Adolescents in the U.S. are Severely Distressed, Increasingly Suicidal.

Adolescents in the U.S. are severely distressed, increasingly suicidal. Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt weigh in on causation: "The sudden switch from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood is—we believe—the leading candidate for being the major cause of the international collapse of adolescent mental health.8 The evidence of causation is particularly strong for girls. In fact, nobody has yet put forth an alternative theory—one that can explain why the same thing happened at the same time in so many countries. Jean Twenge recently considered thirteen such theories that have been proposed to explain trends in the U.S., and she showed that they don’t even work in the U.S., let alone internationally."

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Does Psychotherapy Work?

Does psychotherapy work?

Millions of Americans engage in psychotherapy, women receiving treatment at approximately twice the rate of men. At Aporia, Bo and Ben Winegard discuss whether psychotherapy really works. They are extremely skeptical, based on a detailed analysis of the topic in search of reliable metrics. Their article is titled: "The Psychotherapy Myth: Contrary to the claims of the psychotherapy myth, humans can be resilient and tough-minded; they can suffer the slings and arrows of life without expensive interventions from “experts.”

Here is an excerpt from their conclusions:

Contrary to the claims of the psychotherapy myth, humans can be resilient and tough-minded; they can suffer the slings and arrows of life without expensive interventions from “experts.” . . .

Thus, a healthy culture should teach that life is often full of misery, dashed hopes, and thwarted desires; it should teach that agony, anguish, and despair are ineradicable parts of the human experience, not aberrant or fleeting intrusions; it should encourage more stoicism, more discipline, more sacrifice; and it should discourage cossetting, indulgence, and morbid contemplation. Reflecting obsessively upon grievances and hardships, like constantly fiddling with a wound, is unwholesome.

Furthermore, the idea that understanding the cause of one’s suffering is the key to curing it is dubious ...Often, the disease is not in the head, but in the society. And thus, even if psychotherapy were highly effective, it might be a dangerous distraction.

The idea that the good therapist is a highly skilled mental engineer who knows how to manipulate the complicated machinery of the human psyche has been memorably promoted in movies such as “Ordinary People,” and, if it were true, it might justify the exorbitant salary some therapists command. But alas, it is no truer than the Freudianism that spawned it; and despite its veneer of sophistication and scientism, psychotherapy ultimately remains a human interaction, purchased at great expense to the patient and perhaps to society.

People will always want to talk to other people about their miseries and insecurities, flaws and failures, hopes and dreams; and counselors and therapists will remain employed into the foreseeable future. Some may even do considerable good. But we hope they will drop the pernicious mythology, the exorbitant prices, and the complicated and often unnecessary licensing system and recognize the simple but tragic fact that many people are desperate for sympathetic social partners and will pay a lot of money for them. What is needed is not more expensively trained experts, but more real social relationships.

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How Gender Ideology Escaped the Lab to Become a Treatment Protocol

How did such a flimsy theory become an on-the-ground preferred treatment for so many health care providers? How did it come to be that so many highly trained doctors will surgically remove healthy body tissue of teenagers or inject them with cross-sex hormones, thus making them infertile? Dr. Stephen Levine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, explains at Public:

[A] vast chasm that exists between affirmative care doctors who believe that medical interventions should be the first line of treatment for people suffering from gender dysphoria and those like Levine who remain committed to the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm.

“It’s been for over 2,500 years that we in medicine, we have said we do not remove healthy tissues, and we do not alter the physiology of the body,” he explains, adding that there is no data to suggest that a child who undergoes medical transition can grow up to have a full, happy, accomplished life. “It’s a belief system…and beliefs are not what parents want from doctors. They want to know what the facts are, and part of the facts is the uncertainty of outcome.”

Given that existing long-term data indicate that the “suicide rates of adult transsexuals are much higher than the suicide rate of the general population, not slightly higher, much higher,” Dr. Levine is horrified by doctors who perpetuate the transition-or-suicide narrative as a way to coerce parents into consenting to their child’s transition... A principle of medical ethics is that interventions need to be based on science, and Dr. Levine argues that the evidence for pediatric medical transition is “pretty lousy.”

The entire child sex change experiment is based on a single “innovative experiment” conducted in a Dutch gender clinic. Dr. Levine explains that innovative experiments are how medicine advances. Someone has an idea, tests it out on a tiny patient group, and if the results are promising, that justifies a more controlled study.

“The innovative experiment with patients demands that we repeat and we refine the method to establish the facts,” he said, explaining that this didn’t happen with the puberty blockers experiment.

The original Dutch study began with 197 children, but 86 were ruled out for reasons of mental disturbance. Of the remaining 111, 41 parents refused to allow their children to take part. Of the remaining 70, only 55 were entered into the final reports, and the researchers only had psychological data on 32 of the 55. There was no control group, and no long-term follow-up, as well as other serious methodological flaws. There was one attempt at replication, conducted at the Tavistock gender clinic in London, and it failed to produce the same supposedly positive result.

But Dr. Levine says the Dutch experiment “escaped the lab,” and rapidly spread into general medical practice via a process called “runaway diffusion,” which is when the medical world mistakes a small innovative experiment for proven practice and a potentially harmful treatment becomes widespread medical practice...

When asked what advice he would give to a teenager seeking medical transition, Dr. Levine replied that he says to the young person, “I know that the most important thing about you is that you’re a human being, and you think the most important thing about you is that you’re a trans person.” He seeks to help his young patients understand that anything that is true about human beings is also going to be true about them, including uncertainty, ambivalence, and the influence of the past on their current identity. And above all, he tells them, “Don’t make your parents the enemy.”

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