Hi, I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland.

And I'm Sasha Ayyad, an adolescent therapist in the United States.

And this is Gender, a wider lens, a podcast dedicated to the shifting concepts around gender in our contemporary culture.

Through in-depth interviews, personal stories, and psychological exploration, we seek to open up the discourse around this hot button issue.

Join us as we look at gender from a wider lens.

Hey Stella.

How you doing, Sasha?

Doing well. We finally got to talk to Abigail Shrier, our old friend, of course, most well known for her book Irreversible Damage, the first person to really cover the ROGD phenomenon in girls and in her most recent book bad therapy

She very naturally kind of moves into this problem that we have with

mental health culture and how that's impacting young people and families.

Yeah, what people will learn from this episode is not that therapy is bad, but that the kind of the therapeutic kind of attitude that has kind of started to infiltrate schools and parenting is making it's kind of

disempowering teachers to be teachers and it's disempowering parents to be

parents and it's kind of not helping anybody and it's creating victims out of children. I think arguably if you didn't kind of, maybe if you didn't listen to this episode, if you hadn't read the book you could misunderstand what Abigail is saying and this episode I think really clears this up that she's not saying therapists are bad or anything like it.

Yeah, and you know today we talked to Abigail about this kind of imagined monster of the parents,

how this therapeutic culture kind of assumes that there's first of all this big scary bugaboo around gender and also that parents are some kind of reason

that you can blame for the difficulties that you have.

So that was very interesting and we also looked at the gentle parenting movement and how it seems to be a real overcompensation.

So if you're interested all in this concept of gentle parenting, you're really going to want to hear what Abigail has to say about it.

And Abigail explains why she called the book Bad Therapy, not Bad Therapist.

And then in our exclusive content we discuss the trauma industry

and the issues that are arising as a result of that so you might want to listen to that later on.

And in addition to discussing these issues Abigailail also gives some very practical strategies for parents,

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