33 min

Is Therapy Making Us Crazy? Abigail Shrier on what's really driving the "mental health crisis" among young people‪.‬ The Unspeakable Podcast

    • Society & Culture

This week’s guest is journalist Abigail Shrier. In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, she delves into why so many children, teens, and young adults have received mental health diagnoses over the last few decades. Is it because society is finally recognizing emotional suffering? Or is it because society has become irrationally fixated on the idea of suffering? Abigail says it’s the latter, and in this conversation, she talks about how mediocre clinicians, flawed research, overzealous prescribing of medications, and, above all, a cultural obsession with trauma and emotional injury are causing unnecessary misery.
GUEST BIO
Abigail Shrier’s new book is the best-selling Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She is also the author of the best-selling 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which was named a “Best Book” by the Economist and the Times of London and has been translated into ten languages.
She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
You can pick up a copy of Bad Therapy here.
Read Abigail’s Substack here.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week’s guest is journalist Abigail Shrier. In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, she delves into why so many children, teens, and young adults have received mental health diagnoses over the last few decades. Is it because society is finally recognizing emotional suffering? Or is it because society has become irrationally fixated on the idea of suffering? Abigail says it’s the latter, and in this conversation, she talks about how mediocre clinicians, flawed research, overzealous prescribing of medications, and, above all, a cultural obsession with trauma and emotional injury are causing unnecessary misery.
GUEST BIO
Abigail Shrier’s new book is the best-selling Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She is also the author of the best-selling 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which was named a “Best Book” by the Economist and the Times of London and has been translated into ten languages.
She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
You can pick up a copy of Bad Therapy here.
Read Abigail’s Substack here.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

33 min

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