience was the highest virtue. Basically it doesn't exist in America today at all, as far as I can tell. Authoritative, which just means parents are in charge. They have rules, but they're loving and permissive, which is anything goes. kind of no rules, affirming a kid, being his buddy. Now today, and they found, again and again, what they found that authoritative rule bound but loving is the best for kids, mental health, success in life and relationship with their parents. Now, permissive, I don't think it really exists in America today, unfortunately, in a certain sense, even though the outcomes weren't great.

1:11:50And here's what I mean. There was one virtue to permissive parenting.

1:11:56It have this surveillance parenting, which is so much worse. Parents are acting like therapists with their kids affirming and recognizing their every emotion, never enforcing rules, never saying no, never punishing, and not giving their kids any genuine independence that they could learn from. That's interesting. Yeah, one of the thoughts I had in my mind is whether or not kids being in charge is good or bad. And it seems like what you're saying is kids are given the illusion that they're in charge when it comes to sort of enforcement emotionally, but the important stuff, the agentic freedom to be able to learn is actually being taken away.

1:12:38So it's kind of like some of the some of the bad things and not many of the good things. That's right. And are there also constantly being conned by these therapeutic infused parenting methods It's like, well, I'll let you dye your hair purple or green. Won't that be fun? I mean, in other words, they're given these trivial, relatively trivial choices. I'll let you choose the red shirt or the blue shirt. They're never given, you know, they don't have much control in the world. And they're certainly not having any abilities in the world developed, which comes from independence and a certain amount of trusting them to do hard things and face hard things.

1:13:16But then they're confused with these really trivial choices all the time that are meant to make them feel good and sort of I think distract them from have just Stract them so the parent doesn't have to punish them because because these parents don't don't want to punish Yeah, it's this again another delicate balance like permissive parenting gentle parenting Some parents want to be emotionally attuned with their kids maybe they're just not that authoritative as people, but there's a big difference between being gentle with your kid and allowing it to do whatever it wants. Well, you can be as gentle as you want, but you can't divest yourself of authority.

1:13:56You can't tell the kid you're not in charge. If you want to do that by being as gentle or thoughtful as you can be, that's fine as long as you're still in charge, and that's what the research shows. So it doesn't say anything about how much sort of sympathy you can have for your kid or what they're going through. But ultimately, you don't put a three -year -old in charge, which also means that if a child is having a fit, you don't stop the entire family Thanksgiving celebration to ask the child what's wrong and endlessly let them vent, right? And that's what we're seeing, and that's why we're seeing such lousy results.

1:14:33The final wholesome of the apocalypse, I guess, which kind of falls in line from your last bit of work is over medication. Yes. These kids are way over medicated. I mean, the generations way over medicated in all kinds of ways that we're seeing. But again, you know, I think the worst of it is that, you know, and I want people to know, it's not the same as an adult choosing to take a Xanax. Whatever you think about the anti -anxiety medications, it's totally different when When you get in, when the child's trying or the young teenagers trying to develop emotional musculature and you get in there and delete their bad feelings and introduce all kinds of science effects, that's a problem because now you're interfering with their ability to grow up when they could just be dancing.

1:15:25Right. What is the, have you got any stats around the percentage, the number of kids that are on and some kind of psychiatric medication. It's a good question. I don't. It's much harder to track in the US because we don't have centralized medical care. But we know it's been going up a lot. We know that lexapro in the last year was just approved for seven -year -olds. Lexapro, sorry. Oh, sorry. It's an anti -depressant. It's an SSRI. Okay. Seven -year -olds. That's a big deal. It's a really strong drug. And we know that, you know, the New York Times ran an article I think two years ago, an hour a year ago on the number of young people on 10 different psychotropic drugs.

1:16:07If you interview any doctor today, any doctor in any specialty, they will tell you they cannot believe how many psychiatric drugs their average young patient is on. Why are they prescribing them then? Well, it's very often they aren't. Sometimes they're the OB. They're not the ones prescribing. They're just showing... What's an OB? Oh, sorry. Obstetrician, gynecologist. So a young 14 -year -old, 15 -year -old, 16 -year -old girl shows up at our gynecologist's office and for a regular exam or whatever it is, and the doctor can see what she's on, or the 21 -year -old, they can see what she's on.

1:16:43And the answer is a lot of psychiatric medication. And they look at it aghast, like, who put you on all this? And very often the answer is the pediatrician. outside of the nothing of emotions and the lack of opportunity to learn how to self -regulate, what are the other dangers of kids being on medication? Obviously, this is something that you looked at in a slightly different vector previously, but with these kinds of drugs, these categories, what are the dangers to developing brains and young people being on them? Right. So, all these different categories of drugs are different, obviously. But let's taking an antidepressant.

1:17:22So not only are you interfering, let's just take sex drive. So there's all kinds of problems to deleting a young person's sex drive when they're just developing it. They don't even know what they're missing. And of course, there's some indication that's come out recently that it may be permanent. But here's something else too that I learned when I was doing an interview totally separate from all this. I interviewed a surgeon, a transgender surgeon. And what she told me was she had worked on victims of female genital mutilation. One of the things she told me was that when you remove someone's sex drive, it turns out you also interfere with their ability to make intimate relationships.

1:18:02Your interfering part of our drive to form close relationships comes from a sex drive. They go together. These are profound. I mean, I just gave you one example, but that's a profound intervention with a young person who doesn't yet have very many intimate relationships or romantic relationships. They might not know what they're missing. And then there's the whole, can I handle my life question? An adult who chooses to go on an anti -depressant, at least knows that they've gone through some hard things and that they probably can. But a teenager who starts on an anti -depressant may never know if they can handle life.

1:18:40And that's the worst thing of all, in a sense. You have this sort of buttress psychological support structure, pharmacological support structure that means people never actually realize the robustness of their, like their own capacity. Yes, yes. If you know that you can do things in the world, if you've grown up, if you have overcome a certain amount of distress and handled it, if you have been rejected and failed to make the team and moved on. And you're an adult now. You've held it and now you want to choose whatever it is. You're in such a better position to do it, whether it's psychotherapy or medication.

1:19:22But if you're a child who doesn't yet know those things, you may never get to know them. Because you may never believe you can. The bottom line is that young people's mental health is not good. And something Presumably needs to happen to do that. So what is a good route forward to improve young people's mental health in your opinion? Subdraction of all the bad stuff. So less obsession about their mental health, less focus on wellness, less focus on feelings, more exercise, more getting out into the world, more human connection, less time spent on tech, more connections with extended family, with people who genuinely love them and care if they show up, more involvement in a project bigger than themselves and contributing to the community, in whatever way they can, all that stuff, exercise, all that stuff is so, so good for you.

1:20:14That's what they need to be doing. Have you thought about how to operationalize this or how you would implement it? Is this something that needs to happen at a governmental level? Is this something that needs to be implemented hardcore in education and for schools to follow? Is this something that's the responsibility of parents? Like, who does this fall on when it comes to? I think it I think it falls on parents mostly they're the ones I trust the most to make a helpful change The problem is is they're the only ones totally devoted to how their children turn out Everyone else has a self -interest in getting involved everyone So do I think the government's gonna sweep in with a brilliant intervention?

1:20:51I have a little bit of skepticism there Yeah, Jonathan Heights new books got some interesting stuff in it. I think he wants to basically kind of put a I can age limit on access to social media or on access to phones. There's this suggestion of car telling families together so that you speak to the parents of your child's friends and you say, if we all stand firm, the only reason, it's like a tragedy of the commons thing. Right. Yeah. If the way that everyone's communicating is by using phones, if none of our kids are exposed to them before the age, I think he wants, he's maybe 12 or 14 for phones and then 60 for social media, something like that, but then you want to know that some other bits and pieces.

1:21:32I mean, that's all good stuff, and I hope it's successful. Do I think that, you know, I think it's ghastly that the mental health industry hasn't put something like a black box morning on social media or come out with that kind of claim or a recommendation, I should say. But do I think it's a collective action problem? Not exactly. So my understanding of a collection active problem is nobody can move until everybody decides to move together. Well, I'm not sure that that's the social media problem, right? Why? Because if you get six families in a class of 60 to stop with social media, they will see an immediate improvement.

1:22:16And you know what? They'll have someone else to talk to in the class. And their grades will be better. And they'll be generally happier kids. And then other parents will have the strength to do the same. So, I'm not sure the answer is legislation. I think it's really just parents stepping up. What would you say to parents that are listening, that are worried about the child's mental health? Yeah, I would say a few things. If you could get through something hard, your kids can too. Your kids can too. And they need to hear that message. They need to hear your faith that they can face adversity and get over hard things.

1:22:51whatever that hard thing is because they can. That's the story of humanity. But also the thing to do is if before you go down the road of accommodation, ask one question, you know, whether it's an accommodation, a testing accommodation in school or any other, will this make my child stronger? If the answer is no, don't do it. Don't do it. Stop obsessing about their happiness. Start focusing on their strength. will I make my child stronger? And absolutely part of it is taking away the tech limiting that. I don't know if there's you know you know a quick fix to that other than parents asserting their authority and saying no.

1:23:35Abigail Shryer ladies and gentlemen why should people go they want to keep up to date with the work that you're doing and check out your stuff? I'm on sub -stack under my sub -stack is the truth fairy and I'm on Twitter Abigail Shryer. Abigail I appreciate Thank you. Thank you. Likewise. Thanks so much, Chris.