 This is the reason interviewed with Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Abigail Shryer, author of the best-selling new book Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. She argues that the mental health of Gen Z, that's people born between 1997 and 2012, is a mess because of an infantilizing therapeutic culture that pervades every aspect of their lives. Shryer stresses that she's not against psychological counseling and help per se, but that too many unqualified and misguided people are causing far more problems than they solve. Her previous book was the controversial Irreversible Damage, which looked at the rapid rise of girls identifying as transgender. We talk about the roots of today's therapeutic culture, the extent of the problems it causes, and how parents, teachers, and young people themselves might find a better way forward. Here is the reason interview with Abigail Shryer. Abigail Shryer, thanks for talking to reason. Oh, it's great to talk to you, Nick. Thank you. Well, the new book is Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, and we're going to get to talk about why it is so high at Amazon but doesn't show up on the New York Times bestseller list in a little bit. But first, give us the elevator pitch for Bad Therapy. So I always start a book with a question, and my question was, why are the kids who've gotten the most mental health resources, they've had the most therapy, the most diagnosis, the most psych meds, the most wellness tips, the most coping tips, they should be the picture of mental health. Instead, they're the picture of despair. And I wanted to know why, and I also wanted to know why do they have no interest in growing up? Why weren't they looking to move out of their parents' house? A larger percentage of them is living at home than ever before, even with our low unemployment. Why are they putting off getting a driver's license or claiming that driving is scary? Boys of his 17 are saying this. So those were my two questions, and I found that they were related. Okay. So let's start with a couple of the big points that you make, which I think are really good and interesting and important, which is that all interventions, like all medical interventions are all therapeutic. Any kind of interaction with a doctor of any stripe, they have the potential for negatives. Explain how that kind of intersects with the topic here. Sure. So there's this concept called iatrogenesis, which is a Greek word, meaning when the healer introduces harms. And what people should know, what I want people to know is that any intervention, no matter how good, if it is efficacious, if it has the power to help, also necessarily has the power to harm, right? If it can do anything at all, then of course it can harm. So Tylenol, which is wonderful, can damage your liver if you take too much of it, x-rays. But what people might not know is that therapy, which also has the power to help, can harm as well. Right. And then you also stress that kids are different. And I guess for the context of the book, you're kind of talking about Gen Z, but also then kids who are in school now and are dealing with a much more therapeutic culture generally than you or I grew up with. Certainly me. You are closer in age to Gen Z than I am. But kids are different than adults. How does that factor into your, into the book? So a number of ways. When an adult goes to therapy, say, an adult, first of all, makes the decision, I want to work on this or I need this support. I know myself and I need this. And they absolutely, you know, you have their buy-in. The therapist has their buy-in and they show up ready to work. Number one, number two, they've lived enough life that if the therapist is a little off track or maybe the therapist got the wrong impression, an adult can say, you know what, I really think I gave you the wrong impression of my mom or look, my parents were difficult in that regard, but I wouldn't call them toxic. And I don't think breaking off with them is the right move. It's very hard for a teenager or a child to say those things, especially if they're angry with mom. They don't know what constitutes emotional abuse, especially if an adult is leading them to think that they were emotionally abused, say, or that they had experienced trauma. So, and with a child, you don't have their buy-in. So a therapist is naturally going to want to pander to a child to get them on board. Now, if a child has a severe problem that they're coming to a therapist with, that sort of focuses the mind. You've got a kid who's anorexic or severely OCD, you know what they're going to be talking about. But you drop off a kid for general psychodynamic psychotherapy with, you know, a kid who's got some anxiety, some feelings of the blues, and the therapist could lead in any direction. And I think that's what we're seeing. Can you talk a little bit, what are the numbers and the trends in terms of psychiatric diagnoses of kids, you know, from, I don't know, you know, from two to 20 or there about. And also with medication, there was, you know, going back, God, it's like almost 20 years when Adderall and Ritalin really were a topic of discussion for treatment of attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, or just attention deficit disorder. There was a big discussion of that. That has kind of receded. But what have you found? How many, how many kids are on psycho, psycho, I was going to say psychotropic, I'll say psychoactive drugs ended in active therapy? Yeah, you bring up ADHD. We only stopped talking about ADHD, not because it was being diagnosed any less. There's more diagnosis, but because so many young kids are on SSRIs today, you know, the anti-depressants. I mean, they just cleared the FDA just cleared Lexa Pro, which is a very strong anti-depressant for seven year olds. So it's not that there are, we, you know, it's not in fact, we've been going in one direction, putting kids on more and more and more, you know, so psychotropic drugs, anti-anxiety medications, and, and speed, various forms of speed, as you mentioned for ADHD. So in 2016, one in six kids between the numbers of, between the ages of two and eight, this is according to the CDC, one in six kids between the ages of two and eight already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Now those kids weren't on social media. Okay, they didn't have smartphones, certainly not in 2016. They don't have them today. So we knew that this diagnosis has been exploding. And also mental health treatment has gone in one direction. So nearly 40% of the rising generation has been to see a therapist already. And, you know, I'm not the only one to have noticed this, a group of team of researchers did it earlier a year ago and called this the treatment prevalence paradox. What they were noticing is that with, with treatment of illness, the more you have treat, you know, the more treatment there is, the more of the point prevalence rate of a disorder should go down, right? We saw this with breast cancer treatment and other things, the, the incidence of death from breast cancer went down with, with more pervasive treatment. Here, there's been vast expansion of treatment and the rates of depression and anxiety have only gone up. And, and I mean, supporters of that trend would say, well, that's because it's, it's an epidemic. It's a pandemic of anxiety, of depression, of isolation, of whatever. But you're effectively saying that this is, it's, it's probably more caused by the intervention itself. Because, and before we go on to a longer discussion of viatrogenesis, which I think is, you know, a great underappreciated concept in, in medicine in general, but certainly in psychology or psychiatry, also talk about how the therapy culture has gone into schools. Because it used to be certainly, you know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, schools did not necessarily have a teachers were not trained in therapy. They were not expected to be counselors. Most schools probably didn't even have a school, you know, counselor or psychologist or anything like that on staff. But now everywhere you look, that is considered part and parcel of K through 12 teacher education, right? And that's why we're seeing so much increase in anxiety, depression and the known harms of therapy because we are treating a vast population and mostly they are well. And here's the thing with viatrogenesis or when a healer introduces harm, if you have a problem, if you have a cut and you need stitches, a serious cut, and you need stitches, it's worth the trip to the ER. But if you have a minor scratch, then you only stand to face risk, right? You only stand because you don't stand to benefit really. So now all the exposure to MRSA and other, you know, infections at the ER or other, sorry, you know, bacteria at the ER, now you're just facing risk. And that's what we're doing with this generation. We're taking healthy kids, we're a little bummed out, a little anxious, and we're loading them with intervention, as you say, much of it through school, through social, emotional learning and all the therapeutic techniques now going on in school. And so all these kids face this risk. Why, you know, one question is why don't teachers push back on this kind of, you know, ask of them to say, okay, you know what, you're supposed to be teaching history or reading or math or whatever. And then you're also supposed to be scanning your classroom for, you know, problematic behavior. You know, in most contexts, and I don't mean to shit on teachers, but you know, most of the time they're like, hey, that's not my job. But they seem to have kind of embraced this role as kind of being therapists or being on the lookout for stuff, which I think you both stress and document very well. But whatever else you think about therapy and counseling, you know, these, you know, teachers just aren't equipped to do that. So it's really wrong to ask them or to expect them to be any good at it. But why aren't they saying, hey, you know what, like if you want kids to be, you know, putting therapy, you know, come and do it yourself. Yeah. So the number of therapists who, so, so teachers broke down into some, a number of categories. But some of them absolutely objected, they're desperate to get through their lessons. That's why they got involved. And many of them told me they can't deal with even the behavioral outburst. The kids have become so dysregulated. They're being asked to do things that aren't their job. They want to get out of teaching. Then there are the therapists who don't act, sorry, they're the teachers who don't really want to teach or they find it really challenging. And it's much easier to play, let's talk about your trauma to play sort of amateur therapist. And of course, the third answer I have is that a lot of this is coming from school counselors who march in. And what I want people to know is that when a school counseling staff expands in your high school, it operates a lot like the DEI staff of a university. It starts to take over everything. All of a sudden the mental health staff is overseeing the entire curriculum. And that's what we're seeing. So let's talk about iatrogenesis. One of the people that you talk to in the book is Elizabeth Loftus, who is an incredibly well known psychologist who helped to pop the recovered memory bubble a couple of decades ago. And one of the things that she kind of stressed was that psychologists, psychiatrists, or you know, counselors, let's say, oftentimes can introduce memories that people then take on as their own. I just happened arbitrarily, last night I watched a documentary about Joan Baez, the folk singer in the 60s. And it actually, she late in life became convinced that she may have been assaulted by her father and that her sister probably was, and she had multiple personality disorder, which is also one of, you know, the Sibyl case that those of us of a certain age grew up with. It is now recognized that the doctor who treated Sibyl almost certainly planted those memories and created the multiple personalities that she then treated. So let's talk about iatrogenesis and how does the work that Elizabeth Loftus does? How does that kind of help explain kind of the worst case scenario of a therapist created issue? Well, Elizabeth Loftus, who's widely considered one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, she really showed that our memory is like a mosaic. You can introduce things into it and it's always being updated a little like a Wikipedia page. And other people can edit it and you can edit it. And here's the thing. It's especially true of children. So what she did was she helped expose the recovered memory epidemic of the 90s in which kids were being led through questioning to remember things that didn't happen to them, traumas, assaults, you know, sexual molestation that never happened. The problem is when you have group therapy, what's going on today in schools effectively group therapy, they don't call it that but social emotional learning where the kids sit around sharing their pain and sharing their trauma. You're very likely in that process to introduce incorrect memories or exaggerate kids memories of a of a past pain. And then there's a sense, I mean, that you write about, you know, that there's also a valorization of having pain or of having trauma or of not feeling well. Can you talk about that? How did that happen? Because one of the things that we would, you know, expect therapists to do would be to be empathetic. But the whole goal is to make people feel better about themselves not to dwell on the negative. Maybe, maybe that's the goal of therapy. It's a question. And I'll tell you why. The profession makes no effort to track now to track improvement or harms. That's a real problem. And when I say the profession makes no effort, it's not that no therapists do that. There are some very good cognitive behavioral therapists who absolutely do this. And that's wonderful. But in general, most psychodynamic psychotherapists do not track any harms, they make no effort to see, gosh, have your if you have your relationships gotten worse since we started, have your has your anxiety gotten worse? Has your depression gotten worse? You know, and, and that's a huge problem because those are the known side effects of therapy. We know that when they've studied burn victims, breast cancer survivors, first responders to catastrophe, that many cases therapy, the ones who went to therapy ended up with worse symptoms than those who didn't go to therapy at all. You one of the the kind of villains of your book is, is a Bessel Vander Kolk, Vander Kolk, excuse me, Coke. He wrote a book called body, the body keeps the score, which unlike yours book is on the New York Times bestseller list or the extended version and has been I mean, it's like, Carol King's tapestry or dark side of the moon. I mean, it's like, you know, it's been on the bestseller list for hundreds of weeks. What is the body keeps the score and why is why do you spend as much time as you do in the book talking about? Well, I think this is really underlies the popularity of the book, you're talking about a book that sold 3 million copies over 3 million copies. This is so entered the bloodstream and it's convinced a generation not only that they experienced childhood trauma, but we're actually it actually, he kicked off an effort to go into schools and teach teachers that every child that they needed to be trauma informed about their education, because every child was potential may have been traumatized. And in fact, likely had been traumatized. And the problem with this is of course that kids and people are highly suggestible, right? And, and they came to believe it. And we've basically induced what I think is something like an emotional hypochondriasis, we've created a generation of emotional hypochondriacs that are so focused on their emotional pain, so convinced of their trauma that it's debilitating them. And that's, that's not saying that their pain isn't real. But, but as I learned when I talked to experts in hypochondriasis, the intensive focus, the hyper focus on real pain magnifies it. And I think that's what they're doing. And so I mean, in a, in a kind of simplified way, what you're arguing at least on this point is that trauma has been kind of defined downward. So that, you know, that everyday aspects of adolescence or of growing up have been redefined as traumatic. Right, exactly right. And, and you know what, there was just a new study out in the last, you know, couple months by this wonderful researcher, a psychological researcher, I love in Kathy Wydom, brilliant. But anyway, she, she traced, she did a prospective study. So these are the only rigorous studies really, they go, they actually start with the kids who, and they, they check who has actually experienced, you know, abuse, documented abuse, and they follow them 15 years later, and then see what they're like as adults. And they don't, and the researchers are blinded, they don't, they don't know which group is in, is the control group and didn't experience, or it did. And what she found was the contextualization of what happened to these kids had more to do with adult psychopathology than what actually happened. Meaning, if an adult thought that what happened to him as a kid constituted trauma, he was more likely to suffer as an adult than an adult, than a child who actually had suffered, but didn't think of it as trauma. And here's the thing, many of the adults who believed they had been traumatized as kids, and so were suffering as adults when they went back and looked, there was no record of that actual trauma. So this is, oh, I'm, I'm sorry to have stepped on you there. But, you know, in a way, those of us who are parents, I mean, and again, this is simplifying, and I certainly don't mean to diminish people who have suffered serious trauma. But you know, when you're, when your kid is a toddler or something and they hurt themselves, sometimes they look to you for the cue of like, are you hurt or not? And depending on how you react, they react. If you, you know, show them that, yeah, you think they're hurt, they start to cry. If not, they kind of shrug it off. That's true of all of us is the remarkable thing. It turns out, you know, if we come to believe we were traumatized as children and that the body keeps the score, that somehow mysteriously we have these memories stored outside our central nervous system, which has been disproven by any occasion. But if we come to believe that, we're more likely to manifest symptoms than if we just think, yeah, I went through a hard time and are able to surround ourselves with family, with friends. If we exercise, if we, you know, are active in the world, if we contribute to others, what we tend to do really well in life with those things. And in fact, the story of humanity is one of profound resilience in the face of what we think of as trauma. Yeah, it's amazing. And, you know, in the literature about kind of sexual criminality and things like that, there is, you know, this idea that if you are sexually traumatized, you will repeat it. And it's an unbroken chain. And it turns out that most victims of sexual trauma actually recover and they do not continue. And, you know, and it's odd for a variety of other reasons where we're committed to the idea that sexual criminals are compulsive and can't help themselves. But in fact, most people who are the victims do okay. You know, one of the questions I had is like the, you talk about Victor Frankel in the book, right? Can you explain who Victor Frankel is and why he's important to bad therapy? Sure. Well, he was, you know, a survivor of Auschwitz. He wrote a wonderful book called Man's Search for Meaning. And he was a psychiatrist himself. And one of the things that he says in the book, which was so sorry that he says in his book that I quote, and mine is that actually one of the things that you need in life, there's a number of things that he felt thought him through Auschwitz. One of the things was humor, which is an amazing defense. And unfortunately has become so politically incorrect that we're often not allowed to avail ourselves of it. But actually it's really good for getting through hard times. The other thing he said was that if you want the parts of an arch to form together, you don't relieve it of weight, you put more weight on it. And what he was saying is, you know, actually, you know, making demands of children, which doesn't mean being cruel, but giving them chores, giving them responsibilities, making them responsible for each other, having them in the world doing things, that's better for your mental health than telling them they've probably been traumatized and might not actually recover. That's the worst thing you could do. One of the reasons, excuse me, I'm a big fan of Victor Frankl, I will point out for, you know, this was news to me, and it's actually a little bit unsettling that there are some serious questions about man search for meaning how much of the experiences he showed as his own were actually compiled from other accounts and things like that. But another person that you cite in the book, Christopher Lash, who is best known for two works that came out in the late 70s and early 80s, the culture of narcissism and the minimal self, and Lash, and you quote him in the book about the rise of therapeutic culture, how it's kind of gone everywhere, in the minimal self, Victor Frankl is one of his villains because he felt that Frankl and a number of other people expanded the experience of the concentration camp, which is a very unique historical experience, and also one that is like unbelievably intense beyond virtually anything anybody today could be doing. Lash argued that that was where trauma kind of trauma talk started seeping out. In the 50s, people started kind of equating their everyday life in a relatively comfortable suburb with a concentration camp. The most famous case of that is Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique saying that being a housewife was like being in a comfortable concentration camp. There's no question that it's a vast army of educators and people in the mental health industry that have fanned out into the schools, but what do you think about that argument that the beginning of the redefinition of trauma to everyday life might actually start with the misapplication of the experience of the death camps in World War II? I agree with it completely. We saw a vast expansion in the treatment of, in America, in the treatment of the well. All of a sudden mental health experts were not just treating the sick, they decided to treat the well and so that meant mental health for everybody, first of all. Second of all, we see that people often extrapolate from people who experience the most severe trauma. Bessel van der Kolk himself talks about combat vets and PTSD and then uses that to extrapolate to kids in elementary school who grew up in the most gentle circumstances. I think that's exactly what's gone wrong. They often use these trauma experts, often use metaphor. It's very hard to evaluate their claims because they slip between what seems to be a serious scientific claim into metaphor. You can never tell, wait a second, are you saying that you literally passed down your trauma through your genetic code or are you just saying that you told your kids really upsetting stories and it upset them? Very often, they make a lot of headway by not being clear about that. What is the nature of their claim? No, I think that's completely right. You stress and I think this is an absolutely essential and correct distinction of saying, okay, when a kid has a real problem, they can benefit from counseling or therapy or some kind of intervention, but not everyday life. How do we draw that distinction in a meaningful way? That's a great question and I think parents know their kids best, but I think in general, a good shorthand is, is this something that I could handle when I was their age? If something really didn't qualify as trauma when you were a kid, it probably isn't traumatic. It's probably something they can handle. Now, if you've tried to stabilize your kid, if you've taken the tech out of their environment or whatever else seemed to be contributing to their problem and you can't stabilize a child who is anorexic or severely, has obsessive compulsive disorder and any other number of things where it's really interfering with their daily life and their suffering, by all means, get them help. I certainly wouldn't say don't get them help. Of course, get them help, get even medication if they need it, but unfortunately, we need to change our default settings and the default should be no intervention. The default should be, let's see if we can give him a healthier life. Can I also ask you, because this is, I think, related or at least in my mind, and I apologize that my mind is not the universal mind, so it may not make sense, but you talked at length about your grandmother who was born, I think, in 1927, is that right? Yeah. I mean, it's an amazing story and it's a very typical story of people born and heard. That's the same year as my mother was born of one who was a child where they're literally, her mother died and there was not enough milk, so she was stunted in growth. She actually contracted polio and spent a year in an iron lung and then ended up flourishing. Is there a problem where we valorize the unbelievable stress that people were under in an earlier age? Because I was thinking about that story and I'm like, wow, and then she went to college, which in the 40s, less than 5% of women went to college and a little bit more amended. I think about my parents' experience. They were born in 23 and 27, grew up poor, very poor, and they were kind of broken by that experience, really, when I think about them as adults. How do we make sure that we are not just looking back at the old days and say, you know what, we were tough or even better, our ancestors were tough. So our kids need to be tough. Well, a few things. First of all, I think we need to get clear on what the goal is. So the goal isn't someone who doesn't go through any pain or someone who doesn't... We all have our different personalities. We all have different levels of patience with each other or forbearance. Some people are more irritable or whatever else it is. But here's the thing. Can they function? Because my grandmother formed a family. My grandmother had a stable marriage. My grandmother had certain things. My grandmother could be depended upon by her neighbors. My grandmother was a good citizen. These are things we're seeing the rising generation opt out of. They don't even want to leave their parents' house. And they don't want to get married. They don't want to have children. They don't want people depending on them. And so whatever else you say, you might say, oh, you're looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. I think that's a fair criticism, but the question is, but were these people undertaking adult responsibilities? Because that's ultimately what we want. We want to raise kids who can say, you can depend on me to other people. That's what we want. One of the things I think about in this context, my father started working in a real way like contributing to his household when he was about 13. I started at Reason Magazine, which in many profound ways was the beginning of my career when I was 30. And part of that was because I could afford to kind of hack around. I mean, my parents didn't support me, but we extend childhood. I mean, we created adolescence effectively after World War II because we didn't need kids in the workforce in the same way. And as part of this, we're misdiagnosing the fact that childhood is lasting longer and longer, which is annoying if you're a parent because it's like, hey, you're 21. Maybe you ought to think about getting your own place. But are we misdiagnosing kind of the curse of wealth that we can afford to start our work lives and our adult lives later for a crisis? Absolutely. There's no question that wealth has played a role. I mean, when I started writing the book, I thought, gosh, these kids have gone through no World War, no Great Depression. They have everything they could want. Why are they suffering? And one of the answers is, actually having responsibility is really good for you. Having a job, having, you know, to show up on time, having people you see in person regularly, having neighborhood friends and cousins around, that's all really good for you. And the responsibility is really good for you too. And what I wanted parents to know was not only that that stuff was good for you, but to stop feeling guilty if they wanted to give it to their kids, that kind of responsibility. It is amazing how, you know, they kind of after school job, which used to be something of a rite of passage for everybody from the wealthiest to the poorest, sometimes out of privilege, sometimes out of necessity, was something that everybody kind of bought into. And that has really disappeared at every level of income. And I mean, is that, you know, we just need to put our kids back in, you know, kind of factories or something like that, at least for part of the day. We need to put them back into something. I mean, it's like people will ask me, well, what instead of doing social emotional learning in schools, what would be better for the kids? They could paint the gym. They could literally do anything. They could clean the yard with rakes. They could engage in any activity. They could dance. They could do anything would be better than sitting around and talking about their problems. And that's the truth. Like we all need to feel productive. We do. And part of that is having responsibility where someone cares if you show up. How much of it is also to, you know, injecting a bit of free range parenting into all of this? One of the sources in the book that you come back to a lot is Camila Ortiz, who is a psychologist who teaches clinical psychology students at Long Island University in his private practice. And he is a big proponent of, you know, the Lenore-Skenazi kind of approach to free range parenting. You know, I was thinking when you were saying, oh, they could paint the gym. And it's like, well, they can't paint the gym because every kid right after school goes to some kind of organized or a range practice, you know, for this or that year round and things like that. How, you know, so part of it is giving them more responsibility, but part of the solution might also be giving them more free time where they're expected to hang out with their peers and kind of figure out how to do things. That's right. I mean, tech free, free time is great. Sitting around on their phones is a lot less great. And we know that there's no question, you know, as Jonathan Hyde always talks about the social media has played a really bad role in our mental health. The problem is this is a problem we've known about for eight years, how bad it's been. And we've done nothing to take it out. And why have we done nothing to take it out of the, not even the schools, the schools allowed gets on their phone and on social media all day long. And why have we not? Partly because that we've gotten absolutely parents have gotten no support from the mental health establishments at these schools. They were happy to go in and give therapy and social emotional techniques and mindfulness, but they were less happy to do was take away the kids cell phones even during the school day. Can I push you on that a little bit though, too, because you do say, you know, that it's really not social media. You mentioned earlier in this conversation that, you know, the younger kids who have all these diagnosis, it's pre social media. But also in the book, you talk about how this is something I mean, it's really more about the broader therapy culture. And that it's more, it seems like social media is more of an epiphenomenon of that that we allow kids to do whatever they want, because we're afraid to discipline them or structure their debt. Can you talk a little bit about why why the therapeutic culture in your argument is more important than the social media? Sure, because if you give kids a healthy life, then no one, you know, unnutricious thing or harmful thing is going to damage is going to be that damaging. So for instance, social media is bad. There's no question. And it's harmful. My last whole book was about a horrible trend spread through social media. But here's the thing, it's like that old commercial when we were growing up, you know, with a frost of flakes, they would put a bowl of sugar cereal and so what there was orange juice on the side and toast on one side and eggs and another and they would say part of a nutritious breakfast. And what they were saying is, well, so frost of flakes isn't great, but look at all these other things you could be eating too. And that's where it's not so bad if you eat a balanced diet. Right. And that's the problem. We have social media, which is bad. And then we have all these other things, like a constant valorization of being, you know, emotionally traumatized, like regular therapy teaching you that you need to check in with an adult or a mental health expert before you take any risks whatsoever. Like your mental health diagnosis, which now you believe limits you in some profound way. And you can't just get over on your own like you can with, say, shyness or sadness. Now I have no, I have depression. Well, that suggests you need an expert. So all these things have contributed to the really incapacitating these young people. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about one of the things you discuss is the kind of current parenting generation. And you are a parent, right? Three kids. Okay. And I'm trying to decide whether or not to ask you your age because you know, that kind of, are you Gen X or millennia? I'm 45, which makes me the tail end of Gen X. Okay. So, you know, I, increasingly I am 60. So I'm the tail end of the baby boom, but I'm starting, you know, as you get older, you make the cut differently than generations. So 10 years ago, we would have been natural enemies, but now we're on the same side of, you know, the younger people. Right. Talk a bit about why, you know, parents, your age in particular, although this is also true of boomers, why did they, why did we surrender authority as parents to experts? I think that, you know, part of it, you know, is that we, we, our parents divorced in such high numbers. We had that, you know, the high water mark of divorce in America was when I was young and people were put in therapy or they felt like, sorry, they felt like they needed therapy because they went through something hard like their, you know, parents splitting up. And as they entered adulthood, they entered therapy, they went into therapy and they thought it was beneficial. And they thought, you know, my parents weren't there for me in various ways. I remember the pain I went. And also my therapist really encouraged me to see my parents failings. They weren't emotionally sensitive enough. And we entered my generation and millennials went into parenting thinking we were going to be the most emotionally sensitive generation of parents. We were going to watch our kids like hawks. We were going to be there for them. And we were going to constantly ask them how they were feeling. And we thought that being gentle with our kids would produce them gentlest possible kids. And we never asserted our authority. We avoided all punishment. And frankly, we've presided over something like a disaster. So it's like you, you were raising human veal, right? Right, exactly. You know, but then also just to kind of play devil's advocate, I think about that a lot like my parents were members of the greatest generation. And in a way, you know, they were unemotionally available or emotionally unavailable, partly because they were dealing with their own shit. And they had been taught, you know, I mean, they were the children of immigrants and they grew up in very stern, not only stern families, but in stern subcultures. And that clearly was not good. Like, you know, it's, I mean, I guess I turned out okay in the long run. So I don't want to, you know, dismiss that. But they were, you know, they were not happy people. You're right that they were responsible and you could rely on them for basic stuff. And like, you know, I don't want to be, I didn't want to be like them as parents. I don't want to be my kids friends. Like, how do we find a happy medium where you're not, you know, it isn't like going home to, you know, a German family in the 1930s, you know, that people, you know, rightly thought was the incubator of fascism or something like that with a stern father and a stern mother. Like, how do you balance not being distant, but also not being smothering with positive regard? So I think this is such an important question because a lot of people feel like, but my parents were cold. I didn't like that. I didn't get all the hugs I wanted and the love I needed. So there's a difference between, I think some of this is, is what kids need and other, and, and other is just, you know, good stuff to have. So being loving with your kids as affectionate as you want to be is great. All that no one says you have to be cold. And in fact, there's great research on this authoritative parents who are loving always in study after study. This is so, such a replicated study. It's a very sturdy study. It's authoritative, meaning the parents are in charge, but they're loving. They raise the happiest, least anxious, least depressed and honestly most successful and kids and the kids end up having the best relationship with their parents. What you can't do when you're loving and affectionate with your kids is divest yourself of authority. That's what you can't do if you want to raise them well and have them be, you know, want to be adults themselves. Yeah. And I thought your, the distinction you were drawing while talking about that study in the book between authoritarian parents who are just cold and remote and kind of arbitrary authoritative in the way that you described and then permissive parents or whatever who just really don't enforce anything that, you know, that's a good kind of breakdown to think about. I also, in thinking about when did we as a culture start surrendering our authority to experts, you know, you, of course, parenting, you end up thinking about yourself and, you know, parents like generals are always fighting the last war, right? You know, you, I can remember at a certain point, my parents said like, we're giving you all the opportunities we didn't have. And like on a certain level, that's incredibly generous. And on another level, like why are you saddling me with your aspirations from 1938, you know, in the 70s? It's like, it's a weird thing, but you can't really get around that. But I also think in the post-war era, there were a lot of people, America was a relatively poor country before World War II. There was a huge boom after and a lot of people entered the middle class who really came from, you know, places of little authority. There was a cult of experts growing in mid-century, 20th century. And it was, you know, parents either read Dr. Spock, you know, in droves and were, you know, were supposedly being permissive about their kids, although his book is, you know, it's just filled with passive aggression or Bruno Bettelheim, who's another, you know, concentration camp survivor, who also turned out to be in many ways a fraud. But there was a real dichotomy between hard and soft parenting. But there was an overwhelming urge to, for people who were newly in the middle class, I think, to say, we really don't know what we're doing. And our parents can't help us because they, you know, they grew up in Italy and Ireland and Poland or, you know, under bizarre circumstances. And, you know, are we actually getting out of the cult of experts? Because it seems like in many ways we're, you know, and Gen X certainly, this was like the byword, right, of Gen X, is that we know the institutions, you know, and the experts don't care about us and don't serve us. So, is there, I guess this is a random, I'm sorry for rambling, but is it particularly shocking that Gen X parents would be surrendering their authority to the very institutions that they seem to know we're not really looking out for them? Well, I don't think they knew that therapists were part of that. I don't think they knew that the mental health establishment was part of that. I think they thought I want to be as emotionally attuned. I want to get this right. I'm better educated than my parents. So I'm going to go to the most educated therapist I can find to help me with the exact technique I need for a child. And what they didn't ask themselves, I think, I think what we didn't ask ourselves is, what are we actually looking to produce? So we thought, oh, I'm going to raise the most sensitive emotionally in tuned happy child. Well, it turns out that's actually not how you do it. But we obsessed over our children's happiness and spent no time at all thinking about how to make them strong. And it turns out raising strong kids is a much better way to raise happy kids. Yeah. You know, let's talk a little bit about the treatment of your book. You know, it's it's funny. It has not been reviewed as widely as I would have thought when I and this is not because it is a bad book or a lacking book. It's, you know, it's curious to me. And, you know, that is also reflected in the treatment. Your book was I looked this morning. And of all books sold on Amazon, you were at number eight. But you're nowhere to be seen. And that includes old books and new books. I mean, at Amazon is a vast universe. On the New York Times bestseller list, you are nowhere to be seen. Can you talk a little bit about the treatment of the book in the kind of mainstream or legacy media? And, you know, how how is that working for you? Yeah. So I think all of us who are, you know, truth tellers out there and went against various narratives. That's that's the treatment we get. So of course, right away the New York Times decided wouldn't review my book and, you know, other legacy media, because that's how they treat you when you were, you know, questioning the the transgender narrative or the gender ideology narrative with with teenage girls early on. Now, of course, they write whole articles about it. And as if it's obvious and everything that I said in the book four years ago is now so obvious the New York Times can casually write about it. But but at the time they regarded me as they they tried to paint me as some sort of, you know, bigot or something. And and that's sort of, you know, I write for readers, I don't write for the reviewers and I don't write for legacy media, which so so that is what it is. I'm sort of obviously sales are brisky. We're telling me before we started recording that Amazon actually ran out of the book or I assume is it going through another printing? Yeah, we just got them a number another shipment. So they should be ready to go. But it was the number one book on Amazon in all books in the world and quickly sold out. And that's because there actually is a desire to, you know, learn, you know, talk about what the harms therapy and over focus on feelings might be doing. But the, you know, and any criticism of the, you know, I guess ruling class that tends not to go over well. Yeah, it's but it is. I mean, do you find it heartening that there's an audience for this beyond that? I mean, this is where, you know, without becoming grandiose about it, there are, you know, we live in a series of kind of overlapping empires, you know, some are rising, some are falling. But it seems like they have less ability to actually restrict what it, you know, curious people find. And, you know, sometimes that bothers people on the right, sometimes on the left, sometimes at the New York Times, sometimes elsewhere and things like that. But it seems like in a strange way and a kind of I would argue a wonderful way your your work and certainly the the your your first book, Irreversible Damage, which was the subject of, you know, various attempts to kind of limit its circulation through, you know, discussion or attempts to take it off certain websites and things like that. It finds an audience. So that, you know, that must be heartening. It's absolutely heartening. Look, I have no complaints. I've been very happy that I've been able to reach so many readers. But I think we should all be getting a little tired of being told what we're allowed to read. And unfortunately, there are always these campaigns to limit certain authors because they're so afraid that if your message gets out, people might think for themselves and agree with you. And it's just a really ugly strain that we're seeing. It's, you know, obviously is often enforced through the various tech fora. But, you know, I, I, I certainly hope that there's a good amount of pushback to it. I guess as a final question or topic of discussion, what, what comes next then? I mean, you know, part of it is identifying a problem and discussing its roots and its, its reach and things like that. And I think anybody who has kids, anybody who has been a kid, this is, this is a pitch or, you know, this is a line for you, you know, if you have kids or have ever been a kid, you know, this is a book worth reading because it touches on things and nothing brings out social anxieties more than talking about children. You know, there are blank screen that we project all of our anxieties, all of our aspirations on and things like that. And I think the book should be read by everybody who has any interest in that. What should we, you know, what, what are the next steps though from, you know, kind of talking about this, you know, what is to be done? So this is the thing I'm most optimistic about. We can absolutely turn this around. And here's why you don't need any money. You don't need expert help. You can do it yourself as a parent. Kids need authority. They need to know they're going to be just fine. We need to remember to tell them that minor injuries are fine. They can shake it off. It's fine and play on. We need to assume that most kids will be resilient. Most combat veterans are resilient in the face of trauma. Certainly most children are. And we need to tell them that their ancestors were resilient. We need to tell them about what their grandparents and great-grandparents went through. We need to reassure them that they can get through hard times too. We need to, there's so many things we can do for our kids, like giving them some amount of independence, teaching them a skill, giving them time when we're not monitoring and hovering. All these things are really good for them, surrounding them with family who loves them. And it doesn't cost any money to do it. That's the thing. That's why I'm suspicious. Like everything good costs money, right? But on a systemic level, are there particular interventions that you would make or you think should be done? Because there are 100,000 or I'm sorry, there's like 15,000 school districts in the country, et cetera. Are there particular interventions that can have a broader reach than kind of being the change that you want to see in the world? Absolutely. You could start by shrinking all the mental health staffs at the school and bringing back order to the school. Right now, they consider all bad, all disciplinary problems are now treated as a mental health problem. And the kids get talk therapy and no discipline. That's put kids who are good kids really in danger of violence from other kids who really should be expelled. And we're seeing that. We're seeing kids brutalized in school because instead of expelling, which they haven't been able to do since Obama issued his Dear Colleague letter, they're not allowed to expel a disproportionate number of minority students. So instead of doing that, they do these therapeutic interventions. They don't work. We're seeing chaos in the schools. We need to bring back order and shrink the mental health staff so that they can only treat the kids who actually need it, not everyone. I guess a final word then for the Gen Z. Let's start a generational battle right now. For Gen Z, kids who are in their 20s who were raised under this dispensation of bad therapy, what's your advice to them when they... I mean, there are studies I've seen that show that millennials and Gen Z report higher levels of not being able to do their daily activities because of either mental health issues or physical health issues. Then boomers, for God's sake, who could be in their 70s. What's your message to them? I mean, they're on way too many medications that they don't need, way too many therapeutic interventions, and they all believe they have a mental health diagnosis. I just want to say, some kids are a little different. They're a little weird. They're a little awkward. They're a little quirky. It doesn't mean you have a mental health problem, but I would caution people as serious as I think it is to put a child or an adolescent on SSRIs or a serious antidepressants, you also need mental... Certainly, you need medical oversight coming off of those things. Definitely don't try to quit cold turkey. These medications have very powerful withdrawal symptoms, and you really need to very carefully taper if you're going to try living without the snowsuit you may not need. All right. Well, that's a good point to end on. Abigail Schreier, I want to thank you for talking to reason. The new book is Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. Thank you, Abigail. Thank you.