#2109 - Abigail Shrier
2024-02-27 02:00:15
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Stream by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day!
Hello. Hello. Good to see you again.
It's great to see you.
What was it like the last time you did the show?
Well, they tried to kick it off Spotify.
It was a very small, noisy group of people, by the way. Yeah. It wasn't the head people. Right. They tried to make it seem like there was this big movement to get it kicked off Spotify.
But when you examine what you were saying, and, you know, many more people are saying what you were saying. This was like, what year was this when you were on?
2020..
2020.. Yeah. It had sort of just started boiling. Yeah. You know?
And now, four years later, there's a lot of people pushing back.
That's right. Honestly, I thought you were going to never have me on your show again. Because, you know, it was very, I mean, they had 10 meetings with the employees demanding that it be removed. I thought Joe's going to be so mad at me.
No, they're wrong. They're wrong. They're wrong. Every time someone wants to stop discussions, they're wrong. They're wrong.
Especially when you want to try to stop discussions about a very serious and permanent thing that people are advocating to do to children. that is also very profitable. And it's a dark, weird sort of a scenario that we're in here right now. that's unprecedented, that no one's ever experienced before. And they're using terms like life-saving, gender-affirming care instead of castration and removing breasts and hormones.
And it's a very, very strange time. So I'm glad we had that podcast. And I would have a hundred more of them. Great. I think it's very important to talk about this.
And I think there's too many people that are scared to talk about it. And that's why this stuff is getting so much traction. And it's scary. It's scary. It's scary that people aren't willing to admit that children are very easily influenced.
That's right. I think that's the scariest thing of all, that people are afraid to just say the truth.
Yeah.
And that's not a good world, because we can fix most problems if we can talk about them.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that's my position on anyone trying to stop you from talking about things. Yeah.
They're wrong. It's not the way to do it.
It's definitely not the American way. And it's not the way we've ever solved problems in this country. And it's a bad thing when you can't be honest about things.
And the reason why they want to try to do it is because they know that there's too many people that agree with it and that these people have been silenced before. So they'd like to bully them into silence. They like to scare them into silence. They like to get them canceled. And before Elon purchased Twitter, you used to be able to do that much more effectively.
What? The silencing?
Yeah. The silencing was so easy. That's right. If you said, I mean, look, Megan Murphy was kicked off of Twitter for years. That's right.
Just for saying a man is never a woman. That's right.
And look, I mean, there's no question, I think, that Elon, taking over Twitter, broke open the monopoly on a lot of conversations. I do think that had that effect. And it's really important. I mean, look, if their position, if the gender activist position, was a good one, they wouldn't have to shut everyone up. Right?
They wouldn't have to object. I mean, they took my book off Target. They threw a fit. And Target removed the book. And they did it because even though they have hundreds of trans celebratory books, hundreds of books celebrating gender transition for teenagers, even one that was critical of it, that was too much for them, because they knew it would break their monopoly on the narrative.
Well, the really scary thing is when you see these detransitioners get attacked. That's terrifying. That's terrifying. Because that's just so – it's so cruel. The complete lack of compassion for someone that's done, as the title of your book, irreversible damage to their life forever.
They'll never have children again. They'll never have breasts again. And this – the fact that this is just a part of this bizarre cult that a giant swath of our population is consumed by right now.
That's right. And they didn't let detransitioners be part of the story. Yeah. That there was a growing number of these women who were regretting their transition. And they had some – and they were brave enough to speak up.
And that took real courage, because they're talking about their own experience, their own damage to their own bodies. I mean, they were the most courageous of all. And they were treated horribly by the activists.
Yeah. It's so dark. Like, you don't want to think that people can make mistakes. Even if you think that people should be allowed to transition when they're young, you don't think that some people are going to do it and regret it? That's insane.
Right. You think that everybody who goes through surgery to remove parts of their body because they feel like they're in the wrong – you think all those people are going to be happy? That's insanity. Yeah.
I mean it's like a religion in the sense of the fundamentalism of belief against all evidence. to the contrary. I mean these people believed this on faith. It was a creed. And there was no disabusing them of this, even when there was growing evidence of thousands of young women regretting it.
Well, finally, now the New York Times is on board, though, which is really interesting. It is, isn't it? I saw someone commenting on Twitter, and I think they're probably correct. And they said, this is because the trial lawyers are involved now. And I think they're correct.
I think this is why the New York Times has kind of shifted sides, because I think they realize the lawsuits are coming. And once a few of them are successful, and they will be, it's going to get crazy.
Well, I think that is a part of it. But I don't think the lawsuits are going to solve it as easily as they did, say, the repressed memory scandal of prior eras. And the multiple personality disorder, all these people who thought they had repressed memory of various kinds of harm. And we're imagining childhood molestation. that didn't happen.
Are you talking about, like the satanic stuff from the 80s?
Yeah, from the 80s, that whole satanic. I think that got reversed through lawsuits, in part because they weren't following clear protocols of their profession. The problem with the gender, going after the gender regime through the courts, and I'm in favor of it, don't get me wrong. But the problem is that the gender therapists, the therapists, the doctors, were all following protocol when they transition a kid and cut up their bodies in various ways, incapacitated them in various ways. They were actually following affirmative care, which is the official protocol.
Which is crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's so crazy that there's so many things that we don't allow children to do, because we know that children can't really make lifelong decisions at the age of 11 and 12 and 13,, but yet we'll let them in this case.
That's right.
So nuts.
Yeah. When I look back on it, there were a few lessons of it, but one of the things that really stood out was that almost in every case, there were medical professionals who should have known better and very often, therapists who should have known better. encouraging a young girl who was a little anxious or had some anxiety, had some depression, encouraging her down this road as the solution. Yeah.
But it's also not recognizing what we know about what happens to people when they give them testosterone. Right. So testosterone alleviates anxiety. Testosterone creates a feeling of euphoria. Right.
It does, especially when you give it to someone in doses that their body would never normally have. That's right.
That's right. And so what? the girls would go on it and they would feel great and they would become evangelists for testosterone. They would tell all their friends, you got to do this. I feel great.
All my anxiety is gone. Of course, now they may have a permanent five o'clock shadow. Yeah.
Changing their voice.
Changing their voice.
When they detransition, that never goes away. Yeah. Yeah. It's very dark. It's very dark, and I would have never imagined this.
I would have never imagined that. Before COVID, I had a completely different opinion of the medical establishment. My opinion of the medical establishment is that they were there to help people. That's right. That's it.
I never questioned it. I questioned the motives of some of the pharmaceutical drug companies that were trying to sell drugs. But I felt like the medical establishment always figured that out eventually and then they banned those drugs, the ones that were harmful. But that's not real. That's not really what happens.
It's a money game. The whole thing is a money and influence game and it's run by very powerful people. And no one wants to think that those same factors are at play when it comes to gender transition. But, you know, I've shown people the map of gender transition clinics in 2007 versus gender transition clinics in 2023, and it's fucking insane. Yeah.
It's insane.
Yeah. Hundreds and hundreds of new gender clinics all across the country. You know, the industry expanded so rapidly with very little oversight, and it was just how fast could we get these drugs to these kids?
So, yeah, I mean, I agree with you. There wasn't enough oversight, but there also weren't enough good people speaking up. A lot of the best doctors who are like, I, didn't enter the medical profession to do this. They went silent or they referred to others. They said, why don't you, you know, let me refer you to a specialist.
Well, actually, the gender surgeons, often, you know, weren't even, you know, adequate to the task, because it's very, very complicated surgery, you know, involving transferring peripheral nerves and whatnot. So it's not easy surgery, depending on which surgery you're talking about. Very often they weren't even the most qualified surgeons doing the surgery. So you had a lot of, you know, surgeries that didn't go quite right.
Well, none of them go quite right. I mean, that's what's dark about it. I mean, you're creating a new thing, you know, whether you're creating a penis or whether you're turning a penis into a vagina. This is not like heart surgery. This is not something they've been doing forever, that they have this long history of doing it successfully and they know exactly how to do it correctly.
The whole thing is very twisted.
Yeah, the rates of, you know, all kinds of things going wrong. I mean, you know, if you talk about the creation of the neophallus, the ones you take a vagina to make something like a penis, the number, you know, getting urine to go in a stream as opposed to a spray or making it so that the person can have an erection, then a strong enough erection to actually penetrate. These are all require, you know, separate surgeries. very often. Very often, it doesn't go quite right.
Then there's all kinds of complications with the surgeries. I mean, I've talked to people who've been really butchered.
So, again, what was it like for you? Did you expect, when you wrote that book, did you expect the kind of blowback that you experienced? Like, what did you expect when you wrote the book? Obviously, you felt the need to express this and you felt the need to share this information, because you recognize that there's, like this contagion, this social contagion that seems to be happening. It's a big part of what's going on.
And a lot of these kids are very easily influenced. A lot of them are on the spectrum and they're being led down this road. So, you write this book. What did you expect was going to be the reaction to it?
Well, most books get very little attention at all. So, most books, right, you know, I certainly didn't expect the, you know, massive reaction that I got. I mean, the public campaign to ban me from every possible outlet was so hypercharged. And to some extent, it was successful. I mean, they kept the book on Amazon.
It was deleted from Target. You can't find it in a public library in America, no matter how many people try to donate it to their libraries. So, to some extent, it was successful. But, you know, the campaign to stifle the book, but because I made it onto places like your podcast, because I made it into Amazon, people got it. Parents got it.
And for the first time, I think parents had another source of information besides the activist narrative of, oh, you know, you're either going to have a live son or a dead daughter. This lie that your child's going to kill themselves if you don't do exactly what I say and let them transition. now. This lie was the prevailing narrative. And I think, you know, I was able to break through.
And I think that's what made people so angry.
That lie falls apart under scrutiny when you look at the suicide rates of people that are trans.
Right. Right. There's actually a new study out of Finland showing that, and a really good long-term study, you know, I think it came out maybe just this week, showing that the rates, when you control for other mental health issues, the rates of suicide among those with gender dysphoria, the, you know, discomfort with the biological sex, the rates of suicide are no higher than for the general population.
That's crazy. Your new book, Bad Therapy, Why Kids Aren't Growing Up.
Yes.
What's wrong with therapy? What are they doing wrong?
You know, they're giving it to kids who aren't sick, who aren't actually struggling with mental illness or a disorder. They're giving it to everybody. So what they're doing is they're making existing problems worse and they're introducing new problems, because therapy has side effects. Just like any intervention that has the power to help, it also has the power to harm.
In what way?
Well, there's a whole body of research on some of the side effects of therapy, and they include things like alienation from spouse, alienation from parents, worsening of depression, worsening of anxiety, feeling of incapacity, feeling like you can't do things without consulting your therapist. All those are well-known iatrogenic effects. Once you have a mental diagnosis, the labeling, feeling limited by that label, oh, I have anxiety, I can't. So all those things are well-known, what they call iatrogenic effects, meaning whenever a medical procedure actually introduces harm, that's an iatrogenic effect. And we know that, of course, drugs and surgeries always come with, even the life-saving ones can come with some harm.
And what people might not know is that therapy comes with these risks as well.
So is this your opinion on therapy in general? Do you think there's a place for therapy? Absolutely.
But I guess the big picture theme here is that therapy with kids and teens is totally different. for therapy with an adult, right? An adult sits down. First of all, an adult makes the decision on their own. You know, I really want to work on this.
I'm going to go to a therapist. And you get the patient buy-in, and they're ready to do the hard work of therapy. But a child or teenager is usually strong-armed into therapy, so they don't want to be there in the first place. But, more importantly, you know, they can't say as easily to a therapist, listen, I don't really think – I think I gave you the wrong impression. I don't think I would call my mom emotionally abusive.
Or it's much harder for them to say, listen, I know I was bullied in middle school, but I don't think I have PTSD. It's harder for a kid to say that because they don't have the life experience behind them to know that. And they don't know if they're getting better as easily. An adult can say, you know, I've been seeing this therapist for three years. You know, my depression is as bad as it ever was.
It's just not working. And move on. Maybe find a different therapist. It's much harder for a teenager to know that.
Yeah, I have never been in therapy, although a lot of people told me I should. But they all are in therapy, and it doesn't seem to be helping. But the people that I know that are in therapy, the ones that are in therapy regularly, are the most fucked up. And I don't see improvement. I don't—I mean, maybe it's just a biased sampling of the people that I know that are doing it.
But it's—the people that—and it's not all of them, but the ones that I find problematic are very self-indulgent. And there's something about going to a therapist and talking about yourself constantly and your problems constantly. that sort of reinforces the self-indulgent.
And that's what can lead depression to get worse, sadness to get worse. As you sit and focus on your pain, if you're not careful, especially with teens and kids, it can make the pain, the worry, the feeling of being harmed worse. And I think that's what we're seeing.
But what about the good therapists? Aren't there good therapists that can give you tools to sort of change your patterns of thinking and behavior and move in a positive way?
So if you're struggling with a condition of some sort, a phobia, anorexia, OCD, you know, any number of problems that you want to deal with, therapy can be great. Cognitive behavioral therapy, especially, can be great. But if you go—if you're a teen or kid who shows up bummed out or, you know, just generally kind of anxious, to a therapist, you have a good shot of having that problem made worse.
But why is that? What is it about going to therapy with that problem? that's going to make it worse?
Because you're going to sit and talk about your worries regularly. They're not going to say, you know, that exercise is amazing for depression. Study after study. In fact, there have been recent studies showing it's better than antidepressants, for a lot of, you know...
1.25%.
I mean, it's amazing, right?
Oh, excuse me. One and a quarter, like one times better. Right. Yeah.
Dancing is apparently amazing, for, you know, low mood. Now, I'm not talking about severe major depressive disorder, okay? When you have severe chronic depression, you may need to treat it with medication or therapy. But for, you know, low mood, you know, sort of mild to moderate depression, exercise turns out to be better, and it doesn't have those side effects. But let me give you an example of a teenager I talked to.
So I talked to this girl, Becca. That's what I call her in the book. But she was a high school senior, and she had been in therapy since age six, okay, when her parents divorced. She didn't have any diagnosed mental disorder of any kind, but she had regularly been in therapy because her parents divorced, and they said, you got to go to therapy. So I asked her as a high school senior, so what are you working on with your therapist now?
And she said to me, my therapist is getting me ready to make friends in college. She's helping me. Oh, boy. So we're rehearsing. We're going through my past experiences, and we're talking about how to get me ready to make friends in college.
That gives me anxiety, just thinking about it. So am I coaching me to go make friends? It's like, what?
Right. Do you see? This generation feels that it can't do because they've gotten so much oversight and so much needless mental health intervention that they're questioning themselves all the time. They're in their heads all the time.
And what motivated you to write this book? Do you have personal experiences with people that are going through this?
Well, two things. One is, I'm raising three kids in this generation, so I wanted to know, why was the generation that got the most mental health intervention, the most therapy, the most psych meds, the most interventions in schools, the most therapeutic parenting, why were they in the most distress? And why were they so afraid to grow up? And we shouldn't see that. These should be the picture of wellness.
Nobody worried about anybody's mental health more than we worried about their mental health. And yet they're the picture of despair. So I really wanted to know what was going on with them. And also, of course, I had written Irreversible Damage, and I knew from that experience that very often when a young woman would tell a story about when her life went desperately off track, it was with a therapist. And here's the thing.
It wasn't necessarily a gender therapist. Most often, it was just your vanilla psychodynamic therapist who was there to talk to an anxious or a little bummed out teen, a mildly depressed teen, about their bad feelings. And lo and behold, during the course of regular psychodynamic therapy, they would say, what are your feelings on gender? And with the therapist, they would go down that route.
Wow.
There's a lot of other factors too, right? That's contributing to kids' anxiety today. And a big one has to be social media.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Social media is a huge part of the story. There's no question. I wrote about it in the first book.
And Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge have been talking about it for eight years now. And they've brought rigor and important research to show that that has…. Extracting kids from their social world is bad. Yeah. And making them getting the dopamine hit and the anxious worry about who's going to write me back and when, and then getting the dopamine hit up when they get that response and that whole cycle.
There's no question. that plays on our natural propensities for addiction and makes kids more anxious. But I think it's part of what we're seeing. I don't think it's the whole story. And the reason I don't think it's the whole story is a few things.
First of all, childhood mental health has been…. Adolescent mental health has been in precipitous decline in this country since the 1950s.
And how do they measure that?
So from, let's say, 19…. By every measure, by the way. But let's say, take between 1955 and 1988, the rates of adolescent suicide quadrupled. So that's just one measure. But there are many.
I mean, we've seen it from non-suicidal self-harm, suicidal self-harm. All of these rates have gone up for adolescents. But they've been in decline for…. Mental health of teens has been in decline for years. There's also some other statistics or some other reasons.
I don't think phones explain the whole story. One of them is that in 2016,, the CDC came out with a report. And they said that one in six kids between the ages of two and eight…. These aren't kids with smartphones. Between the ages of two and eight, one in six kids had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.
That's a lot of kids. That's a lot of kids with a mental health diagnosis, right?
Do you think that it factors parents with mental health issues? And there's, I think, more adults are anxious. More adults are suffering from anxiety and depression, at least diagnosed anxiety and depression now than ever before.
I think adults are absolutely passing on their anxiety to their kids. And actually, we're seeing that in…. Jean Twenge came out with this book, Generations. And one of the things she said in it is that boys, even though teenage girls have the worst mental health in general, boys from liberal families had worse mental health than girls from conservative families in terms of anxiety and depression. So why should that be?
We know the girls are on social media more, right? Boys, you know, that's not their thing, right? They're into video games or whatever. But I think part of the reason is what you said. There are certain families that are passing on anxiety about things like climate change.
But I also think it shows that it's in the environment we're giving them. We're not giving kids a healthy life, right? We think that we can give them an unhealthy life and just pour in the mental health resources and remediate. But it doesn't work like that. And then the last reason I don't think that phones totally explain everything or social media is because in societies where they use just as much social media, it's not great for the kids' mental health, no doubt.
But they have much better rates of anxiety and depression than we do, countries like Japan and Israel, where kids have more independence. They have more freedom. They're able to take more risks on their own. And they walk home from school. They do all kinds of jobs outside of the house, like run errands for the family.
And they get a feeling of, first of all, short-term joy and long-term satisfaction from being able to take risks, see what they can handle, but also a feeling of efficacy in the world.
So that's an interesting statistic that you were saying that. So conservative families have less depressed kids. Is that what you're saying?
Apparently, boys from liberal families have higher anxiety rates than girls from conservative families.
But above, like, if you just looked at the norm, more girls generally have anxiety.
Right.
But in conservative families, girls are less anxious than boys from liberal families.
That's right. And, I mean, we could speculate as to why. There are lots of proposed reasons for that. But one of the many, you know, things that we might, first of all, we know it's in the environment. at that point.
It's not an organic, whatever these kids are going through, it's not organic, right? So we know it's something we're pouring into their life. And I think one of the things might be that, aside from the fact that parents in conservative families may be more comfortable asserting their authority with kids, and that's an old finding. We've known for generations now that authoritative parenting, meaning not cold parenting, not cruel, not unloving. But rules.
Those kids have better mental health, they're happier, and they're more successful in all kinds of ways. So it may be something to do with comfort, with rules, but also they're less likely to turn their kids' lives over to a mental health expert.
So what is the speculation as to why rules alleviate anxiety? Is it because there's structure? There's more structure to the world, so things seem less open-ended and less chaotic?
That's right. I think it's something to do with that. Kids need guardrails. They know they're not ready to be in charge. Parents today are so quick to put kids in charge.
What do you want? Where would you like to go to school? What would you like to eat for dinner? Putting kids in charge. But we've known since the 1960s, Diana Baumann did this research years ago, and it's some of the sturdiest research we have, because they've replicated it hundreds of times.
And they've shown that loving parents, who are also rule-bound, they call them authoritative, not authoritarian, which is the cold, unloving rule-bound. But the loving and rule-bound parents tend to raise the happiest kids because kids know there are guardrails. And here's the thing. The people who are making the rules aren't some expert mom hired. They're the people who love me most.
They're my parents. They're the ones in charge. I think that's really comforting to kids.
That's interesting, because that's not what people think of when they think of authoritarian or authoritative parents. Right. They think of parents that are restricting their children, and the children are going to rebel.
That's right. I mean, there's a lot of really good research on this, but it actually doesn't create more rebellious kids. By virtually every metric, they do much better in all kinds of circumstances and in all kinds of situations. And the permissive, what they used to have, was permissive parents and authoritarian parents. Those were the other two extremes.
Permissive parents let kids do whatever they wanted, and authoritarian parents said, obey, at all costs, and they were fairly cold. And their kids didn't end up great in terms of mental health. But today, we don't even have permissive parents. in my view. I think we have something even worse.
We have permissive parents who are therapeutic, meaning they're always asking kids what they want, and they're never asserting their authority, but they're doing something else. They're hovering and surveilling their kids. And so it's permissive without the independence.
Yeah. That's a weird one, right? Like the Snap Maps and stuff where you're following your kids everywhere on Snapchat.
They're surveilling them. These kids have no independence. They have no space for mom or dad, and it's not doing them any good.
Hmm. Why do you think it is that things have moved in this general direction? Like, why do you think it is that more parents are seeking psychotherapy for their children and that it's having this negative effect?
So I think, you know, I'm at the tail end of Gen X, 1978, the year I was born. And I think with my, you know, we were the high watermark of divorce. And I think a lot of, you know, teenagers who grew up when I did, they felt like, you know, my parents were divorced. They weren't there for me. I wish I had had someone I could talk to.
And so they sort of naively – and they had good experiences in therapy. And they sort of naively, you know, watched good will hunting, and they thought, you know, therapy is good for everyone. And they sort of naively turned their kids over to a mental health expert right away. You know, at the first, I talked to moms who signed their kids up for therapy because a cat died, because their grandma died, because basically anything that would happen in their life, even routine events. And, yeah, look, having your grandparents die is very sad, but that's not, you know, an unexpected trauma.
That's part of life, right? Yeah. And signing up your kid with a therapist might help if they're having a real problem, but it could also introduce other problems. And I think that's what we're seeing.
Yeah. There's a reluctance to let children experience discomfort.
Right. Exactly.
Yeah. Exactly. And that's really the only way you learn. You have to, you, we learn, I mean, obviously, bad feelings can be devastating, but bad feelings also can let you understand the landscape of the world better. And understand what to do and what not to do, and what the consequences are of certain actions.
You know, I had some friends when I was growing up that got, that became addicted to drugs. And it, it sealed the deal for me, like with cocaine, was a big one. Like I've never tried cocaine. And one of the main reasons is because of my friends that I had. when I was in high school.
I saw the negative. It was horrible. It was horrible to experience. It's horrible as a friend to watch all that go down. But those bad feelings teach you something.
They teach you something very important about what the consequences of certain behavior are.
That's exactly right. There's this amazing long-term study on kids who lived through the depression. And they found that the kids who ended up, and they followed these kids from, they were born 1920, 1921, and they followed them long-term. And you know who did the best in the Great Depression? It wasn't the poorest kids, whose parents, you know, killed themselves or abandoned them.
And it wasn't the rich kids who didn't feel the depression at all. It was the kids of the deprived middle class. The ones who had to take in extra jobs, wear hand-me-downs, do extra work. Those people ended up so scrappy and so strong. And here's the thing.
They also ended up happy. Really happy. Because they were resilient. They had lived through something. They had learned it.
And they learned this amazing gratitude when things went right.
Yeah. That's the thing. Overcoming adversity and becoming resilient. There's not, there's no pill for that. There's no, you can't just talk through that.
You have to actually experience it.
That's right. And we've spent so much time worrying about trying to make our kids happy. And we don't spend enough time trying to make them strong. And you know what? We've made them.
neither. Because making happiness your goal is actually a recipe for being unhappy. And if you don't make a kid strong, he can't be happy. And, you know, I think about my grandmother, and, you know, because everybody has, you know, if anybody thinks about their grandparents, they went through some hard stuff. Right?
I tell the story in the book. My own grandmother lived through the Depression. Her mother died in childbirth. giving birth to her. She was bounced around.
She had to be taken out of her father's home. I don't know if there was abuse. It's not clear. But somebody decided she should be taken out of her father's home. And he was raising four kids by himself.
And when her oldest sister married at 17,, she went to live with her. Then she ended up at 16.. She got spinal bulbar polio. She ended up in an iron lung for a year. And she went on to college.
She married. She raised three kids. She went to night school. She became one of the first judges in Maryland, female judges in Maryland. And she was the happiest person I knew.
And that's the kicker. Like. it wasn't just that she achieved so much. She was someone who took in foster kids her whole life. She was a happy person who felt grateful all the time.
And today, a school counselor would take one look at her and say, You've been through a lot of trauma. We should talk about it.
But there's got to be some middle ground, isn't there? Is there some middle ground where children can have someone they can confide in and have conversations with that can express these things to them? That, although you're going through something awful, that resilience is actually going to serve you in the long run. And even though this feels terrible now, on the other side of it, you will have new tools that will help you manage life.
If that were what school counselors said to kids, that would be amazing. But the problem is the mental health profession doesn't look at, doesn't track. There's no requirement that they track negative side effects. They're not measuring in general. Now I have some exceptions that I mention in the book, but in general they're not measuring.
Is your anxiety getting better? Like cognitive behavioral therapists will often measure, and they'll often say to a parent, I'm going to see him for this many sessions, and we're going to measure and make sure the phobia is improving. But very often they'll just talk about the pain. And talking about the pain regularly, endlessly, is often not as good for a kid as joining the basketball team.
So what you're talking about is essentially the title of your book, which is bad therapy. There has to be some good therapy, right?
Good therapy is therapy for a kid who needs it. Not preventive. I think so.
So what do you think the requirements would be for someone to get good therapy? Like what would have to be wrong in the child's life?
I think it would be something where the parent has tried to stabilize the kid, that they have a problem, it's interfering with functioning, and they can't stabilize the kid. They've tried other methods, and if they still can't stabilize the kid, I think therapy could be absolutely, really helpful. And I think you should then research the therapist, like you would any surgeon.
So do you think it's something like antidepressants where it's just over-prescribed? Yes. Where everything looks like a nail if you have a hammer?
Right. It's way, way, way over-prescribed. By the way, we have so many mentally unwell people in our streets who are completely underserved and under-treated. And I think the reason is treating them is really hard.
We also have a lot of mentally ill therapists. I was reading this crazy story about this therapist who convinced her client, her patient, to murder her ex.
Wow. Yeah.
She got this guy to fall in love with her, and then she got him to go and murder her ex.
I mean, I believe it. Of course. I mean, there's no question.
Therapists are humans.
Therapists are humans. And a lot of times when you talk to people who went through a PhD in psychology, they'll tell you that some of their colleagues were a little scary because they entered the profession, because they had mental health struggles of their own. And it's important that a therapist not inject their own problems into the therapy. And for that, you need a really good, qualified person. And I don't think that's the majority of what kids are getting.
No. So how do you know what these kids are experiencing when they're having this therapy? What are we basing this on? Do we get reports from the children of what they talked about with the therapists and know that that has had a negative effect? Okay.
So, first of all, there is no oversight, which is a huge problem. There's no one. The profession doesn't require it. They're not measuring harms. They're not tracking harms.
The medical professions, of course, do require it. They're federally required. If you have an adverse reaction to a drug, it gets reported. But with therapy, there is no tracking. But there's something else, too.
We know that as a treatment enters a population pool and it becomes more accessible and more prevalent, the rates of disease or malady or disorder should go down. Right? We've seen this with breast cancer. 1989 was the high watermark of breast cancer, you know, death from breast cancer. As screening improved, as it got more prevalent and more accessible to people, rates of death from breast cancer have plummeted.
So why are the people who are getting the most treatment and the most access to mental health treatment, they're having the worst anxiety and depression? Why? It's skyrocketing. It should be going down. If the treatment were effective, it would be going down.
But there are those other factors that we talked about, like social media, living in the age of the Internet. This is a bizarre time to be a child. I think that children today are experiencing unprecedented pressure in a weird way that no one knows how to navigate, because no one grew up with it besides them.
So, if you're talking about things like social media, I do think that makes childhood worse and harder. There's no question. And there are other things that are making childhood uniquely hard in some sense. Now, of course, we have generations that have lived through pandemics, great depression, economic deprivation, and all kinds of things. But two things.
One, with any population, you would want to see some dent in the depression. We're not seeing that. But the other thing is, where were the mental health experts with social media? They could have called for a ban. They didn't.
I don't think they knew right away. Right? It had never existed before.
No, but there's been really good evidence for the last eight years. I don't think there's a parent alive who doesn't already know that social media is bad for kids. Right? We've known the fonts. We see what they do.
We see how angry kids get when you try to take them away. We know that there's like this addictive element and that kids act a little crazed. We can see it, and we've known that. I mean, there's been good research out for eight years now. Why have the mental health organizations who have been in 2020 warning the Congress about climate change, systemic racism, police tactics?
They were quick to announce their views on all those things. They had nothing to say about the lockdowns. They had nothing to say about social media. They'd never called for a ban on social media. They never issued the same warning that doctors gave about cigarettes.
Why?
Because social media does have some positive aspects to it, unlike cigarettes. Right?
Cigarettes have positive aspects. They're neural stimulants. They're social. Right.
But it gives you cancer.
Long term.
Yeah.
Look, I'm saying I'm not an advocate for cigarettes. I see what you're saying.
I see what you're saying. Yeah.
But bottom line, they lead to cancer. And the medical establishment, the surgeon general, felt like we had to warn the public. they lead to cancer. And, just like that, if you're a responsible organization, you have to warn people, hey, you know what? The social media is really bad for kids.
We're seeing their anxiety get worse. They're on their phones all day long, even in school. We've known for eight years now that the research has been out. Sorry. We're warning parents.
We don't want to see smartphones in schools. And we think no teenager should be on social media. They could say that.
Do you think anybody would listen to that? That seems like. the problem with that is it's like trying to put the water back in the dam. I just don't believe that that would be effective. Maybe they could have said something about it at the very beginning.
If we knew the consequences of social media, let's go back to like 2005 or something like that, before it was really a thing. If they started seeing it happen, if they could put the kibosh on it then. But now that it's so ubiquitous, I can't imagine a world where anybody would effectively say. There's a state that's trying. Was it Montana?
that's trying to ban TikTok?
Okay. I don't know. I believe you.
There's, like some state that's trying to ban TikTok for kids.
For what, though? Something about kids using it.
Is it because of their access to questionable material?
October 24th. Multi-state federal lawsuit.
Dozens of states are suing Instagram parent meta over addictive.
Okay. Dozens of states sue Instagram parent meta over addictive features and youth mental health harms. So this is, I think they're talking about algorithms. They're talking about how algorithms target children, demand users constant attention. Meta has profited from children's pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem.
Yeah,
that's that lady from New York. Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable.
Interesting. Florida's got a separate lawsuit for misleading users about potential health risks.
How did they mislead them? I'd have to read the lawsuit.
So it says Meta's design choices and practices take advantage and contribute to young users' susceptibility to addiction, the complaint reads. They exploit psychological vulnerabilities of young users through the false promise that meaningful social connection lies in the next story, image, or video, and that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation. That seems like a stretch. I don't think they say that. No one says that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation.
What they do say is that children feel left out if they're not on social media because there's a lot of these little chat groups and they share videos and information. That's how they find about songs and bands that they like and movies that they like and television shows they like. So it is a part of society today. It's sort of an inexorable part of society.
Well, why? I mean, I think there are a couple of reasons why. One of them is we made no effort to even stop them during the school day, right? That would have been really easy. You can be on your phone, just not during the school day.
That's so obvious that it's almost pathetic that we don't have that already in place, right? Because why do you need to be checking your text? You're in school with your friends, right? So there were things that we could do and could have done, but we didn't do them. And I think one of the reasons was that I think that mental health experts, I mean, I know there are therapists who allow therapy over text message, right?
That seems crazy.
Yeah, it's crazy, but they have made no effort to stop this, to warn the public about this. And, frankly, I think in many cases they've undermined it, right? There are therapists who went on Zoom and never went back, right?
Yeah, well, Zoom is a little different, right? Because you actually are interacting with a person, even though it's through a screen. You're communicating with them, right?
You are, but you get none of the benefits of in-person. So, you know, this they have measured. And the benefits of being in person, seeing someone face-to-face, the psychic benefits, are real. Even when you're with someone, you don't want to be with. The kids who went home for the lockdowns and were in a big household full of relatives, they didn't want to be stuck with when they wanted to be in college.
They did better in terms of mental health than the kids who were isolated and stayed in school.
Right, but you're sort of arguing against therapy, but yet saying therapy in person is better than therapy on Zoom. For sure.
Yeah. I'm not arguing. I mean, I'm not arguing against. First of all, adults can see therapists for any reason. And that's totally not only up to them.
I think they have the stand to get. They are in a much better position to possibly benefit from it. I'm concerned about therapy for kids, especially kids who don't really need it. Who are a little bummed out. But in any case, we know that Zoom therapy or text therapy for the most anxious generation, for the most socially phobic generation, supposedly.
Well, that's not helpful.
So the thing that gets me about therapy, that I've always talked to the people that I know that are doing it all the time. I don't know how much you should be thinking about yourself. I don't know. I mean, is there a certain amount of time you should allocate to thinking about yourself and your own feelings and problems? And how much of that is self-indulgent and how much of that feeds that anxiety itself?
I mean, it does. Thinking about yourself is the same as unhappiness. in a certain sense, right? It is indistinguishable from anxiety and depression. And if you just think about how our football coaches motivate a team at halftime, what do they do?
They focus the team on the task ahead. That's the way to get them motivated. That's the way to help them complete it. What they don't say is, Johnson, are you still upset about your parents' divorce?
Yeah, that's not going to help you catch up with football. Tell me about your feelings. Why don't they do it? It's not just because they're repressed. It's because they know that if you want to get anything done in this world, you need to, yes, repress your feelings for a time and focus on the task.
But is it even repressing your feelings, or is it just not indulging those feelings and letting those feelings be the primary focus?
I think it's the same thing. I don't mean permanently. I don't mean there isn't a place for it. But when you're in the school, focusing on school, focusing on seeing your friends and going to recess or whatever else, the basketball, whatever the activity, is it really good for you? As opposed to sitting around and thinking about doing social emotional learning and thinking about the pain you're feeling right now, the emotional pain.
That's not going to help you get through your geometry test. Yeah.
Well, that is. one thing that's fascinating about human beings is that tasks and difficult endeavors seem to make people happier.
Yeah.
Especially when you complete them. That's right. And it gives you positive reinforcement that you actually can get through something difficult and that the end result, the feeling of accomplishment, is very valuable.
That's right. And one of the hardest, most worrisome parts of this generation is that they have the lowest sense of efficacy. They report an external locus of control, meaning they don't think they can improve their lives. See, millennials thought they could do anything, right? They are the Mark Zuckerberg generation.
And that's why we had so many tech founders in that generation. We're not seeing that with these young people. They don't want to be in charge. They're afraid and they don't feel up to it.
There's a friend of mine I call every year on her birthday, and she's a research scientist, cell biologist. And every year she invites kids to her lab for an internship who are top kids, pre-med graduates from college before they go on to med school. And she said to me in the last decade, when I called her this year for her birthday, she said to me, I can't believe you're writing about this generation. They are so different. And I said, tell me why.
She said, I'm seeing the smartest, most prepared kids, and they're afraid to run their own experiments. They tell me they're getting ready. They're working on their skills. They're not yet up to it. And they constantly report to me about their mental health, how they're feeling today.
They can't just take a chance and go with it.
It's weird because as a parent, like you, want to hear kids out. And when they're having like some sort of anxiety and issue, you want to talk with them and you want to talk through it. You don't want to tell them, hey, you're going to have to suck it up. I never say that. And I probably should.
I mean, I don't know if I should. But I mean, if I had boys, I probably would. I think I would probably treat them differently. But I think that there's a fine line. Where is the point of diminishing returns?
Where is it valuable to address feelings and anxiety and thoughts? And is it irresponsible to do so without giving them tools to mitigate those things? And, along with those tools, to explain to them that there's things that they're going to have to do in this life that are very difficult. But that there's a great reward in doing these very difficult things.
So the problem, as I see it, is not that you're not saying suck it up. It's that no one ever says suck it up, no matter how minor the scratch to these kids. Okay. And sometimes being told you'll live. Remember when dad used to say you'll live, or, you know, shake it off.
We never hear, shake it off anymore. No one says it. So they don't know they can overcome even minor injuries. And the truth is they can. They can.
But they recently did these studies on these, you know, coping techniques. They taught coping techniques to teenagers, over 1,000 teenagers in Australia. It was called the Wise Teens Program.
And that was the point. It was just to help them with emotional regulation. And it turned out. it made kids sadder and more anxious. They measured this.
And the reason was regularly ruminating on. your bad feelings can make you feel worse.
Did you talk to therapists when you did this?
Yeah, a lot of therapists. Yeah.
How many of them agree with you?
So there was a huge split. The academic research psychologists overwhelmingly agreed. They were aware of the literature, and they said, yeah, these are bad practices. Here are things we shouldn't be doing with kids. What was interesting is a lot of the clinical therapists were either minimized the risks of therapy or denied that there were any.
But isn't that, like Jiffy Lube? Like when you tell them, you don't need to change your oil that much. Well, it's their business to change oil. Right. Exactly.
Exactly. So. I talked to this one amazing child psychologist who said to me, I start by having my patients sign a waiver in which they acknowledge that there can be risks. And the reason I would do that is because I don't want them to experience harm. So if they see that their worries are getting worse, they have to tell me.
Huh. But do they? Would they? I mean, it seems like the therapist is the one who's in control, right? Right.
The therapist is the expert. They're the one who has the authority.
Right. Well, I mean, this one was Camilo Ortiz. He was the one I talked to and the one that I was referring to there. And first of all, he always starts a therapy by setting the number of sessions. He doesn't treat a kid like an annuity.
You're going to be my income stream for years. Right. And also, they come to him with an actual problem, like chronic bedwetting, like, you know, various kinds of phobia. You know, there are people who treat anorexia. They're tackling a problem.
Right.
And those, some of those therapies are extremely necessary and very successful.
When this person gets this person that you were just describing, if they get someone that comes to them, that doesn't have a real problem, do they turn them away?
Well, you can ask, but very often therapists don't turn them away. That's the problem. Right. Too many therapists. I mean, you know, I saw, you know, I think back to the first book, and I would ask, like, was there ever?
did anyone have a therapist who said, you know what? I don't think the trans identity fits you. Right. You know, that doesn't seem to make sense to me. On almost no cases did the therapist stop a girl from going down that road.
No, you don't have gender dysphoria. Listen, it's mostly little boys. Okay. It's overwhelmingly little boys. Starts with little boys.
And you see it in men. It's overwhelmingly male phenomenon. And it always starts ages two to four. So you discovering this at age 12.. Let me tell you something with your friends.
It's so unlikely. We don't even need to go there. They never said that.
Well, I think they get scared of the blowback as well. Sure. What they would hear from their parents. You're telling my child they don't have a problem when they have a problem.
Well, also, the incentive is for therapists to treat the least sick for the longest period of time. That's the incentive. Yeah. Because you don't want the schizophrenic patient who really needs you.
Right.
They're really hard to treat.
Almost impossible.
Almost impossible. Right. You don't want the bipolar patient. Right. Some people will refuse to see those patients.
But a teenager with a little social anxiety, parent pays on time. They're not getting violent in your session.
Oh, boy.
Wow.
You know, I never really considered that until your book. Until I heard the title of your book and I read the synopsis of it, I never really considered it. I never considered that thinking about your problems all the time and talking about your problems all the time literally make the problems grow.
That's right. I mean, it's the number one symptom of depression is what they call rumination, this pathological obsessing over your pain.
Yeah.
That's why stuff like exercise, that's one of the reasons, aside from chemical reasons, one of the reasons that doing anything, you know that running errands is good for your mental health? Getting out of your house and accomplishing anything is good for you? Yeah. But sitting around talking and thinking about your problems, that's a bad habit. And the best cognitive behavioral therapists and others, you know, the dialectical behavioral therapists, the ones who do really well with depression, the first thing they do is try to break that bad pattern.
But a lot of therapists just indulge it.
It's also, it's a luxury that's provided to you by a life that's fairly safe. You know, people that live in war-torn countries and have very difficult lives, they don't have that luxury of just sitting around all day and doing nothing, and, oh, I go outside and run errands. That's going to make me feel better. You're dealing with like real stress.
That's right.
And I think that there's an expression that someone told me once, and I say it all the time. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. If it's you got a dent in your car or it's your parents get killed in a car accident, either. one of those things is the worst thing. Depending upon the level of whatever stress or anxiety or horrible things that you've experienced in your life, that sort of measure, that's your watermark for what you can and can't tolerate.
That's right. And what we should be telling kids is that the amazing story of human history is of resilience. It used to be the case that people lost a sibling. That was common. People lost a parent.
That still happens, right? These things still happen. And the amazing story of human history doesn't mean it's not painful, but of resilience. They get on. They aren't permanently suffering with mental illness or mental problem.
They form families. They are responsible in their jobs. They show up for work. They can be depended on by their friends. That's the story of human survival and resilience.
And unfortunately, we're telling kids, no, you've had trauma.
Yeah. Yeah, you've had trauma and you need to work through that trauma. Right. It's not just this is just a part of life. And, you know, what you need to do is just go out there and live your life and you'll get over it.
And, you know, the thing is, the truth is that most kids and most people did. In other words, that didn't mean that dad didn't lose his job and they were forced out of the, you know, they had to lose their house or these things happen. They've happened in every family. And I think one of the many reasons that kids don't know this today is we've cut them off from extended family. The story of their grandparents is a story of resilience in almost every case.
Right. You think of what you hear about your family history and you're going to hear a story of pain and survival and resilience and overcoming. But today you've got teenagers who say, oh, I can't drive past my middle school where I was bullied because of my PTSD. They don't have PTSD. But they think they do.
And what do they have, though? If you are bullied, that does have a significant psychological effect on kids, and it can lead to lifelong depression.
I don't know that it can. I mean, I don't think so.
Like for young people that like, get treated like shit and told that they're nothing and useless. And that sort of like when I didn't really get bullied in high school, but I remember going back towards my high school when I was like 19 and I'd get anxiety. Right. And I'd get weirded out by it, you know? Right.
So let me just say, yeah.
You start feeling like you used to feel when you went there.
Absolutely. But that's not a PTSD flashback.
Right. What is that?
That's a bad memory. And we have them. And, by the way, when I say you can't have, you know, bullying can mean anything. Right. So when I say, you know, I'm talking about teasing.
I'm not talking about the horrific abuse that some kids have gone through. But do you have anxiety? Yeah. Anxiety exists for a reason. It's actually adaptive.
And so there are benefits to anxiety and there are negative parts of anxiety. Now, I'm not talking about anxiety disorder. We don't want anyone to suffer with an anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life. But a little anxiety and a bad memory, that's not only part of life, but it can have positive effects. So some of the positive effects of anxiety is it helps with performance.
If I weren't nervous for this right now, I wouldn't have prepared so much to make sure I remembered what I was going to talk about. Right. And we don't want someone with no anxiety crossing a street because he's not going to look for cars. Right. And we're going in with medication and we're deleting things like anxiety and depression.
Anxiety helps you make beautiful memories. You remember Christmas morning because of all the nerves about it ahead of time. Or you remember your first kiss, partially because of the anxiety. That's why the memories are so clear. Right.
And when we go in and we give kids a pill for that, not only are they not developing an emotional musculature they're going to need as adults, but actually they're losing a really important part of the human experience, like feeling low because you were dumped and then seeing you can get over it.
Right. That's a very important thing that you just said about experiencing anxiety. It actually helps you be sharper. It does. It really does.
You have to be nervous before you do things. That's right. That are difficult. It's just that uncomfortable feeling people avoid. Right.
Because they get scared of the anxiety. But if you talk to, like, one of the best examples is UFC fighters. UFC fighters, before they fight, they're all nervous. They're all scared. Every one of them.
Terrified. And they don't want to fight. if they're not. Right. If you're too calm and too relaxed, you actually have bad performances.
And I'll tell you something else. Same is true with depression. Now, I'm not talking about major depressive disorder. that's chronic and needs treatment, of course. Right.
But if you have something bad happen to you, you go through a divorce, you go through something hard. Okay. That doesn't mean you should never try, you know, use meds or therapy if you absolutely need it. But there can be good. And here's what can be good.
Okay. Depression is adaptive. Okay. And the purpose, I learned this from talking to interviewing a lot of evolutionary psychologists. And one of the good things about depression is it shuts us down.
so we don't do anything rash. And we think about what change we might want to make in our life. Because sometimes we need to make a change. And if we just medicate away the bad feelings, the worst feelings might be dampened. But we also might be locked into that low state and never make the change we need to make.
Right.
Because we'll lose the motivation. That's the thing. We won't say, you know what? He treated me badly. I'm tired of this.
I'm not getting back together with him. Right. We might just accept it and keep on.
Right. Especially if you're medicated.
Especially if you're medicated. That will to make a big change. often happens after we've been brought low.
Yeah. It's interesting, because this conversation is such a blanket conversation. And when you're talking about people's personal experiences, their personal depression and trauma, people are always very quick to sort of accentuate the negative aspects of whatever they've gone through. No, no, no. You're talking about, but mine was worse.
Right. But mine was this. Right. Mine was unbearable.
And I think that's something that our society, for whatever reason, encourages. That's right.
So one of the psychiatrists I interviewed was this man, Paul McHugh, who used to be the head of the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department. And he looked at vets, combat vets in America and Israel. And what he wanted to know was why was there less PTSD among the combat vets in Israel. And one of the things he noticed was that they treat them very differently. When an Israeli soldier saw something traumatic, a potentially traumatic event, maybe an IED exploding or something, their body's torn apart and killed.
They took them out of battle. They said, listen, just so you know, your reaction is totally normal. We're sending you home for a few weeks. You're going to feel better, and then we're going to put you right back. But you're going to recover.
We're going to put you right back with your men. And with America, when someone had seen something horrific, they would pull them out of battle. They would meet with a therapist who would tell them, you have the symptoms of PTSD. Here is PTSD. Your government did this to you.
And it's possible you may be suffering with this chronically, and they didn't recover the same rate.
So it's a get back on the horse type thing?
Yeah, it is, which doesn't minimize what people, you know, all the traumatic things. I mean, some people will have harder time getting back on the horse. They may need more treatment than other people. But what's amazing is most people, even who go through traumatic experiences, even most combat vets, the majority don't get PTSD. because actually, the story of human history, the story of our experience, is of resilience.
And if we just think back to our grandparents, we know this is true. We can't guarantee for our kids that they won't go through hard things. In fact, the one certainty is that they will. But the message to them has to be, but you're so strong. Our family is strong.
Our family has gone through hard things. I've gone through hard things, and you can too. And if you say that to kids, you have a much better shot that they will.
How do we know that the majority of combat vets don't experience PTSD?
Because they... There's this crazy study. So they look through... This is just one example. Vietnam vets, they know what percentage saw combat.
It was something like 12% to 15% actually saw combat. But for whatever reason, when they surveyed Vietnam vets, 30% of them were reporting PTSD.
That's iatrogenesis. That means that they've been hearing about the symptoms of PTSD, they were thinking about their friends who've had PTSD, and more people were coming to believe they had PTSD than actually could have had it. But you're still talking about a small percentage of people who go through some really hard things in combat. Something like at 70% to 80%, no matter how many traumatic experiences they've seen, and you have four tours in Iraq, they still, for whatever reason, don't have the symptoms.
Yeah, I've talked to friends of mine that are veterans about this, and one of the things they said is that... My friend, who was a SEAL, said that Special Forces guys experience it less, although they do experience it, because they're proactive. They're acting, they're doing something, they're moving. Whereas, he said, the real people that experience it are sometimes people that are stuck on a base. They're always worried about being attacked.
Oh, wow. I love that.
Yeah, the fear of constantly being worried that you're going to be attacked versus the fear of going out on a mission.
That's exactly right.
Having a deployment, going out there and engaging the enemy. That they're task-oriented and that they're the ones in control.
That's right, and what we want to say to kids is be a Navy SEAL. Go out there and attack those tasks, whatever they are. Make a new friend, go play a sport, go do things. Don't sit around thinking about yourself.
Well, it's also, there's a rite of passage that goes with being a Navy SEAL. It's a very difficult thing to acquire. Most people quit. That's the ringing the bell thing. They bail.
They can't take the stress of it because they put you through hell. And they put you through hell to find out who's resilient and who's not. Right. And to show you that you could do it.
But we're not even teaching kids to aspire to that anymore. No. There's a lot of ways to be a Navy SEAL. I mean, some is the official being a Navy SEAL, an actual Navy SEAL. But there's so many ways to be strong and make a difference in the world and do things.
And that message that your friend mentioned, that's a good message for kids. It's not what we're telling them. Right.
It's also, to speak to him and his situation, he said that they're trying to lower the standards. And they're saying that, you know, because occasionally guys will die or get severely injured in training, that they're trying to make it more easy.
That's right.
And he's like, that's terrifying. The last thing you want is someone who can't quite make it on your team.
Yeah, that's right. And we're lowering the standards and expectations. I mean, this is the trauma generation, right? We've told them over and over, you can't handle very much. Don't worry.
I'm going to write you in. They have these things in schools called anytime passes, where if a kid's feeling a little anxious, they'll get a pass from the school counselor and they're allowed to leave class anytime they're feeling anxious. Well, how's a kid going to sit through anything if they've been given this pass to leave class, any class they don't like? Right.
I would use that constantly.
Anybody would. Anybody would. And teachers tell me it's getting abused like crazy. Yeah. You know, they're not keeping the standards for kids high.
And you know what? Kids who've gone through hard things, and there are those kids, they need high standards, they need expectations, and they need to be told you can do it. There's this one woman I talked to. She was raising three kids out of foster care with her wife, okay? And these kids had gone through horrible traumatic experiences.
I mean, so bad, so abused by their birth parents, that the detective who took them from their home cried on the stand talking about what they had lived through. And she said to me, you know, my kids, I have therapists who are dealing with them. They are in a lot of serious there. They've been through a lot. And I can't – one of the hardest things in my life is that I have to send them to public school, where teachers and counselors are constantly playing amateur therapists, asking my kids to open up about their trauma.
I'm trying to get them with actual professionals that I have picked to get through the day and not think about the hard things they went through. And all these teachers are just asking them about their trauma all day long. It's not helping.
That's a very specific case, though, right?
Well, yeah, but I guess the point is it doesn't help the kids who've lived through serious trauma and it doesn't help the kids who are just fine. So who are we helping?
So is the problem that these people that are teachers, they're well-intended, they just don't understand that dwelling on this and talking about it constantly is not beneficial? Yes. And in fact, it would just be more beneficial to be friendly to that kid and kind and offer encouragement.
That's right.
Give them activities and give them encouragement and support.
That's right. Most people who work with kids care about kids. I have that prejudice. I assume, and I think it's true, that most people who work with kids want to do what's best for kids. Sometimes they do things that aren't best for kids, and having them focus on their feelings all the time is not best for kids.
That's the way to make you more emotionally dysregulated.
This is going to be very difficult for people to hear that are very sensitive and very concerned about their children. Their strategy has always been to move it in a general direction. Also, people that are experiencing a lot of anxiety and depression themselves, who are raising children,
I think they become accustomed to talking about it and dwelling on it.
That's right. And in fact, some of the most effective ways to treat childhood anxiety is by treating the parents.
Oh, boy.
Parents are a huge source of anxiety for kids.
What's the primary source of anxiety that comes from parents?
Worry over everything. Teaching kids they have to be afraid of everything, that they can never do anything without the parents' supervision. They can never go anywhere where their parents won't see them, because they could be abducted or hurt or abused. Calling the teacher and saying, my daughter was bullied because someone said something mean to her. The child gets the message, I can't handle something mean said to me.
I will fall apart. That's what my mom's saying. She's so scared I'm going to fall apart. She's calling my teacher.
Yeah. There's also the opposite of that, too, where if you grow up with a parent that's very weak, you despise that, and you become strong because of that. I have a friend whose mom was a severe alcoholic, and because of that he became very disciplined, because he realized if you let something like that control your life, he saw what happened to his mother, and he's like, that's never happened to me. Wow.
And that's a really strong person as a result, and part of his strength, which I'm sure is having that real-life experience, which was hard, and it was painful, and it taught him a lesson that no teacher could give him, which is that you need discipline in life.
Right, but it's very difficult to learn from a bad example sometimes, especially if your parent's constantly worrying and constantly negative about things. Right. Yeah.
Right, but you know what we do? We let kids try. We give them freedom from our oversight. You know what they do in Japan? In Japanese preschools, they have these little areas.
They're designed to have areas for kids where the teachers can't see, so that they work out their own problems. Remember, we used to say to kids, work it out? Now the teachers get involved in every squabble. They think it's their job to go in there and give kids tips on how to make friends and get involved. We never tell kids, look, work it out.
Yeah.
And you know what they learn from. working it out? I can. I don't need my mom calling my boss, as a lot of this generation's parents are doing. Right.
I'll handle it. I can. I've been doing it since preschool.
Right.
What has the reaction to this book been? Have you had some negative reactions? Have you had anybody that wants to debate you on this?
It's a good question. Overwhelmingly, it's actually been surprisingly positive, but you want to know the truth? The dads especially love the book. The dads will be like, can you give this to my wife? I mean, sometimes they'll say that to me, because I think, you know, the biggest change in the last generation in parenting, aside from the role of therapy sort of taking over, and I think therapeutic parenting take it over, everybody's trying to be a mental health expert with their kids, but I think the biggest change was dads.
Dads stopped, you know, I think, being a sort of a backstop and saying, he's fine. He'll handle it. I did it. He can do it. Or I did it.
She can do it. She's fine. Shake it off. Go back to, you know, keep playing soccer, whatever it is. They stopped doing that in part because they didn't feel like we were told.
I mean, in general, we've all been told, right? The mental health experts tell you how to talk to your children. They tell you what your child can handle. They pretend they're experts on the brain, when the truth is, and I've interviewed a lot of neurobiologists and, you know, academic psychologists and psychiatrists, and they will tell you, we know very little about the brain. And a lot of these therapists don't know anything about the brain.
We certainly don't know much about emotion in the brain, right? And so the idea that we need brain science in order to raise our kids is just not true, and it's not helpful. It's undercutting parents' confidence. Parents need to trust themselves. We've been raising good kids for a long time.
Are there any studies about the cultures or the civilizations, whatever countries, that have the most mentally healthy people?
Well, that's a good question. So I interviewed one woman who runs the Georgetown Emotions Lab, and she's a cultural psychologist.
Oh, the Emotions Lab.
Yeah. It was actually really neat. I went into her lab, and we did these. She showed me these tests. she does with subjects behind a one-way mirror, and she hooks them up to electrodes.
And she looks at them. Her name is Julia Chentsova-Dutton. She's amazing. And she looks at Russia, Japan, America, and other countries, especially in the West. So I guess you want to look at like and compare, like to like, so sort of similar Western cultures, I guess, Asian, but similar levels of development and stress, a certain kind of stress.
And one of the things she noticed in her research was that American kids tended to exaggerate dangers.
So when they listed things they were afraid of or things that scared them, they would say, stranger looking at me, funny, things that weren't actual dangers. But teenagers from other countries, Russia, Japan, they tended to be able to calibrate what was an actual danger much better. And that's what we're seeing on campus. We're seeing these kids having nervous breakdowns because someone dumped them or because a teacher gave them a bad grade. Because they couldn't hand her a paper in on time.
One of the things that drives me the most nuts about universities is this term, microaggressions, which is so crazy. It's like looking for things to be bigger than they are, taking a very small thing, whether it's someone like rolling their eyes at you or saying something that might be insensitive and calling that insensitive thing a microaggression.
That's right. And it's exactly right. And one of the things I looked at was, are we turning these kids into emotional hypochondriacs? And what I mean is I interviewed a world expert, Arthur Barsky, at Harvard Medical School, on hypochondriasis, being hypochondriac, what they now call it illness, anxiety disorder, or somatic symptom disorder. And what is it?
So it turns out what it is is people who put hyper focus on the normal pains. we all feel. They're not faking it. They're just attending to the normal pains and increasing their pain by doing that. And people who turn their pain into an organizing principle of life, of their whole lives, they have a hard time overcoming it.
It becomes their identity.
It becomes their identity. And that's what kids are doing today about their emotional pain. Oh, I have social anxiety. I had trauma from my breakup. You don't have trauma from your breakup.
Okay? You had a breakup and it's painful. But using these psychiatric terms. Trauma. It's not helping.
It's not. It's exaggerating the pain and it's making that pain feel worse. And I'm not minimizing these kids' pain. They are in real pain and they're making it worse.
I would be really fascinated to see you have a conversation with someone who is a therapist, who engages in this, who thinks it's beneficial.
I would love. I mean, I'd be happy to. I would love to. I mean, I would like to see, you know. Look, there are therapists that I've met who I would take my own kids to, who I've, you know, very impressed by what they have to say and what they've done.
But the therapists who claim that everyone needs to talk about their problems, well, no, they don't. That's not true. I interviewed a lot of great therapists who tell me that a lot of people who have experienced terrible trauma, they do better by not talking about it. They're therapists who deal with, and I'm talking about people who work with convicts, people who have unspeakable childhood abuse, actually are very helped by acknowledging. I know you went through some hard stuff.
Let's talk about, you know, what you're doing. now. That turns out to be better for some people. So this endless rehashing of your pain, this myth that you can only be helped by talking about your pain, it's just not true. There's no evidence behind it.
And, in fact, you know, there's these crazy studies that burn victims, people who've experienced all kinds of first responders. Breast cancer survivors have been made to feel worse by talking about it, by being therapy, in therapy. They had control groups. They've done these studies where burn victims, one portion of them went to group therapy. The other portion didn't.
And the ones who didn't go to therapy ended up better, with less symptoms. after, you know, nine months, I think it was.
And why do you think that is?
Because they did other things that are healing, too, like spend more time with family, like get involved in work, like, you know, pick up a phone and call a friend you haven't seen in a while.
Find a natural way to mitigate that.
Exercise is amazing. I mean, study after study has shown that exercise is amazing. And you know what it doesn't have? All these bad side effects, right, of loss of sex drive, like SSRIs have.
Yeah.
Right? We know that the antidepressants come with all these horrible side effects, especially for adolescents, like the risk of suicide and other things. Right? You know what doesn't have that? Exercise.
Yeah.
So I'm not saying don't get help. And if you really need it, get the medicine and get the therapy. What I'm saying is, if you don't really need it, gosh, there's a lot of ways to feel better. And we seem to have forgotten about those.
Is there a chart or a graph that shows the amount of therapy that was given to children over the years now versus the past?
So we know that it's gone way up. I don't know if there's a chart, but I know that they say roughly 40% of the rising generation has had therapy. That's a lot. It's way more than any prior generation. 42% of them have a mental health diagnosis.
That's a lot. 42% of kids have a mental health diagnosis? 42?.
There was just a news article saying that 86% of them think they have menu anxiety.
Menu anxiety?
That's ordering from a menu in a restaurant.
What?
They have a friend order for them.
Oh, my God.
Yeah. I mean, these are kids who think of themselves as unwell.
Menu anxiety? Really? That's a thing?
You know, I mean, climate anxiety, summer anxiety, when your parents move, dislocation, depression.
Summer anxiety?
Summer anxiety.
So here it is. 42% of Gen Z diagnosed with a mental health condition. Jeez, Louise.
That's a lot.
That's crazy. But that's what my question would be. What is that internationally? Like when you're dealing with other countries.
Oh, it's much better. internationally. I mean, there's no question. We have the most anxious and most depressed teens and adolescents.
And what caused that? Is that the rise of this industry? The rise of the therapy industry? Is it something that is in the zeitgeist, where people in this culture sort of gravitate towards that sort of thinking, that therapy, and talking it through, is very important? Like what is it?
I think we're not giving them a healthy life. And that includes. It's like, remember, they used to give us with sugar cereals. They used to say like there'd be a bowl of sugar cereal and there'd be like eggs and toast and orange juice. And they would say, Frosted Flakes, part of a nutritious breakfast.
Right.
Right. And we knew it was bad for us, but we had these other healthy things around us.
I don't think we knew it was bad for us when I was a kid.
Frosted Flakes?
I never thought it was bad.
Really?
Well, we didn't know. sugar was bad for you.
Well, in my. I mean.
We thought it'd give you cavities. Well, okay. That was the only thing anybody worried about.
But I mean, kids weren't allowed. I mean, at least in my house. We weren't allowed to have sugar.
Well, I'm a little older than you. Okay. I'm 10 years older than you. Okay.
So we weren't allowed to have sugar cereal. And the best thing we ever got was Honey Nut Cheerios. That was like a miracle. When that came in, it was so exciting.
We used to put sugar on our Frosted Flakes. You were allowed to have sugar and put sugar on everything. I love that. Yeah. People, in my generation, people, ate sugar all the time and there was no fear.
It was just brush your teeth. I know. It's psychotic. But, you know, obviously you know the story behind that. That was all because of the sugar industry bribing scientists.
I didn't know that. To pass the blame on saturated fat. Yeah, because sugar was causing heart disease. It was causing all sorts of problems that people were having. It was causing obesity.
And the sugar industry bribed some scientists in the 1960s to pass the blame onto saturated fat. And that's where margarine came from and all the other stupid shit. Right. That's terrible for you. Right.
Seed oils, all these different things. Canola oil that people thought was actually better for you. Right. But it's not. It's not better for you at all.
Your body doesn't even know how to digest that shit. Right.
So we've given kids worse diet over the years. We've given them, you know. Processed foods. Yeah. We've given them less exercise.
We've given them less connection to family, people, relational stability. Having this set of friends or relatives who are cousins around you, grandparents, who love you unconditionally over your life. Kids don't have that anymore. They don't have the neighborhood. And they don't have space from mom monitoring them.
Or another adult she's hired to monitor them. Or the recess monitor. Or my kids have bus monitors. They have monitors everywhere. And monitoring is the same as stress for kids.
Wonderful academic psychologist, Peter Gray, told me this. That when they want to introduce stress to a subject, they introduce monitoring. Because it's the same thing.
Really? Really. So. if they have a subject and then they're going through a test and they have someone stand over and watch, that introduces anxiety?
That will introduce stress. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's the condition we're raising kids in. We're going to track you on your phone, even in college. Oh, how was your trip to the Rite Aid? I can see you on my phone. We're doing that.
Yeah.
Kids are doing it to each other.
Kids are doing it to each other.
Yeah, my daughters, all our friends know where everyone is. Right. On Snap Map.
Right. It's not good for them. They don't have freedom to just be.
Yeah.
So I think we're giving all kinds of things. We're making their lives less healthy. And then we just pour in the mental health resources. Oh, we're going to keep your life unhealthy, but we're going to pour in SSRIs, antidepressants. We're just going to pour in the therapy.
Well, that doesn't remediate.
Have you had anybody push back on this? Like you said, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. But what has the negative response been?
So I think that some parents feel like, you know, it seems to be mostly moms, but some of them feel insecure. Like, well, you don't know. You know, my kid really had sensory deprivation issues. So I really did need to see that therapist. But I don't know the situation.
I mean, I think in general, parents know their own kids. Right. And if they have tried other things, the problem is not parents seeking out help. The problem is it's when it's the first resort. The problem is not that parents ever allow their kid to get a diagnosis.
The problem is that some parents are going diagnosis shopping. Because sometimes a neuropsychologist will say, your kids, sorry, they're within normal range, and the parents will keep going.
And they're doing it because they don't have, you know, sometimes they're unwilling to be an authority in their home. Maybe because they feel that that's traumatizing. They're unwilling to impose any kind of discipline. The kid is disordered. The kid has a lot of tech.
And then, lo and behold, he can't concentrate in school. And the teacher has a problem with him. Well, I talked to parents where they said one year my teacher thought my kid had ADHD, and the next year they didn't. Why would that be? And why is the teacher diagnosing the kid?
Yeah. Are they qualified?
Are they qualified? Well, they're a little conflicted, right? Yeah. Because they have an interest in getting you bolted to your seat. Right.
They don't care about the long-term effects of, or they might not be aware of them, the long-term effects of strotera, cancer, you know, Ritalin. Yeah. The fact that you might need to take more and more of it over time to get the same effects. The withdrawal for some of these things, Adderall, people have told me it's brutal.
Yeah, it's brutal. Well, it's amphetamines. Right. They're highly addictive. Right.
And we're giving them out like candy.
Like candy. That's the problem. It's the like candy part.
There was a recent study that said 39 million. What is the number of prescriptions per year of Adderall? It's something bonkers when you really know what Adderall is. And essentially, this is like what they were doing in the 1940s with crystal meth in Germany. They were giving it to soldiers.
They were giving it to people. They're giving them methamphetamines, because methamphetamines make you more alert, makes you more hyper-focused, makes you more productive, makes you more willing to engage in things. And it's an unnatural stimulant that you're adding to someone's mind and you're getting a result, and you perceive those results to be positive, because they fit along with what we're looking for in terms of outcomes. Right. But you're not thinking of the long-term consequences of ramping up someone on fucking amphetamines all day long.
What's the number? Oh, even worse. 41.4 million Adderall prescriptions were dispensed in the U.S. in 2021, up more than 10% for 2020, according to IQVIA, a health research firm. What's happening?
Getting a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, which can be treated by Adderall and other stimulants, got significantly easier during the pandemic. A wave of telemedicine startups hit TikTok and Instagram with advertisements suggesting that people look into ADHD medication if they felt distracted. By the way, that would have been me. If this shit was around when I was a kid, I'd never paid attention in school. And I would have probably thought that I had a disease.
Some startups diagnose people with ADHD and prescribed stimulants after 30 minute video calls, entirely remotely and much faster than a typical diagnosis from an in-person psychiatrist. The Wall Street Journal reports. Yes, but the trouble with such rapid diagnosis is that it can be difficult to tell whether ADHD is actually the problem. Anxiety can present as ADHD and depression can present as ADHD. As Sanford Neumark said, Sanford Neumark, a professor at University of California, San Francisco Medical School.
Of course. I mean, look, if you give someone stimulants, they're going to feel better. That's why people do coke. Right. You know, it makes you feel better.
And what if you start them on it when they're four or five? And guess what? There are a lot of jobs where ADHD might not harm them. In other words, it might even be an asset, right?
It's a superpower.
I think it can be. I mean, you know, there's an amazing piece in the Wall Street Journal by a guy who argued that in the military, in venture capital, where you have to have...you're constantly checking, you know, other companies, or constantly looking into... Being able...someone who's constantly shifting their focus turned out to be an asset, unmedicated.
Well, I think that the idea is that it came from hunter-gatherer tribes.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah. See if you could find that, that ADHD, that the trait emanated from hunter-gatherers. The thing is, like, a lot of ADHD people, if they find a thing that they really enjoy, they get very focused on it. Right. Which is what was the thing with me.
Exactly.
I thought that because I couldn't pay attention in school, that I was going to be a loser. A recent review of the evidence by child and adolescent psychiatrists, Annie Swanepole, how do you say that? I don't know. And colleagues, made the case for the latter. They argue that ADHD traits likely evolved in early human environments that rewarded exploration, novelty-seeking, and movement, such as nomadic and migrating communities.
Yeah, it's probably how you stayed alive. And if you were strapped down doing something really fucking boring, that seems completely unnatural, which is part of the problem with children in the first place. We're subjecting them to eight hours a day of doing something you don't want to do, because they say it's for your mental development. And what they're essentially doing is teaching you how to do something that you fucking hate, so that you will be able to do that for the rest of your life.
Right. And you know what they could do with those kids? Give them longer recess.
They also could tell them that there's other things you could do for a living if you could find the thing that you actually enjoy and focus on that. And that was the thing that I didn't know until I started doing things outside of school. I didn't know that there was things that I could excel at because I actually enjoyed them. And I would focus on those things and get very good at them. And I didn't know that that was a part of me.
I had never been told that. Everybody was just like, if you can't do this, you are going to be a loser. If you can't sit and pay attention to this boring ass teacher, teach this boring ass thing that they have no emotional investment in whatsoever.
Right. And it was never true. That's the thing. You were incredibly successful, despite what they said. But imagine if they had said to you, actually, there's something wrong with your brain.
It's called ADHD. You need a pill so you can be like everybody else. Would you have had the same motivation to go? keep looking for what you were good at and what you were passionate about?
No, I probably wouldn't have. I probably would have been medicated. If I had the wrong parents at the wrong time in history, I probably would have been medicated. And who knows? I probably would have some fucking horrible job where I couldn't wait to get to my pharmacy so I could refill my prescription because I'm running low.
And I talked the doctor into ramping up my Adderall.
We're putting seven-year-olds on Lexapro.
That's crazy. That is so crazy.
FDA just approved it for seven-year-olds. These are kids who are going to have their sex drive deleted before they ever have a sex drive. So when they reach the teenagers, because kids do not go off them, they put them on antidepressants and they put them on more, they'll never have had a sex drive. They won't even know what they're missing. And that's the problem.
The problem is not, and I'm not saying no medication for anyone ever. What I'm saying is, when you get in there and change a kid, you put a kid in an emotional snowsuit, not only will they never have the feeling, I overcame that on my own. I thought I had ADHD, but I'm so excited about this other thing I got into. Not only will, they'll never know they could get through a breakup without a pill, because they've never done it.
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