What does it take to write books that make the establishment uncomfortable—and keep writing them anyway? Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Abigail Shrier joins Rafael Mangual for an engrossing conversation. The author of two national bestsellers, Irreversible Damage and Bad Therapy, Shrier has spent years investigating what’s gone wrong in the institutions educating and treating America's children—and speaking honestly about the consequences.

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I am your host, Rafael Mangual. Today is a very special day because we are joined by my brilliant colleague, Abigail Shrier. Abigail, welcome to the show.

Abigail Shrier: Thank you so much for having me.

Rafael Mangual: I’m so excited to be talking to you today because I’m a massive fan of your work, and I think your background is super fascinating. I don’t think a lot of people know this about you, but you’re a lawyer by training.

Abigail Shrier: I am.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, walk us through that, right? I mean, Yale Law, Federal Judicial Clerkship, how’d you end up as a public intellectual in the think tank world?

Abigail Shrier: Well, I left the law firm I was working at when I started to have kids in 2010 for a few years. Actually, when the kids were little, I wasn’t working for a number of years. I was writing fiction actually, a bunch of unpublishable novels. Then I started to get back into journalism, and I hadn’t done journalism for a bunch of years, but I got back into it. I wrote for the local Jewish press, and one of my pieces a Wall Street Journal editor saw. She reached out to me and said, “You should submit to us.” Then in 2018, I published, I think it was, 12 or 13 op-eds in the space of a year for The Wall Street Journal. Right away, they liked everything I was doing. One of those pieces became a story that turned into my first book, Irreversible Damage.

Rafael Mangual: Awesome. I mean, it’s an incredible story. I’ve been reading you since you’ve been writing for the Wall Street Journal, so this is an incredible privilege for me. Going from the Wall Street Journal and the journalism world into the think tank space is different. I’m always curious about how people view the differences. I mean, what made you want to make the transition into a policy think tank like the Manhattan Institute? Why the Manhattan Institute out of all your choices?

Abigail Shrier: Well, growing up, a lot of my heroes worked here.

Rafael Mangual: Same for me.

Abigail Shrier: You know Kay Hymowitz. You know Theodore Dalrymple.

Rafael Mangual: Kay Hymowitz was the very first person I ever read at City Journal. It was a piece on manning up that she wrote in the early 2000s. I was like, “Oh, this lady knows what she’s talking about.”

Abigail Shrier: Exactly. I think I used to read in commentary as well. These were a lot of my heroes. I’ll tell you, I have a slightly different role than other people at the Institute as a journalist. That is I go into the cave first with the torch, I find the problem areas, then other people come in behind me, and then try to fix the policy. But that first step of going in, doing the investigation, and finding out what’s going on, that’s my favorite part. Getting able to do that at the Manhattan Institute has really been a dream. I mean, it’s been wonderful, and I get to work with the most incredible colleagues like you, Chris Rufo, Heather Mac Donald, who I may have been reading for years, and Jason Riley. It’s really been absolutely wonderful.

Rafael Mangual: It’s an amazing place, and it’s significantly better off now that you’re here so we’re very happy about the work that you do. I mean, one of the most recent issues that you’ve investigated is through your book, Bad Therapy, which I want to get into.But before that, I mean, one of the other things that’s on your resume that I think is just also super fascinating is you are an advice columnist. I’m a fan of your advice column. I’ve never read an advice column at any point in my life before, but I read almost everything that you write for the Free Press in that space. I’m just always curious to get tastes of people who do that kind of work. I feel like you have probably a particularly accurate vantage point of where society’s at through that work. Is there a common thread that you see?

Abigail Shrier: Sure. There is a common thread. What I try to provide people is a moral framework, not the supercilious framework that we’re all used to getting from advice columnists, but an accurate one. I love it. I really have enjoyed this. Bari asked me to do it, and it’s a great joy. But I’ll tell you why I started it, and that was that when I first wrote Irreversible Damage, I wrote it in 2019. It was published in June of 2020. The first editor I was ever assigned, I went to meet him for the first time at my then publisher. He said, “To be honest, I know it’s a book about kids transitioning, young girls transitioning, changing their bodies. The truth is I would never read a book like this, I don’t think. I mean, the whole topic is yuck.” That stuck with me all these years today because he’s a wonderful man. He’s a brilliant man, but I kept thinking, “We have this problem because good people think this is yuck.”

I think tax policy is incredibly important. I think legislation is important, but I also think the moral dilemmas that this country is facing are critical. The things that the people care most about, those are the things we should be addressing, too. There’s no shame in it. In fact, it’s a real responsibility we have. From the time I went in and looked at the teen trans phenomenon, why all these young girls were transitioning, and exposing the social contagion of it, that has really been a passion of mine, is trying to meet Americans where they are and shed light on the problems that are most critical to their lives.

Rafael Mangual: It’s such an important insight because I find it in my work, too. One of the other topics that I write about besides crime is child welfare policy. I often find that it’s very hard to get people to engage with some of the stories that I cover. I think a big part of it is this disgust factor. No one wants to think about a four-year-old boy being starved to death. This just happened last year in East Harlem. No one wants to think about a two-year-old being beaten to death by their own parent. How do you get through something like that? How do you overcome that instinct that people have to pull away from the things that make them uncomfortable?

Abigail Shrier: It’s so interesting. When I was writing Irreversible Damage, it was very hard because I was talking to hundreds and hundreds of parents, and no one would listen to their stories. They were telling me they were predominantly liberal. These were not religious people. They were secular, liberal. That’s really who the trans phenomenon hit the hardest with these young girls because all of their teachers were in agreement. All of their therapists were in agreement. They didn’t have any counterweight at all. When they went online, they couldn’t find anything. Before Irreversible Damage, there was no place to look to get another side of the medical story of what they were doing to their kids. Every therapist, not only therapist, every therapy organization, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association was saying, “Affirm the kid. Affirm, affirm, affirm gender identity. You must go through with transition.”

Parents were reaching out, hundreds of parents. Once I wrote the piece for the Wall Street Journal, then there was a response to it in the New York Times. That author, Jenny Boylan, got hundreds of responses to her column attacking mine. Jenny Boylan’s commenters were mostly on my side. That’s when I knew I had a book.

I was talking to hundreds of parents, they were coming to me, and they were saying, “What do I do?” Almost all of them cried on the phone. They would sob. It was very hard because I would say to them, “Look, I’m just a journalist. I can expose what’s going on. I can talk to the experts, but it’s very hard for me to tell you what to do,” but that became a theme. I really decided, “Here’s what’s going to be my job. My job is to expose it, and then the people who want to come in after and figure out what policy needs to change, what healthcare needs to change, I’ll leave that to them.” I was invited to testify in all the trials that have come after, many of them, and I didn’t go around testifying. I just moved on to the next topic, and that’s generally what I do as a journalist. I try to go in, do the investigative work, expose it as rigorously as I possibly can, and then move on to the next problem.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, I think that’s admirable. It takes discipline as well. I think it’s important for public intellectuals who do that kind of work to understand their own limits, which I don’t think is always the case. I mean, I think sometimes, people get into an issue, and then they want to become the foremost expert, even in the areas in which they don’t have training to really address it. Again, just incredibly appreciative of how you go about the work that you do.

After that book, you wrote Bad Therapy, which I read cover to cover and was just fascinated by. I always say, if I could go back to school and do it again, I would’ve studied psychology. It’s just a fascinating topic to me. But I want to just give our listeners a sense of your argument in that book, because I think we live in a time in which therapy is regarded as something between a luxury and a necessity. Everyone who has the money should, of course, be in therapy. I mean, it’s an unalloyed good. Do it. I think you make a very interesting argument, which is you suggest that there is a subset of the population for whom therapy is not just unnecessary, but a net negative likely. Take us through that.

Abigail Shrier: Sure. Every book I write, I start with a question. My question with Bad Therapy was, “Why was the generation that received the most mental health treatment...” Over 40 percent of them had been in therapy. Over 42 percent of them had…

Rafael Mangual: 40 percent?

Abigail Shrier: Had been in therapy. Over 42 percent had a mental health diagnosis. Why was the most treated generation also the most miserable? Why did they have so many mental health problems and diagnoses? You asked, how did I get started with this? It really began with I really just wanted to know what was going on. These should have been the most robust. They had the most wellness, the most therapy. Instead, we were seeing the reverse.

One of the things I explored in the book is the idea of iatrogenesis. The idea of iatrogenesis is that a healer can harm. We’ve known this. It’s a very old concept. What is bad therapy? Bad therapy is unnecessary therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse. The problem is that, by definition, every single intervention, if it is efficacious, if it has the potential or the power to help, it can, by definition, also harm. A trip to the ER, now, if you need to get stitches, then the risk of picking up MRSA or another infection, it’s worth the risk. You’re bleeding. But if you’re not bleeding, we don’t give you X-rays, you don’t hang out in an ER. Why? Because you can always pick up something that’s in the ER.

The same thing with therapy. Therapy can be efficacious. Of course, it can, and sometimes it’s necessary. We need it to stabilize really unstable kids, kids who are suffering with anorexia, with severe OCD, with all kinds of problems. The problem is it has become a prophylactic. Parents were using it for everything, the death of a cat, I was told. “Oh, it’s going to be a hard transition for her to middle school. Just in case, I’m going to set her up with a therapist.” The problem is what was happening was that it was introducing problems. All of a sudden, every minor deviation from a norm was getting diagnosed. You hand a diagnosis to an adult, and I was told this by adults, “I had a therapist who said I might have PTSD from my childhood. I’m not sure that’s right.” But you hand a diagnosis to a child, to an adolescent, and you forever change that child’s view of himself or herself. That’s what we were seeing. We were seeing kids handed a limitation and told, “There’s something wrong with you, and only science can fix you. It’s out of your control now.” That’s a devastating thing to tell a child, especially when it’s unnecessary.

Rafael Mangual: It also becomes part of their identity. I think that’s actually particularly problematic in the time that we live in now where everyone seems to be vying for position in the Oppression Olympics, to some degree or another. Having a diagnosis, if you are a well-to-do white male or female upper-middle-class or wealthy family, you have privilege that you have to check. You’re going to be seen as problematic in a lot of the spaces that you want to be accepted in. The second you get a diagnosis, you now have something that puts you on this victim totem pole somewhere, and I think that’s probably problematic.

Abigail Shrier: It’s hugely problematic because it becomes permanent, a permanent limitation. You’re defined by it. Remember, if you think of yourself as shy or lazy, we all know those are things you can overcome. You might never naturally be an extrovert if you’re shy, but you think, “I can fight this. I’m a little shy, but I can work through it.”The problem is if you’re told you have ADHD, now you know you need a stimulant. That’s the only thing that can help. You have an official medical problem. That’s a very different thing to tell a child. If it’s not necessary, if you can work around it, that’s much better than handing a kid a limitation and telling them, “No, there’s something wrong with your brain.”

Rafael Mangual: Right. I’m very interested in this idea of the iatrogenic effect of therapy, because we see this in criminology as well. Actually, there’s a paper I just read, a pre-print, that’s fascinating. It’s about the iatrogenic effect of criminal justice reform. People who get released early have a higher risk then of being killed by police because they’re still in the midst of a criminal career of an active criminal pattern, that they will then repeat when they get released. They come into contact with police, and they end up being on the receiving side of a use of force. They were able to empirically show this, that actually for some people, the early release actually puts them directly in harm’s way.

We see this all the time with other categories of offenders who are targets themselves from other gang members, they get released, and they’re back out on the street. But I think not enough people, especially in the policy world, really consider the fact that even something that is meant to be helpful, and that can be definitionally helpful, also has the potential to put people in positions where they’re going to face new harms that might actually overwhelm the potential benefits.

Abigail Shrier: Yeah, there are two things we’ve done with kids in the last generation. We haven’t given them the good things that they need in a healthy life, and we’ve introduced all kinds of harm in the form of gender ideology, in the form of unnecessary therapy and unnecessary diagnosis, of course, unnecessary medications as well. We have little kids being put on SSRIs left and right.The thing to know is what do kids need? We actually have great research on this. They need three things. They need parental authority. They need relational stability, people who love them over a lifetime, not hired people who are paid to love them or the perfect expert, people who actually love them over a lifetime, and they need independence. They need to be able to do stuff on their own without the constant monitoring. We have withdrawn all three, and so the kids are suffering more.The problem is what we’re pouring in to fix them is not making things better, and that’s mental health therapy and intervention. It’s not helping. It’s pouring it into an unhealthy life.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s right. It’s almost as if we’re overmedicalizing the everyday experiences and emotions of kids. A kid’s anxious, a kid’s sad, a kid’s unhappy or frustrated, we have to put a label on this and we have to treat it as if it’s not a part of normal life. It puts people into this pattern, which I think is dangerous.I mean, do you see that as part of the problem? Because, I mean, I think about my own life. I’m turning 40 this year, which I’m having a hard time with. Probably the first three decades of my life, I could count on one hand the people that I had met who had ever been to therapy at any point in their life. In the last 10 years, I think I’ve lost count of all the people I know who have been in and out of therapy, some of them for decades. It can’t be the case that, at a national level, our mental health has just fallen off a cliff, can it? Or is there something cultural about this where we’re overmedicalizing a lot of just normal life?

Abigail Shrier: I think both things are true. I think we’re leading more unhealthy lives, lives that make us more atomized and sad, and we’re overmedicalizing problems. People will now say, and you hear this, “Oh, that’s my trauma. I can’t go buy my own…”

Rafael Mangual: Yes, as if it belongs to you.

Abigail Shrier: Our treatment of soldiers, combat veterans who’ve been through PTSD, has this problem. When you spell out the symptoms of PTSD to soldiers, and we’ve done this in America, when you give them the symptoms, you tell them to look for it, effectively, all of a sudden, lo and behold, they decide they have PTSD. They effectively talk themselves into it in much higher numbers, and they’ve tested this. Much higher numbers of people identify as having had PTSD than even saw combat. We know that some percentage of those who believe they have PTSD have no real reason, or at least the reasons they’re coming up with don’t make very much sense. We know this.Paul McHugh, a wonderful psychiatrist, is the one who did the work and explained this to me. That is that in other countries, in Israel, they don’t treat soldiers who have been through a traumatic incident the same way. What they do is if they see their combat colleagues hurt or killed, they take them out of the war, out of combat for some period of time. They go home to rest for a few weeks, then they come right back and rejoin the troops. They rejoin their men.What do we do in America? We take them out. We sit them with a therapist. We say, “Your country did this to you. You have been injured. You now have a brain problem.” Lo and behold, they never come off disability.

Rafael Mangual: Right, yeah. No, I mean, it’s actually a big problem, that more and more people are talking about the degree to which people who separate from the military are finding themselves on permanent disability for all manner of things, even though in a lot of cases, they’re perfectly fine.

I’m really interested in something that you said when you were talking about what kids need to lead a healthy life. One of the first things that you said was parental authority, which implies some degree of structure, which I think is just both one of those things that’s obvious, but one of those things that we miss all the time. Everyone feels like it’s nice to give kids choices, but choices are incredibly overwhelming. If I’m scrolling Netflix, sometimes I have 10,000 choices. I almost missed the days when we didn’t have cable, and we had four channels that we could spin the dial through. It was like, “All right. Well, this is what’s on at this time, this is what I’m going to watch, and I’m going to be happy.” I feel like I was happier with it. I think the same thing goes for kids. I mean, when they don’t have structure, there’s this unlimited world of choices before them, and that’s actually anxiety-inducing because how do you make the right choice about which step to take when you have seemingly infinite ones?

Abigail Shrier: There’s wonderful psychological research on this. It goes back to the 1960s by Diana Baumrind, a wonderful psychologist. One of the things she found was that authoritative parenting that’s rule-based but loving parenting, not harsh, authoritarian, and unloving, but rule-based and loving parenting produced reliably the best results in terms of happiness, in terms of mental health, and in terms of success in life, and even their relationship with their parents. I looked at this in Bad Therapy from a number of angles, but it turns out that rash of family alienation we’re seeing, young people cutting off their parents, it’s mostly young people who are very coddled by their parents. It’s mostly not people who were dealt with harshly by their parents because actually, what kids need, and this is very good research, it’s been replicated hundreds of times, what kids need is rules. They need authority and they need to be held to account if they break the rules. We’ve known this. We stopped doing it. Part of the reason we stopped doing is we shamed parents out of it. We turned them into what’s called caregivers. We gave them a huge demotion. Their job essentially, it used to be giving the kids their values. No, the school’s going to supply those. What did the parent role become? Shuttling them from one expert to another. It’s a very degraded role. By the way, parents don’t enjoy it as much either.

Rafael Mangual: Right, yeah. I mean, I’m a parent of two small kids, and I would feel territorial. You just said, “Oh, the school will give them their values,” and I just thought, “Not in my house.”

Abigail Shrier: Right. That’s why kids from conservative families do better in mental health, because conservatives are more and more skeptical of the messages from the progressive left coming in through the schools. They were much more skeptical. Liberal parents were much less skeptical and much more willing to let the school supply some of the values, not realizing what kind of values were coming in through the schools.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, I think part of it too is this idea that I often hear parents talk, especially with parents who have older girls, they’ll say like, “Oh, my daughter’s my best friend.” I don’t know, It never sits quite well with me because that’s a different relationship than the one I think you’re supposed to have with your parent. I heard someone, I wish I could remember who, it might’ve even been you, recently say something that just I thought got it perfectly right. “You can be either friends with your kids when they’re children or friends with them when they’re adults, but you can’t do both.”

Abigail Shrier: I love that. I did not say that, but I love it. I think that’s exactly right. That’s absolutely right. Kids need authority. The time to give them the rules to that and to teach them right from wrong is when they’re young. I often deal with parents who say, “Look, these are my beliefs, but I didn’t want to push that on my kids.” I always say, “But your kid’s teacher has no problem pushing her values on your kid.” Now, your teacher is supplying the values, and you’re sheepish about it. Who’s going to win? That’s the problem. That’s why we have a generation crying for socialism. That’s at least one piece of it, and that is we let the school supply the values when it should have come from us.

Rafael Mangual: One of the values that the schools have supplied in our society is this anti-risk-taking disposition, where anything that’s deemed dangerous is now taboo, like letting your kid go to the store by themselves. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When I was seven or eight years old, my mom would hand me a $5 bill, and say, “Go to the corner store, get milk and eggs,” whatever. I would go by myself in 1990s New York, which is significantly more dangerous than where we live today. Yet if I did that with my child, if I said, “Here’s $5, go walk a few blocks to the store, and come back,” I would probably get a knock at the door from the police.

Abigail Shrier: Right. The experts no doubt made this much harder, the local laws, about the kids being unable to be alone ever or walk by themselves, made it much harder, but there’s something else too. Parents became frantic, and they became frantic not for foolish reasons. Once they saw the civilization in decline, they started watching things look worse than when they were young. It’s very scary as a parent to go through that, to realizing the city around you is getting scarier, that there are more homeless people, that there are more people violating the laws. That you can’t rely on police to pick this person up, and if they do pick this person up, they’re just going to be let go.

That made parents absolutely frantic, and try to stamp out risk-taking in their kids, and largely understandably. I know we beat up parents and say, “Oh, they’re all helicoptering.” But the truth is when you can trust the society around you to behave rationally and reasonably, all of a sudden, you’re a lot braver of a parent. When you can’t, when there are homeless encampments all around, as there are in L.A., and I know there’s a huge problem here in New York, when you have those problems, it’s much harder to be a parent who is allowing independence.

Rafael Mangual: It’s hard to begin with. I mean, I was at the playground the other day with my kids and my daughter who’s four now, she just turned four. There’s this metal ribbon thing, but it’s like a climbing wall. It goes up and then comes down, but it gets up there pretty high. She starts climbing it, and I’m watching her. She’s getting near the top, and I’m getting more and more nervous as she gets to the top. As she starts to try and work her way down, you can see she’s confused, and she’s getting anxious and worried. She doesn’t know where to quite put her feet. All I want to do is run up there, grab her off, and pull her down.My wife started to, and I said, “No, no, I’ve read things. We have to let her work this out. We can stand here and catch her if she falls, but let her do it,” and she did it. It was hard. I had to make a conscious effort to push through just that, which is pretty minimal risk. If she falls, it’s on mulch.

Abigail Shrier: It’s hard. I remember one of my son’s first piano recitals. He was four and it was a very, very simple piece, as you can imagine, because he was only four. But he started to get nervous before he was going to go on, and I started to panic a little and think, “Oh God, if this goes badly, he’s going to quit piano. He’s never going to want to do this again. I don’t want this to leave a...” My husband just said to me, “Let him be.” He got up there and it shocked us all. He announced himself, he announced his piece, and I didn’t think he could do it. I didn’t know. In that moment, he could do it. He decided that. To him, he identified as someone who could do those things. I mean, he made it true.

Rafael Mangual: There’s a risk you take that you rob them of those experiences that actually give them confidence in the future. I mean, it’s a hard thing to do as a parent because you want to save your kid.

Abigail Shrier: No one around you is doing it either. It’s very scary because you think, “Oh God, I’m going to be the parent, if something happens, everyone’s going to say, ‘Well, she’s the idiot who let her walk home from the bus stop alone,’ which I did.”This is what I’ll say. It’s not that I’m not afraid of those things. I’m also afraid of the alternative. The alternative is a young person who can’t do for themselves. Now, they’re 12, 13, 15, they’re childlike, and they’re tied to you. It’s very hard to get that kid out of the house because if they’ve never done it... I used to say this, but I said this in the book, and it’s true. When my 10-year-old wanted to walk home by herself, I let her. She was proud of herself.

Rafael Mangual: Right, yeah. I remember the first time I walked to school by myself.

Abigail Shrier: Right. She was proud when she came in the door. Maybe she started at nine. If I had waited till she was 13, every 13-year-old knows there’s no great pride in that. They don’t have the impetus. When I would interview parents, what I learned was if you didn’t let kids do things they can do in their window of eagerness to try, they stop wanting to.

Rafael Mangual: Right. No, it’s so important. I think you framed it exactly the right way. It’s not that there aren’t risks; it’s that there are also risks associated with minimizing the risk of the thing that you’re afraid of. It’s a double-edged sword.I mean, one of the things that I’m worried about as a parent, in particular as a parent of a girl, is the risk posed by social media. I have been reading nonstop about all these adolescent girls who seem to be suffering from various kinds of mental health problems that are tied in some way to the ubiquity of social media. People are just addicted to the dopamine hits that they get from scrolling. They are addicted to the feedback, and define themselves by the feedback of their posts. They’re posting these selfies, and if they don’t get a certain number of likes, it’s like someone told them that they were a bad person, and they curl up in a ball. That can’t be healthy.

Abigail Shrier: No, and it’s not a risk we were really evolved to handle. That’s not walking home from school, which we know we can do. We did it when we were kids. Nobody is prepared for the one million viral tweet or the one million person or even a thousand kids making fun of you. Nobody’s ready for that. In fact, we didn’t evolve to handle that. We had, what, 15 kids making fun of us, and nobody was taking pictures of it.

Rafael Mangual: They had to do it in person, and risk getting smacked.

Abigail Shrier: They have to do it in person, right. It was a growing experience. I don’t think there’s anything healthy about social media. My kids aren’t on it. I think that really is a very unhealthy. Look, we’re seeing the effects of social media in all kinds of ways, but one of the ways is the ability to herd young people and feed them, propagandize to them writ large. We’ve never had a mechanism for this. I mean, to put messages, beam them directly into the heads of tweens and teens, that’s a very dangerous thing because a lot of people beaming these messages are very bad people.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. No, I think that’s a massive, massive problem. One of the other risks that I see is, I even see this with some adults, is they define and measure their own success up against the sort of curated feeds on their social media platforms. It’s like, “Well, my life can’t be good. Look at so-and-so. They’re constantly on vacation or in the gym or posting these glamorous selfies where they look perfect.” It’s like, “Hey, they’re using filters.” I go to a nice gym, and there’s a very wide range of people who go, but there’s a subset of the gym-going population where I work out that’s constituted by these young, early 20s girls who are constantly taking glam shots. They have tripods set up. I watched this one girl take, it must have been, 75 different versions of the same selfie before posting it between sets. It was almost like OCD. It was like compulsory behavior. You could tell it was unhealthy in that moment.

I feel like more people need to understand that what they see is what people want them to see. It’s a very small slice of their actual life. They don’t always look like that. They don’t have a filter. They don’t have the ability to doctor the image in person. They’re not always on vacation in Aruba or in some VIP section at a nightclub or whatever. They’re taking these posts, sometimes from a year ago, and posting as if it’s today to give people the impression that they’re living this glamorous life. It makes your life feel substandard by comparison.

Abigail Shrier: I don’t think there’s any doubt, at this point, that the social media companies have made young people’s lives worse net, and certainly, children’s lives worse. One of the biggest harms is that they’re not really enjoying their lives anymore. They’re not really present in that.Going to the gym used to be a lot of things. It was a chance to meet someone. It was a chance to think about your life. I mean, you start to work out, and your brain very often goes somewhere else. You work through a problem that you can’t figure out, and you find this calm, too. I mean, that’s one of the great things about exercise. You can chew on something, chew over something, and then all of a sudden, you realize the answer or what you wanted to say or what you need to do. They’re not letting themselves get to that point.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I think that’s right. This is a fascinating conversation, by the way. I’m really enjoying it. I wish we could go on for another hour. But when I think about some of the problems that we’ve talked about, I think about social media, I think about the overmedicalization of our lives, this overreliance on therapy, SSRIs, Ritalin, and all these other things. My instinct, as a policy person, is to ask, “Well, what do we do? What’s the solution? These are problems. There’s got to be a fix.” I’ve come around more and more over the years to the idea that there are actually some problems that are not particularly susceptible to policy interventions. I wonder if the problems that you’ve covered as a journalist fall into that, or do you think that there are some concrete policy levers that we could pull to make things better?

Abigail Shrier: Right, that’s a great question. Some of the things, we’re already seeing great policy interventions, right? Certainly, with the trans identification issue among teens, we’ve gone a long way to reversing a really, really bad trend. Lawsuits, obviously, made a big difference in that too, journalism made a big difference, but the policy really matters. For instance, no longer forcing mental health professionals to affirm, which they were compelled to do. That’s an important reversal.

Some of these things can be susceptible to important policy intervention, but I would say that a lot of the problems with young people in the last generation are problems we introduced. We need to do less of that. Gender ideology was not something sixth graders were gravitating toward, not until we pushed it through every school. We need to stop doing that. The same thing with therapy, with medication, and diagnosis of young people. We brought in mental health professionals, and lo and behold, they found diagnosis everywhere they went. We need to stop introducing harms into the lives of kids.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s a great place to start, I do, and a great place to end this lovely conversation. Thank you so much for doing the show, Abigail.

Abigail Shrier: Oh, thank you.

Rafael Mangual: Thank you all for listening and watching. Please, do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, do all the things for the algorithm. Let us know what you thought of this episode and the others, and we will bring you a new one next week. Until then, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast.

Abigail Shrier: Thank you.

Rafael Mangual: Thank you. That was great.