Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

alrighty everybody it's time for another episode of the Michael shmer show I'm your host as usual this is brought to you by skeptic society and skeptic magazine here's our new issue just came out this week on artificial intelligence look at that cover is that a gorgeous cover or what all done with artificial intelligence and now we can even include Four Color throughout you can get your issue by going to skeptic.com magazine okay my guest today the returning Champion Abigail shrier she received the Barbara olssen award for excellence and independ end and journalism in 2021 this was based in part on her bestselling book irreversible damage it was named a best book by The Economist and the times it's been translated into 10 languages in her new book here it is bad therapy why the kids aren't growing up this has been the number one bestselling book on Amazon even more than um those diet books and the kids books and all that stuff congratulations Abigail thank you so I like that um I I iatrogenic uh concept you introduc at the start of the book talk a little bit about that just as an introduction sure iatrogenesis is a Greek word for when the Healer introduces harms and we've long known that certainly in the field of medicine through Psychiatry you know all of these fields anything that we found that can help a patient can even cure a patient can also harm so you know an x-ray you don't want to go undergo an x-ray if you don't need one because of the risk of radiation and and so forth same thing with Tylenol too much Tylenol can damage your liver it's great for a headache but you know you don't want too much of it and and yes Psychotherapy also comes with side effects we know that we know that burn victims who have uh gone through uh group therapy as opposed to the control group ended up sadder we know that people who experienced a traumatic event sometimes end up with worse PTSD if they go to group therapy than if they don't uh victims of normal bereavement the loss sometimes talking about it makes you feel worse about it and that's true with amplifying worries amplifying sadness and uh and also undermining a sense of efficacy like you can make a difference in the world um and these are precisely the major uh harms afflicting the rising generation we're seeing the same symptoms in the rising generation that you get for over treatment yeah I thought of um the covid shutdown of schools and restaurants and all that stuff that happened you know when it was done it was like well what have we got to lose the P the pandemic could be 10% 20% deadly don't forget AIDS was 100% fatal at the start you know we don't want anything like that and what's the harm of closing down schools Well turns out there's a huge cost to pay for that and you know I think policy makers politicians they don't think of it like that yeah and and frankly you know that's right they don't they don't think about it they don't discuss it and you see this you know with doctors they have to they're federally obligated to report the side effects of their medication or the reactions of drugs but unfortunately there's no such thing with in the field of psychology with therapy and um you have a lot of practitioners out there who don't even know that talking to or certainly don't admit that talking to a teenager about what might be troubling her could lead her to feel worse about her life yeah yeah like in terms of the shut down I try to put myself in the shoes of a of the mayor Governor president or the CDC head or whatever and if it turns out it's like 10% fatal and you don't shut down the schools and you don't take drastic measures then that's on you so you you kind of make the uh other calculation like I'd rather risk shutting things down and who knows what the consequences will be rather than the the one that could be deadly so I'm thinking you know these schools if they have a kid that commits suicide and you know it's it's like a nuclear we a nuclear accident we we have zero tolerance of that we cannot allow this to happen again we have to do something what can we do well we better hire some psychologists and we better monitor every single kid just in case yeah I mean two things one you mentioned the lockdowns you know parents objected parents were very worried about putting teens through a second Academic Year of isolation but the mental health establishment and I'm talking here about the school psychologist Association School counseling Association the school social workers they have an association all of them were silent as we had it into a second year of lockdowns this was the most predictable you know harm psychologically to the kids and now they're presenting themselves as the solution oh let's talk about your problems well their track record on that isn't very good either why do you think they were silent why do I think they were silent oh I think it was politically you know I I think you know the school teachers really clearly wanted that they did not want to go back to work but at the very least the school Counselors Association the school psychologist they owed us a warning so we could at least temper all the enthusiasm for shutting schools down with some hey by the way you could harm a lot of kids in the process I mean the fact that they didn't even say a word now they did go to Congress you know the American Psychological Association did go to Congress to lecture Congress about systemic race racism climate change uh police tactics they just had nothing to say about the foreseeable detriment to kids by shutting down another year of school yeah yeah I guess it's uh weighing the consequences of different um effects that happen down the road like in your previous book you talked about um you know trans kids threatening suicide to their parents the famous line do you want a dead daughter or or or a transon or what whatever whatever the line was and of course no parents going to say well I'll take the chance that my kid will kill himself you you just couldn't live with yourself so you go the other direction something like that is a calculation yeah and remember it was psychologists saying that or it was it was therapist saying that they were the ones saying that line to parents and strong arming them and I think they're doing the same now you don't want your child not to have a diagnosis and medication I mean if you know we're seeing this it could be depression and you want to immediately get in there with an SSRI and I think they're vastly over diagnosing these kids without any sense that diagnosing a kid in itself is a serious intervention you're going to change that child's self-concept so I'm not saying never do it of course if you need to you need to but if you don't you don't throw around diagnosis for a kid who may or may not have you know an anxiety disorder yeah yeah I don't know how much you follow Jordan Peterson's career but he he's become a friend and colleague and I've just watched with just kind of startling awareness of the message he's giving Which is so basic and these kids are just like glomming onto this I remember when I first went to see him live it it you know just basic stuff like set goals and work out Eat Right make your bed it's like really no one's ever told you this I mean this is really kind of like 101 the life you know I think T Jordan Peterson's amazing I think he's tapped into is something so Elemental and important and what you said is right no one's telling them these things see what they're telling them is you have social anxiety you may need to start a medication but what they're not telling them is go join a sports team put down the iPad go play sports you'll feel better uh because we know exercise does more to reduce you know Sy you know symptoms of mild to moderate depression than than Psychotherapy or medication yeah okay so yeah to me your book is could have been titled bad therapy bad parenting both it's a little bit of both yeah I think that a lot of the solutions you can't Implement if you put you know mental health experts in charge of your child rearing you need to be able to say listen I'm your mom I know best or I'm your father I know best this is what we're going to do and if you can't sort of set the guard rails for your kid you're leaving them prey to a lot of other people who are going to come in and make up the rules for your kid and that's we're seeing that with the activists and I think we're also seeing that with with some of the therapists as well yeah yeah when I was reading your book I went to pick up my kid from school he's seven so second grade and because you were talking about you know just kids say just crazy [ __ ] and then you know it and parents just go yeah yeah whatever but the therapists at school like oh my god do you know what he said we have to talk about this anyway so uh we just uh put him in a new monaster school here in Santa Barbara and he's having a little adjustment missing some of his friends at the the old school and anyway long story so he's been kind of getting more and more used to it so you he gets in the car he goes how did it go today he was like oh it was pretty good and I said on a scale of 1 to 10 10 being best how was your day today oh it was a 10 I'm like oh thank God oh this is great and then his mom calls and and and she says you know how how how was it today he goes terrible it was horrible I said you just told me it was a 10 he said well I thought 10 meant the worst I said no you didn't and then he's like and then she's like oh come on he's like oh never mind they from Mom he knows he's G to get sympathy from M yeah who knows they're just they just say [ __ ] and yeah you most of it you could just sort of blow off instead of looking for some deep meaning right so a lot of it is like deep root cause ISM what's the deep root cause of whatever and often it's just random [ __ ] that happens from day to day it's like um I was reminded while reading your book of that uh Ellen degenerous Riff on those commercials for anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications like do you ever feel sad D are you ever anxious about anything and she goes yeah I'm alive I mean that's right and unfortunately see with adults this there's this natural vetting process or this natural triage where we know what we should ignore what we can brush off and what we can move on from we have a history of ourselves right we know if this is look I'm feeling blue but I've been through breakups before kids don't know that kids and teenagers don't know those things so when we throw them into a kind of counseling or therapy or emotions discussion they have no way they they they will take the adults lead and this can often lead them to really magnify minor distress um and and ALS also inevitably it leads to the conclusion that the parent is to blame after all they're the ones in charge of keeping you safe yeah okay so your book is addressing a problem to be solved is there really a problem is the data really reflecting something that's happening in society that is the spike since about 2015 three times as much as girls one and a half times in boys of suicidal ideation depression anxiety cutting anorexia and so on and so forth that that's real right you're pretty confident well here's what I'm most confident in from those numbers because there's no question there's an exaggeration and diagnosis okay here's what I'm we are talking about our distress the young kids are talking about their distress more than ever before and ruminating on their bad feelings and that itself is a symptom of depression sitting around thinking that you're sad and you're feeling bad and rehearsing in a loop your sadness that itself is a symptom so we know that these kids are in a bad place um and we know I think that the mental health experts in general that they're encountering are not helping I think they're hurting but but at the very least we know they're not helping MH right so we follow this debate on the show with you know Jonathan height and and Greg lukanov blaming social media screen time Facebook and all that stuff and I'm not 100% convinced of that I I like your approach also the parenting thing uh I had Jean twangy on the show talking about generations and she presents her theory of you know life history Theory and and so our listeners not familiar with this um that thanks to life-saving technology Public Health vaccines and so on people are living a lot longer twice as long as they used to live so the de unfolding of your life can go slower you don't need to have kids as early you don't need to have kids as often and she had a startling statistic that women today are 10 years later than they were my generation Baby Boomers in other words it was I think age 19 was the average first pregnancy for a baby boomer woman and now it's 29 it's a Whole Decade slower and instead of having three or four 2.5 or whatever now they have one so her theory was that when you only have one you become highly risk averse yes and therefore the it's not coddling in a negative way it's just like that's the only one I got I have to put everything into it right it's a little bit like you know in evolutionary theory there's our selected case selected species so our selected rapid like salmon you know you have a 100,000 eggs and you hope one gets all the way to the top of the stream right case elected like elephants you just have one or two and you got to put all your resources into them to make sure they make it to reproductive age and so on so that that kind of risk aversion factors into how much you allow your in this case kid to to be a free range kid and run around in the playground and take the like lar skazi did you know take the subway to school or back and you know for that um you know times have changed on that so what are your thoughts on what's the cause of this whole problem and how do you tease apart those different causal vectors right so I love that what you just said about jeene twangy I love jeene twangy I've interviewed her I profiled her for the Wall Street Journal and Lov loved her book I would say this my explanation for what she's seeing and documenting why aren't these why are these kids taking so long to grow up and and then of course my other question is why are they in such distress so she's right they're taking a long time to grow up they're delaying these things and my my you know what I argue in the book is those two questions are related why are they so miserable because actually the cure to most of their adolescent angst is Growing Up by which I mean taking on responsibilities becoming a load loadbearing wall being someone other people can depend on that's actually the cure for the lot of a lot of the sort of teenage fantods and and and general angst teenage what fantods you know the worries all the fears and uh I've never heard that ter I I try to avoid saying anxiety because we uh oh you know we constantly talk about anxiety as oh it's my anxiety we talk our way into you know what we used to just call worry or fear or nervousness we now diagnose all the time and and really uh it's just it's too much we have we have people in the streets and all kinds of people who really do suffer with severe di you know disorder and and other things but but the idea that we're all walking around with you know this well of anxiety is just it's not a helpful way of looking at it right so uh because of entropy and the second law of Thermodynamics there's far more ways for things to go bad then go good life is hard it's it you know every single day could be a bad day so you just have to get up and face it and what you're saying is that obsessing about the ways things could go wrong could be self-fulfilling rather than pushing forward and say well [ __ ] it just I know bad things but I'm going to set my goals and just go and just buffer it and be antifragile um and and so on that that's the way to do it I mean that's exactly right I can quote studies but also but but let's just think about our grandparents we don't need the studies just think about your own grandparents what they survived what they made what they persevered through and that they never expected to be happy they didn't think they were owed happiness or entertainment every day they you know I talked in my book about my own grandmother who you know grew up poor through the Great Depression she spent a year in an iron lung you know surviving Pol polio her mother died in childbirth and she never occurred to her she was supposed to to be happy all the time and truly to the end of her life in her 90s she was the most positive happy person I've known yeah I think it's been my constant complaint happiness is the wrong word or the wrong goal you know it should be leading a purposeful meaningful life which which means having challenges in which you're not happy doing them right the examples I use you know being a caretaker for two of my four parents my parents were divorced when I was young and so I had two stepparents anyway so I took care of two of the four of them and it wasn't fun I wasn't happy doing it but you know afterwards I felt like well you know that's the right thing to do I feel good doing it I'd want somebody to do that for me they did these wonderful things for me and so on it was just sort of this is part of life and it's good but if happiness was my goal I wouldn't have done it right I mean it's it's funny you know I think about my own kids you know naturally and one of the things I I only learned this through while I was writing the book but what you just said is totally right getting a purpose and doing something for the common good taking care of you know parents and grandparents actually you know can be very reward it's very rewarding and I'll give you an example you know we we celebrate this Jewish holiday called sukot where you're supposed to build these little Huts in the uh and um and and live in them in the in the fall and for a week basically I mean you have your meals and them whatever and we sent my son my my my mother-in-law and father-in-law needed help because they're getting older building theirs and we sent my sons over to build it for them and they of course you know grumble or whatever but they get over there and they're when they're done they're so happy why because with me with rods and tools and metal you know metal poles and all these things they had built this structure that was needed by the family and those things are so gratifying and we don't give kids enough opportunities to do things like that yeah yeah I remember reading Dan Gilbert's book stumbling on happiness and he had that research in there about how having children makes parents less happy and I remember thinking well so then what's the answer to this don't have kids you don't be one of these what do they call them D two double income no kids Dinko but but if you're having kids to be happy that that's the wrong reason that's not why you do it you do it because it's fulfilling it's the best thing you'll ever do and on and on and on uh you know again wrong goal yeah we're not very good at sort of knowing what we need when it comes you know psychologically I mean think about it you know you you go through a breakup what do you want to if you're a woman you know especially women you want to talk about it endlessly but the advantage is you know you complain and complain to your friends is very natural most women have this experience at some point and at some point your friends basically let you know I'm done hearing about this it's time to move on and that's actually really good advice that's actually really good for us and the problem is when we send a child off to therapy no one's going to tell them it's time to move on he dumped you in the seventh grade grade it's not the biggest deal in the world and you're never going to get that signal from the therapist and the child's not going to know it so now you've got years and years of rehashing the same you know injury yeah yeah I've done some counseling and therapy with for marital with my first marriage that that broke up after 20 years you know so we tried for a few years of this and you know 225 bucks an hour and you know kind of div dissolved into this just complaint session like you well you what he did this week I'll tell you what she did this week you know each had our little list I thought you know I could do this for free with my cycling buddies when I'm out you know what my wife did and it's like what you know what's the end game here so you talk about this what's the goal of therapy and do they have goals well obviously the best therapists do I mean that you know when they're for two things one with adults okay which is a separate category adults can decide what they want some adults might just want someone to talk to once a week forever and that's fine too some people might find that use useful and they need it good for them but with with children you really who can't push back on a therapist who aren't likely to say hey I've been doing this for two years nothing's working a kid can't say that right they can't know it but so they're not in a position to cut it off if it's not helping or if it's counterproductive um and and with with them it's more of a concern because the the during the therapy they can get more upset about their own lives they can they can absolutely get more upset with their parents and we're seeing that you know this whole phenomenon of Parental estrangement there's no question we've we've seen record levels of that in the rising generation and the the man I interviewed about this is an expert in it his name is Joshua Coleman he's a psych you know a psychologist he's written several books on the topic but he'll tells me that he told me that the number one cause of Parental estrangement the rising generation young people deciding they're cutting off their parents because their parents are toxic supposedly um is the therapist that they went to see quack therapist I would say I think that's fair I really do it's just irresponsible and I've talked to so many wonderful therapists who say to me no I'm there to deal with a problem and I make sure and we talk about is it getting better and we tell them you know we limit the number of sessions with a child you don't let it go on forever I mean these are responsible practices by really good you know therapists yeah I bring that up cuz I have some institutional memory on this issue uh in skeptic here are some of the um quack Psychotherapy and theories we've debunked over the decades the subliminal messages scare the satanic Panic recovered Memory Mania the self-esteem movement multiple personality craze the left brain right brain bad the Mozart effect supposed to play Mozart what when your child's in the womb the vaccine autism fur super predator M Fair uh fear that was in the early 90s attachment therapy the drug abuse resistance education the Dare program you talked about this in your book that increased teen drug use the Scared Straight program that made adolescence more likely to offend the critical incident stress debriefing CISD program that worsened anxiety and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and many more that have plagu psychology in Psychiatry it's astonishing to me in our profession that this the it just seemed like every five to 10 years or so there's some new fad thing that it takes really experimentalists and lawyers ultimately to kind of bring an end to it it's astonishing and gender dysphoria the convincing the whole all these teenagers that they were transgender these teenage girls who could possibly have had gender dysphoria I mean yeah that's right and and and of course the problem isn't that they aren't useful or can never be useful or that therap there's no place for therapy it's that no one's tracking side effects in fact a lot of the you know practitioners a lot of the clinical therapists don't even acknowledge that it could harm a patient they think and they will say talking about your problems is always the solution or it's always going to improve things and make it better that isn't true it's never been true uh um and again with adults it's one thing an adult can say listen I I know I know we seem to be blaming my mom but I I don't think it's fair to call her toxic uh but but a teenager is not going to say that yeah yeah yeah I met a Mom I don't know about a year ago so told me her 13-year-old daughter has come out as bisexual by which she means she likes boys and girls I said oh she's having sex and she's tried both no she's not having sex with anybody it's said well then how does she know oh it's you know it's up here what are you talking about yeah and that's that's sort of the intersection of those two things you brought up you said to me your book could have been called you know the problem with therapy and the problem with parenting and they they do go together when a parent turns over their child to a therapist and says well you sort it out transgender identity could have been one of the things they explore in other words they're just sitting around fishing in the child's brain very often and if there isn't a problem if they're not working on the child's severe you know anorexia or any number of of disorders that the child desperately needs work to work on then they're just really sitting there for a rap session and the adult has so much power um even inadvertently she can suggest things you know and and lead a kid down the wrong path right again memory is not a recording device uh in which you replay the scene on the uh cartisian theater of your mind and the little homunculus reports what's on there uh I'm glad to see you interviewed Elizabeth lofa she's a longtime good friend she's amazing that was a it's astonishing that it was it wasn't until the 19 late 1990s thanks in part to the recovered memory movement that it took to debunk all that nonsense yeah I I mean we just have our our intuitions are really wrong about about a lot of human psychology so our intuitions that our memories are this perfect recording device no they're not as you just said they're more like Wikipedia Pages Elizabeth Loftus has called it so anyone can up you know other people can update your memory and alter it and you can alter it too and um you know the recovered memory epidemic that was a series of therapists who suggested and implanted the idea that kids had been abused and they were they began to remember the abuse here's the thing your memory of abuse is not different your your even if it's false it it's it's no less veritical than an accurate memory so when when we're in there you know fishing for trauma with kids as school teachers are now today and school counselors are today um they're they're very likely to turn up something even something that is didn't happen no Holocaust Survivor ever repress the memory of what they went through this just doesn't happen and when we pointed that out back in the 90s their response is well sex sex abuse is different than genocide or being gassed it's like oh really okay but you know how did that unfold so we published in skeptic a u an account by one of these women that went through this so she went in her late 20 she was suffering whatever depression anxiety the usual just uh problems and goes to see these therapist who says well do you think was there any like sexual abuse in your childhood she goodness no no no I I know I know you don't think there was but a lot of my patients find out that they were now maybe you weren't you know who knows but but here here's a book I forget which I think you cited the book in your your book uh you know read this and think about it and think about your dreams do you ever have any dreams where these images come up well maybe anyway six months later you know oh yeah my father sexually abused me and my mom was complicit and the sisters and brothers knew about it and so on and but she ended up getting a lawyer and suing the therapist um after ruining the lives of her family I mean and there was you know dozens of cases like this that were just horrible that's right I mean the the power of suggestion especially with children and teenagers they're going through so much it's so strong you don't need much to lead a child down a wrong path and that's why I'm saying like you know unless a kid has a real problem look if they sit around with a family member right an aunt a grandparent usually not only does the person love them not only do they want what's best for them but they have no incentive to keep these sessions going forever but with a therapist the incentives are all wrong and there's no one overseeing it to make sure that the child's actually improving and no one's measuring are there harmful side effects like alienation from Mom you know PTSD is apparently a real thing and stress does have effects on the body so what do we know and what don't we know about that sure so we know things like um combat vets who succumb to PTSD I mean they develop they go through a traumatic experience and seem to develop the symptoms of PTSD they may have there's some indication that they may have slightly different brain structures that's possible okay but here's what we don't know at all we don't know whether the traumatic event caused the brain difference whether the brain difference made them susceptible to succumbing to PTSD and that's true across the board of all kinds of different physical symptoms of uh traumatic events because we do know in the wonderful work of George penano has shown this that most people will be resilient even in the face of of traumatic event most soldiers combat vets don't get PTSD they actually recover uh remarkably we're actually built to recover now some people don't some people have a harder time and we don't know why but here's what we definitely don't know we don't know that traumatic events change your body or your brain we don't know it causally because they haven't done prospective studies that would establish that and we definitely don't know that you can reason from combat veterans to elementary school kids who whose parents got a divorce we don't know anything about the brain of such a child based on the combat vets who suffered PTSD for many reasons aside from the fact that children like adults are most likely to be resilient in the face of all kinds of traumatic event but also we don't know because actually a sudden shock is totally different from a grinding um you know period of abuse or sadness because we tend to actually kids and people in general tend to habituate to the sort of slow move sadness of say parents breaking up um but but a traumatic event you see your buddy explode that's a different kind of so it's the the counterfactuals we have to look at um children who grow up and become abusive parents we think well were they abused oh they were abused oh well that's the cause okay how many children were abused as children and grew up and they became anything but abusive parents they're exceptionally loving because they would never want that to happen to their own and so on and and so it's the counter examples we have to look at well also yeah Kathy whm actually those those studies the idea that every person who you know is traumatized in some way or has Psychopathology they were abused as adults well that's never been sorry they they went they were abused as children they've never established that through prospective studies and the researcher who did the best work in this area is Kathy weam and she did she did step active studies meaning she looked at the kids who had gone through something like childhood abuse and saw that it was documented she Then followed up with them 10 15 years later and sent in blind researchers researchers who were blinded to not meaning they didn't know which of the kids had suffered actual abuse and which hadn't and what she found was that the kids who had suffered abuse as children were no more likely to physically abuse their own children as adults that than those who hadn't but she has a more recent study which is to me even more interesting it just came out I think a month ago and and that is that if you're an adult who believes you were you who has a current Psychopathology a c current mental health problem or difficulty in life like making emotional connections or forming relationships you are more likely you are more likely to um believe that you had a childhood in abuse than those who actually I'm sorry saying this wrong if you have an adult Psychopathology um sorry to keep track let me just let me let me make sure I'm getting this right um those oh sorry those adults this is it the Kathy wham's new study is the following those adults who believed they were traumatized as children are more likely to exhibit adult Psychopathology than the adults who went through actually traumatic in ins incidents as children and didn't regard it as trauma not regarding it as trauma is it meant coincides with better mental health as adult yeah so the again the consequences of believing something happened to you when it didn't is not trivial here I was think thinking in the story you tell in the book about right uh with one of your boys and the counselor came in and said I'd like you to leave the room now so that we can do some psych test or whatever and you didn't thank God you didn't because that's where the bad things happen we learned this from the um from the McMartin preschool case that was the longest most expensive trial in California history till the OJ trial and uh this was a a case where the police took these children aside away from their parents and these are like grammar school kids so they're scared to death like where's my mom you can see your mom in a moment but first we're going to show you these anatomically correct doll now you tell us where the teacher touched you here on the doll you point to the doll and and basically the kid's just stumbling around what do I got to say to get out of this room so and that's how the whole thing unfolded and so it became clear after that you know interviewing techniques were being done all wrong and we're doing this to kids it's like what happened to you know I I tell that story in my book where I took my son in to a urgent care clinic for a stomach ache because it wasn't going away and I thought maybe he' picked up a bug at summer camp or something and uh they they cleared him they said it was just dehydration they were going to send us home and they said now we'd like you to leave the room because we're doing our mental health screener and I almost left the room but I had already written the book so I said hold on let me see your mental health screen I can't believe I got up to leave the you know I had just written the book and even I get up to leave the room because when a person in Scrubs ask me to do something I usually just do it and it was put out by it was a survey put out by the National Institute of Mental Health this a federal government agency and they it's it's mandated for kids eight and eight and up and they ask the parents to leave the room that's part of the protocol and then they ask them five escalating questions about whether that child may want to be may want to kill himself astonishing oh I was thinking about um back back to the abuse of parents or CH children you know it's a signal detection problem this one of the last columns I wrote for Scientific American before they canel it was uh I told a story about doing a documentary on cursed horror films so these are horror films where something bad happened to the cast like The Exorcist and some of these other famous films and anyway so they had examples of this I said okay what about the the horror films where nothing bad happened to the cast oh I we I don't know anything about those okay what about the non-horror films were something bad happened to like Superman with Christopher Reeves breaks his neck and so oh I don't know about those it's like right I mean what what are we even talking about right so you get the two by two grid one two three four cells you know we're interested in the two cells the one where bad things do happen to the of course or they don't and then the other two false positive false negatives and so on anyway so that part of the column was fine but then I said I Ed the example because Carol Tav had told me about this study I think it was one you cited about you know abusive parents who were abused as children okay what about the abusive parents who were not abused as children what about the abused children who do not grow up to beep and and my editor said well we can't we can't say that because you're discounting the pain that people were abused as children it's like no I'm not it's nothing to do with what somebody feels it's just we just want to know does it have this causal effect or doesn't it brilliant and people don't obviously I mean obviously you're you you know more than you need way more than I know about this stuff but that they're all beset by selection bias as you were saying right and it's the same is true with these studies that purport to show intergenerational trauma they look at the the kids of people who survived the Holocaust so already you're dealing with a particular subset of humanity the tiny number that survived you're not looking at everybody and now you're saying okay are their kids a little different well we don't know if they have if the reason this group survived is that they all have heightened anxiety or heightened awareness of danger maybe there are things that are different about them but second of all there's no proof that that what was passed on was passed on you know through epigenetic transmission it may just be they scared the Daylights out of their kids by telling them the stories of what they went through which is also you know very believable and understandable so um you know these studies aren't that that purport to show intergenerational trauma unfortunately aren't terribly one that finally did me in was when I said uh you know the the theory of systemic racism as an explanation for black white differences in income and generational wealth that may be true but maybe it's these other factors and I listed those off they said oh no no no we're not we are not even going to touch this like oh great okay you don't want to know what's true right okay you know not good all right did you come across the fragile families and child well-being study uh in your research I was um I was just writing about this the last chapter in my next book which is called Truth what it is how to find it why it matters uh and the last section is on unknowables unknown un known unknowables things we can't ever know so I have God free will and determinism and Consciousness and why there's something than nothing and then I added um the last one the unknowable is predicting the future of human behavior of individual or Society or anything like that uh because because of um this this concept of the of a of a what is it the the branching forking Garden the The Garden of forking paths that's it Garden of forking paths you know the the more Forks you go down the harder it is to predict in an escalating manner where you know more than 5 years out no one can predict the future this studies Phil tlock has studied these super forecasters even with basing reasoning and statistical models and computers they cannot predict anything more than random chance five years out you know will Putin do this within the next six months you know who knows Putin may not even know what he's going to do right or predicting where the next school shooting's going to be or who's going to commit suicide uh there was that example of the guy who left a note suicide note he said I'm going to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge today if somebody Smiles I will not jump and he jumped and it's like so it's so Random right it's so hard to predict we'll never be able to predict the next school shooting never and of course everybody would like to do this politicians and you know policy makers we have to do something about this you can't there's nothing you can do about it because how many kids threaten to kill themselves and they don't or they feel bad and and nothing happens they don't shoot up the school and that sort of thing anyway so here's the the study the prediction problem was poignantly exposed in a massive study in which 160 teams of social scientists were provided with detailed data collected over 15 years on 4,242 atrisk families from The Fragile families and child well-being study database they were tasked with predicting six life outcomes for example child GP GPA family material hardship parental eviction or employment uh and other is based on various causal variables such as employment income Education Health environment relationship with extended kin marriage attitudes fatherhood father mother relationships interviews and inhome assessments the research teams employed not only the best statistical tools and methods all social scientists are trained to use but AI machine learning programs as well the results were underwhelming quoting here from the paper even though the fragile family's data included thousands of variables collect Ed to help scientists understand the lives of these families participants were not able to make accurate predictions for the holdout cases further the best submissions which often Ed complex machine learning methods and had access to thousands of predictor variables were only somewhat better than the results from a simple Benchmark model that use linear regression continuous outcomes or logistical regression binary outcomes with four predictor variables selected by domain experts anyway so and I just this goes on they they just can't know and these are the best people we have with the best statistical models and the most you could ever say is there's a slightly greater chance that you'll have a bad outcome if you have all well you have the ace thing right sexual abuse physical abuse neglect emotional neglect uh parent not in the home and so on th those are all factors that intuitively seems like they should have a negative effect and maybe statistically groupwise you could see some difference but will that person right there have a negative outcome not possible to say and you'll never it doesn't matter how good your statistical models are you'll never be able to know wow I can't wait to read your book that's exactly right and why don't we know because human beings are amazingly resilient and not everyone will be affected by the same things and some people will deal with unbelievable poverty and all kinds of other you know difficult ad you know adverse circumstances and they will over overcome them and here's the thing given that given that we don't know the message to kids should be a positive one you can get past that don't worry you can achieve as much as the next kid but instead we're telling them the opposite we're telling them that they've had trauma and they they may have PTSD for the rest of their lives it isn't true and it's really counterproductive so Solutions uh so the last part of your book you know I guess if you're a policy maker politician or a you know a public health official you know somebody says what are you going to do the the the feeling is well I should do something from the top down you know the government should do something we should Implement some programs or like you said in the chapter on schools hiring all these counselors what was it the state of California hire like 10,000 counselors or something I presume the these are not PhD trained carefully screened right no no no and and and I didn't even I didn't deal with this in the book because I you know I wanted to just look at the psychological harms but you know ever since I I wrote the book so many counselors and psychologists are writing to me to tell me and you didn't even get to the fact that it's completely you know co-opted by woke uh you know racist Theory and whatever so I didn't even deal with the politicization which is you know which which we know about but but yeah what what would I do as a policy maker the number one thing I would do is shrink mental health staffs in schools so instead of treating kids who don't need therapy uh and said you know they could just focus on the kids who may need extra support we don't want a kid who can do math to get an accommodation for an untime test why because he's likely to get worse at math with the accommodation he doesn't need and we're just we're giving we're putting every child in a wheelchair right now and uh of course there all kinds of emotional muscles are atrophying you know and and I think that's what we're seeing I think we can absolutely turn this around but parents have to get really involved and that does not mean uh any paying for anything expensive bringing in experts it just means asserting your own authority and picking the expert out I know was my last five years teaching at Chapman University every semester I got half a dozen letters from the school counselor or the psych Department there um in charge of this you know so and so is to be excused from whatever public speaking interacting with others needs more time on the test and so on it was like what is going on here and in my case they they just did these take home essay tests based on the readings that didn't matter but they all had to do a a 18-minute TED Talk student Ted Talk and this really one of the best things most of them ever did uh because you know forced them to get up there and be organized and speak in front of their uh their colleagues and so on but uh every semester I I just can't do it I yes you can you can do it this is going to be epic when you do this you're GNA be no I can't yes you can I'm going to work with you and they all did it all the the very last semester last year uh this frail little girl oh my God I thought she was just going to die I mean it was I felt so bad for her and I was like come on we can do this you can just do it in front of me after class and we'll rehear oh no I can't even do it in front of you and she was just like shaking I'm like all right all right I'll have you just do a ter paper I just didn't want to destroy this poor kid but how do they get like that I don't know her particular case but yeah that's an example of what you're talking about that's exactly right I mean what they need is coaching they need people who say you can do it do it you know get up there instead they're getting you know letters from the time they are five years old on you know the time they start school and the the the counselors are saying don't call on this child because of her social anxiety well everyone who has even any experience with you know an you know studying anxiety knows that that's counterproductive you want to expose a kid to the things that make her uncomfortable not let her Retreat further from them and that's what we're seeing we're seeing a generation that that doesn't feel up to life because the mental health staffs went in there and they gave them accommodations they didn't need therapy they didn't need that was counterproductive and medications that are not tell jury Seinfeld riff about uh how people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying and he says so if you go to our funeral you'd rather be the corpse than the eulogist so so that kind of breaks things up a little bit so if you feel a little anxious before your Ted Talk good that that's how you're supposed to feel that's normal I've given thousands of talks and I still get nervous before everyone or at least a little you're you know if you don't feel a little anxious or something it means you're not excited or you're not involved or you're not you don't care that's right and when we delete those feelings then the natural evolutionary benefits of things like anxiety in children because the parents are so frantic they think they need to get in there with medication and delete it we they do it without even ever being told what the benefits of anxiety are like as you said performance tends to improve with anxiety right awareness of danger we look both ways when we cross the street because of a certain amount of anxiety and you know if you if you get in there with medication and delete our body's natural adaptive resources uh the kids may never learn to cope yeah it's just so distracting and you know reading your chapter in the book of what they're doing in these classrooms what happened to teaching algebra or just reading or English mean what are these teachers doing at these schools it's astonishing right that's exactly right and instead of giving them a skill or something they can go out and do and feel good about we obsessing over their feelings and they're understandably feeling worse what you just said is right when I wrote the last book you know the thing that parents might not realize is that nearly every one of those girls those teenagers who decided suddenly she had a trans identity um that was very much with a therapist that that these girls tended to make that decision and it wasn't a gender therapist usually it was just a generic psychodynamic psychotherapist who was talking to the girl about her feelings or her problems or her trauma and when they were done talking about mom they moved on to gender I think it's a form of dualism cartisian dualism like with multiple personality disorder now disassociative uh something disorder did this is this just crazy notion that there's you your body and then there's this other thing that's floating around in there and maybe there's two of them you know maybe there's three of them you know the three faces of Eve and civil you know these all turned out to be just bogus in in some cases fraudulent just people making up stories to write a book but it caught on and and even therapists trained therapists they just bought into this dualism you know you're you know you Abigail you're a female but it's not like there's a female body and then there's this female Soul floating around in there you just are there's no there's no your inner child female there's just you that's right and you know you mentioned the dualism that's exactly right I love that because the cartisian dualism because that's why we don't realize that things like exercise is really really good for the mind because we're all connected right and it turns out that regular exercise does more you know dancing does more for mild to moderate depression than than psychotherapy or or psych meds uh because we because we are one I listened to your book while I was out riding I said I felt so much better after being depressed reading AB book but I went for a ride now I'm happy but but but but but what is the what do we know about ssris are they really no better than exercise or are they helpful for some people who suffer extreme depression or is it what do we know it's a good question I don't think we know about why they work they seem to depress you know they seem to in many people sort of put a cap on how low your emotions can go but they also can put a cap on how good you can feel too so we don't exactly know there they seem to be a fairly crude mechanism they come with a lot of side effects and you know most importantly in children who or adolescents who can't say you know really I miss having a sex drive they're not in a position to evaluate the changes the way an adult can so you see these SE kids put on they have some side effects and they get put on more psych mads and now they're they're walking around in this giant snowsuit emotionally and it's it it seems to not be doing a lot of good we know that suicide suicidal ideation is the side effect of these medications for reasons we don't understand in adolescence yeah at the beginning of your book you have that um cautionary tale of there are people that have severe mental illness or depression or whatever well I'm not talking about those people so I guess it's a question of quantity at some point becomes a qualitative difference um and maybe it's a subjective definition like like do you have an addiction well if your spouse leaves you and you get fired from your job and you're homeless you have a problem whatever it is gambling or sex or drugs or whatever if you don't if you function all right well then maybe you don't so maybe it's something like that with depression everybody feels sad or once in a while but if you're so depressed you you you can't even get out of bed to go to work and you so you lose your job that would mean you know maybe we need to try something totally and what what the problem is with teenagers they don't know a lot of what they're feeling is normal they don't know it see an adult can say man I you know I've had you know periods of sadness before but this is worse I can't even get out of bed that's different with a teenager they're so tumultuous anyway in terms of and they don't have any perspective on it and that's the problem you start them down then the road of SSRS they may never gain perspective on it yeah I've listened to most of the podcast you did on this book uh Rogan asked you and you were on the day before your book even came out you know what what's been the response well the book it was not even out yet so now here we are month out what have you heard from parents or therapists or has anybody written said hey hey hey no they're a good therapist and I'm one of them and I'm different from the bad therapist or whatever okay most people are I'm shocked by this but oh there's been overwhelming agreement so in other words so many therapists want to tell me how bad their colleagues are and um certainly psychologists they want to tell me they said they've been worrying about this forever and they're glad a journalist wrote about this because they they didn't want to say anything about their colleagues but they think it's a mess you know all this overdiagnosis and then adults want to tell me the number of adults who tell me I spend 10 years in therapy and I don't think it improved any of my problems oh you know people will tell me someone the other day told me 25 years they they just nobody's measuring nobody's tracking are are the problems I came here for are they getting better I knew a uh a um a a mentalist who was also a magician but he also worked for the Psychic Friends Network back in the 90s uh be because you know it paid better than being a magician you know they they all want to they all want to be pen and Teller in Vegas with their own show but few many or call if few were chosen right so you know he was working and he got it was like four bucks a minute that the company charged and he got like half of that a minute right so I mean it was a pretty good thing so anyway I asked him why are these people calling you he said mostly they just want somebody to talk to nights and weekends is when they would call they just need somebody to talk to and it's like yeah but you're not a therapist and he goes I know but you know we're just chatting you know love life and work and health and just you know basically the four areas that people are did love Health money and career and he said I could keep them on for hours just going through so tell me about your mother it's hilarious and then uh uh the the company got I think they got shut down or they went out of business and none of the psychics saw that coming by the way which is kind of funny but it was like a crocodile dunde remember that scene where she's explain he goes to New York and she's explaining all her friends are seeing therapists and he says why well you know they have trouble and problems and they need somebody to talk to he says in Australia we have [Laughter] friends it's amazing because the truth is there's no question look for children especially there's no question who it's better for them to talk to if what they're feeling is a little blue or a little down talking to someone who really cares about them even a teacher you know anyone but an aunt an uncle a grandparent and you know a friend that that'll do you know at least they're not incentivized nobody those adults aren't incentivized to keep them coming back regularly on Tuesdays to talk about their sadness which can be a really bad pattern you mentioned Goodwill Hunting in your book I love that movie it's so well written and acted and but that but that scene where uh you know where they have the Breakthrough where Robin Williams says you know it's not your it's not your fault son that you he was sexually abused as a child and Robin Williams was too and they exchanged their horror stories and he it's not your fault I know I know don't pull that [ __ ] on me it's not your fault son it's not your fault finally they Embrace and they cry and then and then he's off like that was the moment from what you know is is that possible or is that just a Hollywood Story So from what I understand that's a Hollywood Story and I didn't know that when I started but I actually was able to talk to people who worked with uh adults there's a one physician of mental health who work does works in the area of Mental Health in England and he works with ex-convicts in Plymouth England and he said you know some people who aren't helped by talking about what they went through first of all and second of all so they they would only be in the Here and Now is much better than rehashing what they went through with them that can be more injurious and we have this fantasy that everybody needs to talk about their problems they can't feel better until they talk about their problems they need to discourse their problems it's not true the research doesn't back it up and most people if you give them a healthy life if you surround them with those things we call friends and family and and sense of purpose and and sense of productivity in the world and and capacity in the world they'll do much better uh than them down you know especially as kids talking about their problems once remember the comedian Drew Cary or the the black glasses yeah you know and there was a story that came out that he was sexually abused as a child I forget exactly how it came out but he's like yeah yeah that that happened and everybody in holl well let's talk about it you know let's interview you and let's talk about it and he's like I don't want to talk about it it it happened of course it wasn't good but [ __ ] it I'm just I'm just going forward and they're like no no no we have to talk about this oh my God you were seually Abus he's like yeah it happened whatever and the same thing happened to Richard Dawkins at the end of I think it was The God Delusion he mentions like he went to this um you know exclusive is Eaton or one of these exclusive British schools where the one of the school teachers or whatever the these were boarding schools so he's staying the night there and so there was some of this kind of little fondling stuff with the boys and it wasn't clear how far it went but far enough that it would you know we would say that's sexual assault and he's like yep it happened but whatever it does bother me didn't really affect me I prefer it didn't happen but you know whatever and and people in well in the atheist Community where he's a huge hero he like no this has to be a huge thing we have to talk about this he's like no we don't it didn't really affect me it had to have affected you and again this is part of that kind of psychic dualism but there's something inside you like like the unconscious racism it's in there you just don't know that it's in there you are a racist no I'm not yes you are you just don't know you're racist same kind of thing right and we can tease this out through these kind of trick psychology things where we do the timing you have to press this button and that button when you see these images aha we fared it out the in racist this this uh this test that supposedly shows this is bogus again more bad psychology yeah I mean it's it's crazy that we think that the only way to be compassionate to someone who desperately wants to and wants and feels they would be helped by talking about something you know traumatic that they went through is by forcing everyone to rehash their pain and we there's no good evidence that it's necessary um for in order to get Beyond um you know most of the things traumatic even traumatic events I mean they the number if you look at the number of women who were at some point you know you know sexually what would count as sexually assaulted is very high and it's not that they are all going around with this huge injury that they're not admitting to actually you know we don't like to talk about this but most of them do recover and live hold down jobs form families you know hold down relationships uh and are productive citizens and the idea that they're they're somehow hobbled by it um most of them won't be and aren't and and we shouldn't presume right yeah during the height of the me too movement my wife was telling me yeah of course I've been pinched and poked and touched and every woman has it's just I mean honestly has I'm not a flake I'm just not going to let it bother me it's like oh okay then why is it that some are tra traumatized I guess that's the question and some of it is self-inflicted as you said through these kind of bad therapy yeah I mean people are going to have different reactions especially if they've been told they've been sexually assaulted right if they told if they were told um that what they went through was traumatic and was constituted sexual assault I think it will be harder for them to put behind them now that doesn't mean it's not ever necessary to name what happened in that way or you know but but you know in the main we don't want to go around labeling things as trauma if a person is naturally recovering especially if they're a kid well that part of your book too also reminded me of the the during the me2 movement when all these colleges universities launched their own little tribunal uh court cases with these uh uh students who were accused of sexual assault you know did you call the police oh oh no are we going to take this to court oh no no we have the three Deans and they're going to launch their own investig are you really sure and finally some of the parents stepped in and said we have a lawyer and you're not doing this to our son you know he get because some of them they'd bring they'd haul the guy in you can't have a lawyer with you and we're going to interrogate you about what you did usually it's these you know couples that hook up at one of these keger where everybody's just shitfaced and then people [ __ ] around and then the next day like oh I really shouldn't have done that and instead of saying well I'm not going to do that again they you know they go oh in that case we're going to you know make a big thing about it here on campus right I think that's largely starting to turn around now because of the legal uh ramifications for colleges to do that yeah I I mean I you there's that's susceptible to all the same problems right the moment that you bring in these authorities you start you have this power of suggestion and um yeah I mean the lack of due process in universities has been a huge problem for a long time all right so um on the general larger picture of you know the kind of craziness and and all this politization of stuff you know my wife keeps asking me you know when is this going to turn around because I keep telling her the pendulum is about to swing and I've been telling this for like five years now you know all of it it's just gotten crazy my sense is it depends what we're talking about so the issues that I write about the demoralization the the generation convinced it's ill uh that it's somehow mentally ill because it you know is gets nervous before exams so therefore has you know testing anxiety and all this stuff that parents can absolutely turn around absolutely I can make them you know I tried to in the book make them more aware that you know Psychotherapy can cause harms to kids medic psychiatric medication can cars hards of kids social emotional learning all that okay that parents I think is very easy to turn around the the the bigger problems is that you know we have an ideologically committed group of people in our country and the question will be Are we more committed to our way of life or are they to theirs it's really going to be a contest of who is more willing to defend its values uh and uh you know it's just it's harder everyone wants to do it through legislation which is a very blunt tool for regulating medicine yeah I did wonder about some of these therapists you write about to what extent are they projecting themselves onto these students like I'm not sure what my problems I have all these problems and if I diagnosis this with a bunch of other people then I'm not a stand out this is normal you know honestly some some people therapists were very open about that how like a lot of their colleagues seem to have a lot of personal problems but I would just say it's like the parenting experts I don't believe anybody's a parenting expert until you meet their adult children okay you know it's like I'm not a parent parting expert I always tell people that my kids are young who knows how they'll turn out I'm hoping for the best but I am no parenting expert and I feel that about parenting experts in general you know you see these women out there giving advice they have a they have a 5-year-old and a seven-year-old I don't know what's going to be with those kids don't take advice from that person yeah right they really I mean there's tons of parenting books but but these are so fattish for the last century you know you're you should be super loving and hugging no you should be cold and disciplinary but but there is some research on this right authorit what is not authoritarian versus authoritative yes yeah want to be authoritative that is have rules and enforce them but don't be authoritarian and don't be super loose right be loving but rule bound those those parents do the best they produce the happiest kids least depression least anxiety most successful and ultimately they have the best relationship with their parents yeah yeah my wife's from Germany she's a good disciplinarian with love I'm a pushover whenever my little guy gets upset I take him to Target to get a new toy she's like don't do that I'm like oh yeah okay I'm the worst know immigrants tend to be much better about this American that's really funny yeah immigrants are the first people who always told me you know Americans they have no Authority with their own children and I thought you know there's something to that well Abigail I'd say you're doing God's work except I don't believe in God so you're you're doing the work of uh of the Angels or something no you know your first book was published by regnery right yes right so that's kind of a conservative religious publisher this book is is uh Sentinel which is Simon and Schuster right penguin R penguin R house sorry yeah yeah so You' really gone mainstream I think that's interesting and telling because I was always worried that your work would be labeled as a conservative or religious position and it's not it shouldn't be right you know what's crazy when wrote irreversible damage it was not published by a conservative publisher in the in the UK it was just a regular publisher because in the UK they didn't regard it as a conservative issue really in America it became a conservative issue for no good reason right right it was never a political issue it was a medical issue but um that was the only one that you know was interested in publishing me um so that's what I went with I wasn't going to you know there were other journalists who thought about it and thought H I don't want to be with a conservative or religious publisher but I I wanted to get the message out so I was you know very happy to work with ragner and they were wonderful to me and um and this time again you know I'm looking into the harms to children and you know this time caused by the mental health profession and uh uh with this one it was less politicized so I I guess publish every parent should read this book I mean there are no good parenting books okay but this is this is closest you're going to get all right what's next on your research writing uh plate it's a good question I don't yet know but uh you know the last two books have been on the rising generation and and they definitely fascinate me I have three kids I'm raising in the rising generation so uh you know we'll see that's right you have twin boys right I do yeah okay so there's your experiment exactly you have an N of two see how that goes compared to their sister the sister's older I forget yeah that's right all right well congratulations to you on the book and for letting your kid take the what is it the bus the subway no we don't have subways in La yeah they they walk home from school yeah I like that you said that was the hardest thing you ever of course of course it is I would Aid it too but anyway all right thanks Abigail thank you

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 5,437

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, behavioral psychology, mental health, pseudoscience, psychiatry, Science Salon, The Michael Shermer Show, therapy, Abigail Shrier

Id: tFRSKTjbdWY

Length: 68min 11sec (4091 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024