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Joe Rogan Experience #2109 - Abigail Shrier

Abigail Shrier is an independent journalist and author. Her latest book is "Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up." www.abigailshrier.comwww.thetruthfairy.info

Abigail ShrierguestJoe Roganhost
Jun 27, 20242h 0mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:22

    Reunion after the 2020 controversy

    1. NA

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. AS

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. NA

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)

    4. JR

      Hello.

    5. AS

      Hello.

    6. JR

      Abigail, good to see you again.

    7. AS

      It's great to see you.

    8. JR

      Um, what was, uh, what was it like the last time you did the show?

    9. NA

      (laughs)

    10. AS

      (laughs)

    11. JR

      (laughs)

  2. 0:22 – 3:51

    Censorship pressure campaigns: Spotify, Twitter, Target, and narrative control

    1. AS

      Well, they tried to kick it off Spotify. (laughs)

    2. JR

      Yeah, it was a very small, noisy group of people, by the way.

    3. AS

      Yeah.

    4. JR

      It wasn't the- the head people.

    5. AS

      Right.

    6. JR

      Th- 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?

    7. AS

      2020.

    8. JR

      2020?

    9. AS

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      Um, the, it had sort of just started boiling.

    11. AS

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      You know? And now, four years later, it's- th- there's a lot of people pushing back now.

    13. AS

      That's right. And I th- honestly, I thought you were gonna never have me on your show again. (laughs)

    14. JR

      Why?

    15. AS

      Because, you know, it was very, I mean, they had 10 meetings with the employees demanding that it be removed. I thought, "Joe's gonna be so mad at me." (laughs)

    16. JR

      No. No, they're wrong. They're wrong. They're wrong. They're w- every time someone wants to stop discussions, they're wrong.

    17. AS

      Yeah.

    18. JR

      They're wrong, especially when you wanna try to stop discussions about a very serious and permanent thing that people are advocating to do to children that is also very profitable.

    19. AS

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      And it's a, 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-

    21. AS

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      ... instead of castration and- and removing breasts and hormones and, it's- it's a very, very strange time. So, I'm glad we had that podcast, and I would have 100 more of them.

    23. AS

      Great.

    24. JR

      I- 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.

    25. AS

      That's right. I think that's the scariest thing of all, that people are afraid to just say the truth.

    26. JR

      Yeah.

    27. AS

      And that's not a good world, because we can fix most problems if we can talk about them.

    28. JR

      Yeah. Yeah.

    29. AS

      Uh-

    30. JR

      Exactly, I mean, that's my- my position on anyone trying to stop you from talking about things.

  3. 3:51 – 8:04

    Detransitioners, moral panic backlash, and the coming legal wave

    1. JR

      Well, the- the really scary thing is when you see these detransitioners get attacked.

    2. AS

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      That's- that's terrifying. That's terrifying, because that's just so, it's so cruel, it, the- the- the complete lack of compassion for someone that's done, you know, as the title of your book, irreversible damage to- to their life, forever.

    4. AS

      Exactly.

    5. JR

      They'll never have children again. They'll never have breasts again, and this, it, the fact that this is just a- a part of this bizarre cult that a giant swath of our population is consumed by right now.

    6. AS

      That's right, and they didn't, they didn't let detransitioners be part of the story.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      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, but, and that took real courage-

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. AS

      ... because they're talking about their own experience, their own damage to their own bodies.

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. AS

      I mean, they were the most courageous of all, and, uh, and they were, th- they were treated horribly by the activists.

    13. JR

      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 gonna do it and regret it? That's insane.

    14. AS

      Right.

    15. JR

      You think that everybody who goes through surgery to remove parts of their body because they feel like they're in the wrong gender, you think all those people are gonna be happy? That's insanity.

    16. AS

      Yeah, I mean, it- it's, you know, like a religion in the sense of a funda- 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.

    17. JR

      Well, finally now, the New York Times is on board though-

    18. AS

      (laughs)

    19. JR

      ... which is really interesting.

    20. AS

      It is, isn't it?

    21. JR

      And I saw, 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 kinda 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.

    22. AS

      Well, I- I think that, that is a part of it, um, but I don't think the lawsuits are gonna solve it as easily as they did, say, the repressed memory scandal, uh, of prior eras and, you know, um, the multiple dis- you know, personality disorder, you know, all these people who thought they had repressed memory of, of various kinds of harm, uh, and, uh, were imagining, you know, uh, you know, childhood molestation that didn't happen and put, you know, that in fact-

    23. JR

      Are you talking about, like, the- the satanic stuff from the '80s?

    24. AS

      Yeah, from the '80s.

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. AS

      That whole satan- I think that got reversed through lawsuits in part because they weren't following clear medical pr- uh, you know, clear protocols of their profession. The problem with the tr- 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- the gender therapists, the- the- the therapists, the doctors were all following protocol-

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. AS

      ... when they transitioned a kid, um, to, you know, and cut up their bodies in various ways, you know, incapacitated them in various ways. They were actually following affirmative care, which is the official protocol. So, I just-

    29. JR

      Which is crazy.

    30. AS

      It's crazy. It's crazy.

  4. 8:04 – 11:44

    Medical incentives, hormones, and surgery realities

    1. JR

      Yeah. Well, it's also not recognizing what we know about what happens to people when they give them testosterone.

    2. AS

      Right.

    3. JR

      So, testosterone alleviates anxiety. Testosterone creates a s- a feeling of euphoria.

    4. AS

      Right.

    5. JR

      It does a lot, especially when you give it to someone in doses that their body would never normally have.

    6. AS

      That's right. That's right. And so, what, the girls would go on it, and they would feel great-

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      ... and they would become evangelists for testosterone. They would tell all their friends, "You gotta do this. I feel great. All my anxiety is gone." Of course, now they may have a permanent five o'clock shadow.

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. AS

      Um, you know-

    11. JR

      Change in their voice, everything.

    12. AS

      Change in their voice.

    13. JR

      And when they detransition, that never goes away.

    14. AS

      Yeah.

    15. JR

      Yeah, it's very dark. It's very dark, and I would've never imagined this. I would've 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.

    16. AS

      That's right.

    17. JR

      That's it.

    18. AS

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      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- 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-

    20. AS

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      ... versus gender transition clinics in 2023.

    22. AS

      Right.

    23. JR

      And it's fucking insane.

    24. AS

      Yeah.

    25. JR

      It's insane.

    26. AS

      Yeah. Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of new gender clinics all across the country. Um, you know, it- it, the industry expanded so rapidly with very little oversight. And it was just, how fast could we get these drugs to these kids?

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. AS

      Um, so yeah, I mean, I agree with you. There wasn't enough oversight, but there also weren't enough good people speaking up.

    29. JR

      Yeah.

    30. AS

      A lot of the best doctors who are like, "I'm- I didn't enter the medical profession to do this," they- they went silent or they referred to other. 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 m- weren't even, you know, adequate to the task 'cause it's very, very complicated surgery, um, you know, involving tr- you know, transferring peripheral nerves and whatnot. Um, 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, uh, you know, surgeries that didn't go quite right.

  5. 11:44 – 13:59

    Writing 'Irreversible Damage': expected impact vs real-world blowback

    1. JR

      So, again, what was it like for you? Did you expec- 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? O- o- obviously, you felt the need to express this, and you felt the need to share this information because...... you, 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 gonna be the reaction to it?

    2. AS

      Well, most books get very little attention at all. So most books, right ... You know, I, I certainly didn't expect the, you know, massive, uh, reaction that I got. I mean, the, the public campaign to ban me from every possible outlet was, was so hyper-charged, and to some extent, it was successful. I mean, it was p- ... Uh, they kept the book on Amazon. It was deleted from Target. You can't find it in a, uh, a public library in America, no matter how many people tried to donate it to their libraries. So, to some extent, it was successful, but, uh, uh, y- you know, the campaign to, to, to stifle the book, but because I made it onto places like your podcast, because I made it into Amazon, um, people got it. Uh, parents got it, and for the first time, I think, parents had another source of information besides the activists' narrative of, "Oh, you know, you're, you're either gonna have a live daught- you know, a live son or a dead daughter," this, this lie that, "Your child is gonna kill themselves if, 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, uh, I think that's what made people so angry.

    3. JR

      That lie falls apart on scrutiny when you look at the suicide rates of people that are trans.

    4. AS

      Right. Right. There's actually a new study out of Finland showing that, uh, th- a, a really good long-term study, you know, I think it came out maybe just this week, showing that, um, the rates, when you control for other mental health issues, the rates of suicide among those with gender dysphoria, the, you know, uh, b- you know, uh, discomfort with the biological sex, the r- the rates of suicide are no higher than for the general population.

  6. 13:59 – 15:23

    Launching the new thesis: 'Bad Therapy' and iatrogenic harms

    1. JR

      That's crazy. Um, your new book, Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren't Growing Up.

    2. AS

      Yes.

    3. JR

      What's wrong with therapy? What are they doing wrong?

    4. AS

      You know, they're, they're giving it to kids who aren't sick, who aren't actually struggling with mental illness or, 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.

    5. JR

      In what way?

    6. AS

      Well, some of ... There's a whole body of research on, on some of the side effects of therapy, and they include things like alienation from spouse, alienation from parents, uh, worsening of depression, worsening of anxiety, um, feeling of incapacity, feeling like you can't do things without consulting your therapist. Um, all those are well-known iatrogenic effects. Feeling, uh, once you have a mental diagnosis, the labeling, feeling limited by that label. "Oh, oh, I have anxiety. I can't."

    7. JR

      Mmm.

    8. AS

      Um, so all those things are well-known what they call iatrogenic effects, meaning when- whenever a medical procedure actually introduces harm, that's i- an iatrogenic effect. And we know that, of course, you know, drugs and surgeries always come with, you know, even the life-saving ones can come with, um, some harm. And what people might not know is that therapy comes with these risks as well.

  7. 15:23 – 20:05

    Kids vs adults in therapy: rumination, self-focus, and the 'Becca' example

    1. JR

      So is, is this your opinion on therapy in general? Do you think there's a place for therapy?

    2. AS

      Absolutely. But I, I guess the big picture th- you know, 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 wanna worked- work on this. I'm gonna 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 wanna be there f- in the first place. But more importantly, you know, they can't say as easily to a therapist, um, "Listen, I, I don't really think th- it ... I, I think he gave you the wrong impression. I, I don't think I would call my mom emotionally abusive." Or it's much harder for them to say, "Listen, um, I don't ... I, 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 'cause they don't have the life experience, uh, behind them to know that, and, 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.

    3. JR

      Yeah, I have never been in therapy, although a lot of people told me to ... I should.

    4. AS

      (laughs)

    5. NA

      (laughs)

    6. JR

      Um, but they all are in therapy, and it doesn't seem to be helping. But the, 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, a biased sampling of the people that I know that are doing it, but it's ... The people that ... Uh, and it- it's not all of them, but the ones that, uh, I find problematic are very self-indulgent. And there's something about going to a therapist and talking about yourself constantly and your problems constantly that sort of reinforces this sel- self-indulgence.

    7. AS

      And that's what can lead depression to get worse, sadness to get worse. As you sit and focus on your pain, it ... If you're not careful, especially with teens and kids, it can make the pain, the worry, the, the feeling of being harmed worse, and I think that's what we're seeing.

    8. JR

      But what about the good therapists?

    9. AS

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      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?

    11. AS

      So if you're struggling with a condition of some sort, a phobia, anorexia, um, 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 ner- you know, just generally kind of anxious, um, to a therapist, you have a good shot of having that problem made worse.

    12. JR

      And wh- but why is that? What is it about going to therapy with that problem that's gonna make it worse?

    13. AS

      Because you're gonna sit and talk about your worries regularly. They're not gonna 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-

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. AS

      ... um, you know-

    16. JR

      1.25%.

    17. AS

      I mean, it's, uh, amazing, right? Like-

    18. JR

      Oh, excuse me, one and a quarter, like, one times better.

    19. AS

      Right.

    20. JR

      One, you know.

    21. AS

      Dancing is apparently amazing for, you know, n- 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, or therapy. But for l- you know, low mood, you know, sort of mild m- to moderate depression, exercise turns out to be better, and it doesn't have those side effects.

    22. JR

      Yeah.

    23. AS

      But let me give you an example of a, a teenager I talked to. So I talked to this girl, Becca, uh, is what I call her in the book. But, um, 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, um, diagnosed mental disorder of any kind. But she had regularly been in therapy 'cause her parents divorced and they said, "You gotta 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."

    24. JR

      Oh. Oh, boy.

    25. AS

      "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."

    26. JR

      (laughs) That gives me anxiety just thinking about it.

    27. AS

      Right.

    28. JR

      "Someone coaching me to go make friends," is like, what?

    29. AS

      Right. Do you see, this generation feels that it can't do-

    30. JR

      Mm.

  8. 20:05 – 25:25

    Why Gen Z feels worse: social media is big—but not the whole story

    1. JR

      And wha- what motivated you to write this book? Like, uh, do you have personal experiences with people that are going through this?

    2. AS

      Well, you know, two things. Like, one is I'm raising three kids in this generation, so I wanted to know, like, why was the generation that got the most mental health intervention, the most therapy, the most psych meds, the most interventions in schools, the most therapeutic parenting, why were they in the most distress? And why were they so afraid to grow up? And we shouldn't see that. They should be the picture of wellness. Nobody worried about anybody's mental health more than we worried about their mental health. And yet they're the picture of despair. So I, I really wanted to know, like, what was going on with them. And also, of course, I'd written Irreversible Damage, and I knew from that, you know, 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 depre- a little bummed out teen, you know, a mildly depressed teen about their bad feelings. And lo and behold, during the course of gen- you know, regular psychodynamic therapy, they would say, "And what are your feelings on gender?"

    3. JR

      Mm.

    4. AS

      And with the therapist, they would go down that route.

    5. JR

      (exhales deeply) Wow. Um, 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.

    6. AS

      Absolutely. Absolutely. Social media is a huge part of the story. There's no question. You know, I wrote about it in the first book. And, you know, Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, they've been talking about it for eight years now, and they've brought rigor and important research to show that that has ... You know, extracting kids from their social world is bad.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      And getting them, you know, f- making them, you know, getting the dop- dopamine hi- dopamine hit and the, you know, uh, you know, the, the anxious r- you know, worry about, "Who's gonna write me back and when?" And then getting the dopamine hit when they get that response, and that whole cycle, there's no question that plays on our natural sort of pe- you know, propensities for addiction, um, and, and makes kids more anxious. Um, but I th- I think it's part of what we're seeing. I don't think it's the whole story. Um, and the re- the reason I don't think it's the whole story is a few things. First of all, childhood mental health has been, and adolescent mental health has been in precipitous decline in this country since the 1950s. So, yeah-

    9. JR

      And how do they measure that?

    10. AS

      So from, let's say, 19... F- 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. Um, but they, but they've been in decline for, mental health in this c- you know, ha- 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?

    11. JR

      Do you think that it factors parents with mental health issues and there's m- I think m- more adults are anxious, more adults are suffering from anxiety and depression, at least diagnosed anxiety and depression now than ever before.

    12. AS

      I think, uh, uh, adults are absolutely passing on their anxiety to their kids. And the, actually we're seeing that in, you know, (laughs) 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?

    13. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    14. AS

      Boys, you know, that's not their thing, right? They're, they're into video games or whatever. But, um, 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, um, 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 s- or social media, is because there are... In societies where they use just as much social media, it's not great for their, 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 have more... They're able to take more risks on their own and they, they walk home from school, they kind of, they do all kinds of, you know, jobs outside of the house, uh, like run errands for the family. And, um, they get a feeling of, first of all, sh- short-term joy and long-term satisfaction from being able to take risks, see what they can handle. But also a feeling of, of efficacy in the world.

  9. 25:25 – 29:19

    Guardrails vs permissive-surveilled parenting

    1. JR

      So, that, that's an interesting t- t- statistic that you were saying that... So, conservative families have less depressed kids? Is that what you're saying?

    2. AS

      Apparently boys from depr- from conservative fam- sorry, boys from liberal families have higher anxiety rates than girls from conservative families.

    3. JR

      But above, like, uh, if you just looked at the norm, more girls generally-

    4. AS

      Yes.

    5. JR

      ... have anxiety?

    6. AS

      Right.

    7. JR

      But in conservative families, girls are less anxious than boys from liberal families.

    8. AS

      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?

    9. JR

      Right.

    10. AS

      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 a, that's an old finding. We've known for generations now that authoritative parenting means, meaning not cold parenting, not cruel, not unloving-

    11. JR

      Rules.

    12. AS

      ... 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.

    13. JR

      Is it... W- what... 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 seem, things seem less open-ended and less chaotic, and-

    14. AS

      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. You know, parents today are so quick to put kids in charge, "What do you want? Where would you like to go to school? What would you like to eat for dinner?" You know, putting kids in charge. Um, but we've known since the 1960s, Diana Baumrind did this research years ago and it's some of the mo- it's some of the sturdiest, uh, research we have because they've replicated it hundreds of times. And they've shown that loving p- parents who are also rule-bound, they call them authoritative, not authoritarian, which is the cold, unloving rule-bound-

    15. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    16. AS

      ... but the loving and rule-bound parents tend to raise the happiest kids 'cause kids knows 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.

    17. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    18. AS

      They're the ones in charge. I think that's really comforting to kids.

    19. JR

      That's interesting because that's not what people think of when they think of authoritari- or authoritative parents.

    20. AS

      Right.

    21. JR

      They think of parents that are restricting their children and the children are gonna rebel.

    22. AS

      That's right. I mean, there's, there's a lot of really good research on this, but they, it actually doesn't create more rebellious kids by virtually every metric. They, you, they do much better in all, you know, in all kinds of circumstances and, and, and 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 authorita- t- tarian parents, you know, said, "Obey at all costs." And they were fairly cold. And their kids didn't end up great in terms of mental health. But here's... Um, but, you know, today we don't even have per- permissive parents in, in, you know, in my view. I think we have something even worse, we have permissive parents wh- who are therapeutic, meaning they're always asking kids what they want but they're... And, and they're never asserting their authority but they're doing something else, they're hovering and surveilling their kids.

    23. JR

      Mm.

    24. AS

      And so it's permissive without the independence.

    25. JR

      Mm. Yeah. There's a, that, that's a weird one, right? Like the Snap Maps and stuff-

    26. AS

      Yeah.

    27. JR

      ... where you're following your kids-

    28. AS

      Right.

    29. JR

      ... all around Snapchat.

    30. AS

      They're surveilling them. These kids-

  10. 29:19 – 34:10

    How therapy became a first resort—and why discomfort matters for resilience

    1. JR

      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?

    2. AS

      So I think, you know, I'm, I'm at the tail end of Gen X, 1978 was the year I was born. And I think with my... You know, we were the high water mark of divorce. And I think a lot of, you know, teenagers my... you know, 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 Hu- 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's h- 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, a, you know, unexpected trauma. That's part of life, right?

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. AS

      And signing up your kid with a therapist might help if they're having a real problem, but c- but it could also introduce other problems. And I think that's what we're seeing.

    5. JR

      Yeah, there's a, a th- there's a reluctance to let children experience discomfort.

    6. AS

      Right. Exactly.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      Exactly.

    9. JR

      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 m- 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, um, some friends when I was growing up that got, uh, 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 feel- 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.

    10. AS

      That's right.

    11. JR

      They teach you something very important about what the consequences of certain behavior are.

    12. AS

      That's exactly right. There, there's this amazing long-term study on kids who lived through The Depression.

    13. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    14. AS

      And they found that the kids who ended up, and they followed these kids from, from ni- they were born in 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 who, 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-

    15. JR

      Hmm.

    16. AS

      ... 'cause they were resilient. They had lived through something, they had learned it, and they'd learned this, this amazing gratitude when things went right.

    17. JR

      Yeah, that's the thing, that overcoming adversity and becoming resilient, the, 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.

    18. AS

      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, I think about my grandmother and I, you know, 'cause everybody has, you know, if, uh, if anybody thinks about their grandparents, they went through some hard stuff, right? My, I, uh, tell the story in the book of my, my own grandmother lived through The Depression. Her mother died in childbirth giving bir- 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, uh, married at 17, she went to live with her. Then she, um, ended up at 16 she got spinobulbar polio. She ended up in an iron lung for a year.

    19. JR

      Oof.

    20. AS

      And she went on to college. She, uh, raised, 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 I, 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."

  11. 34:10 – 1:15:16

    Defining good therapy: measurement, limits, and the PTSD framing problem

    1. JR

      But, but there's gotta 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 gonna 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?

    2. AS

      If that were to, 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 going, 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 gonna 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, you know, is often not as good for a kid as joining the basketball team.

    3. JR

      Mm-hmm. So this is, well, so, uh, what you're, uh, talking about is essentially the title of your book which is Bad Therapy.

    4. AS

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      There has to be some good therapy, right?

    6. AS

      Sure. Ther- good therapy is therapy for a kid who needs it, not preventive-

    7. JR

      Only?

    8. AS

      I think so.

    9. JR

      So, like, what, uh, what do you think the requirements would be for someone to get good therapy? Like, what, what would have to be wrong in the child's life?

    10. AS

      I think it would be something where you can't, uh, the parent has tried to stabilize the kid, that it's, 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, uh, you know, really helpful and I think you should then research the therapist like you would any surgeon.

    11. JR

      So do you think it's something like antidepressants where it's just over-prescribed?

    12. AS

      Yes.

    13. JR

      Where it's everything looks like a nail if you have a hammer?

    14. AS

      Right. It's way, way, way over-prescribed. By the way, we have so many mental he- you know, mentally unwell people in our streets who are completely underserved and undertreated, and I think the reason is treating them is really hard.

    15. JR

      We also have a lot of mentally ill therapists. You know, I was reading this crazy story about this therapist who convinced her client, her patient to, uh, murder her ex.

    16. AS

      Wow.

    17. JR

      Yeah. (laughs) She, she got this guy to fall in love with her and then she got him to, uh, go and murder her ex. (laughs)

    18. AS

      I mean, I believe it.

    19. JR

      Of course.

    20. AS

      You know, like, I mean, there are, there's no question when you-

    21. JR

      Therapists are humans.

    22. AS

      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 c- colleagues were a little scary because they entered the profession 'cause they had mental health struggles of their own.

    23. JR

      Right.

    24. AS

      And it's important that a therapist not...... you know, inject them, their own problems into the therapy. And, uh, for that, you need a really good qualified person. And, um, I don't think that's the majority of what kids are getting.

    25. JR

      No. Well, so, (sighs) so how do you know what these kids are experiencing when they're having this therapy? Like, what are, what are we basing this on? What, uh, do we, do we get reports from the children of what they talked about with the therapists and know that that has had a negative effect?

    26. AS

      Oh. Okay, so first of all there is no oversight, which is a huge problem, right? There's no one. The profession doesn't require it, they're not measuring harms, they're not tracking harms. The medical professions, of course, do require it, right? They're federally required, if you have an adverse r- reaction to a drug, it gets reported. But with therapy, there is no tracking. Um, but, there, but there's something else too. Um, we know that as, um, a treatment enters a population pool and it becomes more accessible and more prevalent, the rates of disease or malady or disorder should go down, right? We've seen this with breast cancer. 1989 was the high water mark of breast cancer, you know, death from breast cancer. As screening improved, as it got more prevalent and more accessible to people, rates of death from breast cancer have plummeted. So, why are the people who are getting the most treatment and the most access to mental health treatment, they're having the worst anxiety and depression? Why? It's skyrocketing. It should be going down. If the treatment were effective, it would be going down.

    27. JR

      Right, 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 'cause no one grew up with it besides them.

    28. AS

      Right. So, if you're talking about things like social media, I do think that makes childhood worse and harder. Um, there's no question. But there are other, and there are other things that are making t- childhood uniquely, you know, hard in some sense. Now, of course, we have generations that have lived through pandemics, you know, depress- Great Depression, you know, economic d- deprivation and all kinds of things. But, um, I, you know, two things. One, with any population you would wanna see some dent in the depression. We're not seeing that, okay? But the other thing is, where were the mental health experts with social media? Right? They could have called for a ban. They didn't.

    29. JR

      I don't think they knew right away, right? It, it had never, it had never existed before.

    30. AS

      No, but there's been really good evidence for the last eight years, I don't think there's a parent alive who doesn't already know that social media is bad for kids, right? We've known the phones, we see what they do, we see how angry kids get when you try to take them away.

  12. 1:15:16 – 1:26:03

    Campus sensitivity culture, microaggressions, and 'emotional hypochondria'

    1. JR

      Are there any studies about the cultures or the civilizations, what- whatever c- countries that have the most mentally healthy people?

    2. AS

      Oh, that's a good question. So, I interviewed one woman who runs the Georgetown Emotions Lab, and she's a cultural psychologist.

    3. JR

      Boy, the Emotions Lab.

    4. AS

      Yeah. (laughs)

    5. JR

      That's heavy.

    6. AS

      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-

    7. JR

      Hmm.

    8. AS

      ... and she hooks them up to electrodes, and, and, um, she looks at ... Her name is Julia Chentsova-Dutton. She's amazing, and she looks at, um, Russia, Japan, um, America, and other countries, especially in the West, so I guess you wanna look at like, and compare like to like, so sort of similar Western cultures-

    9. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    10. AS

      ... you know, I guess, A- Asian, but, um, you know, simi- similar levels of development and stress, a certain kind of stress. And one of the things she noticed in, in her research was that American kids tended to exaggerate dangers. So, they ... 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 R- but, but teenagers from other countries, Russia, you know, um, Japan, they tended to be able to calibrate what was a- 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 fa- gave them a bad grade-

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. AS

      ... because they didn't, couldn't hand her, a paper on, o- in on time.

    13. JR

      One of the things that drives me the most nuts about universities is this term microaggressions.

    14. AS

      Right.

    15. JR

      Which is so crazy. It's like looking for things to be bigger than they are.

    16. AS

      Right.

    17. JR

      Taking a very small thing, whether it's someone, like, rolling their eyes at you or, or saying something that, you know, m- might be insensitive and calling that insensitive thing a microaggression.

    18. AS

      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?

    19. JR

      Hmm.

    20. AS

      And what I mean is I interviewed a world expert, this man Arthur Barsky at Harvard Medical School, on hypochondriasis, being a hypochondriac, what they, 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 ex- and, and, i- increasing their pain by doing that. And people who turn their pain into an organizing principle of life, of their whole lives-

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. AS

      ... they have a hard time overcoming it.

    23. JR

      It becomes their identity.

    24. AS

      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 br- you had a breakup, and it's painful, but, but using these, you know, psychiatric terms-

    25. JR

      Trauma.

    26. AS

      ... it's not helping.

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. AS

      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 rea- they are in real pain, and they're making it worse.

    29. JR

      I would be really fascinated to see you have a conversation with someone who is a therapist, who engages-

Episode duration: 2:00:14

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