From the author of Irreversible Damage comes an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming American children. Gen Z’s mental health is significantly worse than previous generations, with rising youth suicide rates, common antidepressant prescriptions for children, and a growing number of mental health diagnoses failing to alleviate feelings of loneliness, sadness, and fear among kids. The issue, according to bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier, lies not with the children but with the mental health experts. Through hundreds of interviews with psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier examines how the mental health industry has altered the ways we teach, treat, and communicate with children. She uncovers that many therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and limited benefits. Her alarming findings include: talk therapy can lead to rumination, trapping children in anxiety and depression; social-emotional learning may hinder vulnerable children; and "gentle parenting" can provoke emotional turbulence and violence as children seek adult guidance. While mental health care can be lifesaving for those with severe needs, it can be detrimental for the average child. This work is essential for anyone questioning why efforts to support America’s youth have backfired and what parents can do to instigate change.
Abigail Shrier Book order (chronological)
Abigail Shrier is an American journalist and author (formerly a columnist for The Wall Street Journal), best known for Irreversible Damage (2020) and Bad Therapy (2024). Her writing is distinctly polemical: it draws on interviews and narrative case studies and often shifts the debate into the terrain of culture-war politics. Nevertheless, she remains an influential voice thanks to her ability to craft a clear, confrontational narrative.
'Every parent needs to read this' Helen Joyce In Irreversible Damage, Wall Street Journalist, Abigail Shrier investigates why groups of female friends in universities and schools across the world are coming out as 'transgender'. These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex. Teenage girls have a constant online diet of social media which feeds and magnifies every traditional insecurity. Feeling inadequate as girls, they are being encouraged to think that they are not girls actually at all and unsuspecting parents now find their daughters in thrall to YouTube stars and 'gender-affirming' educators and therapists, who encourage life-changing interventions. Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria - severe discomfort in one's biological sex - was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. Abigail Shrier has talked to the girls, their agonised parents, and the therapists and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to 'detransitioners' - young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls' social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back.