Stella O'Malley is a psychotherapist based in Ireland who specialises in working with teenagers and young people dealing with mental health issues. In this episode, she talks about her own experiences of dealing with teenagers, how she deals with them, and what she thinks of the state of mental health in Ireland today.
00:00:32.000It's a real pleasure having you on the show.
00:00:34.000We're going to talk all about teens and mental health and all of that interesting stuff and of course the trans issue which you can never get away from these days.
00:00:41.000Before we do, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:00:48.000Well, as you said, I'm a psychotherapist and I'm based in Ireland.
00:00:53.000And up until I came late to psychotherapy, didn't kind of qualify until I was about 30.
00:00:59.000And then up until about the last five years, I was very general and I wrote, you know, books and articles in the national media in Ireland about mental health.
00:01:09.000So mental health is my thing. And I'm particularly interested in teenagers and young people because when I had my kids, which was 2007 and 2009, I kind of realized with a shock that it was incredibly unhealthy.
00:01:26.000Their life styles as such that was being shown just, you know, the general presuming of how we should raise our kids was very intensive and almost like battery chickens, if you follow me.
00:01:38.000And that's when I got really, really into the kind of mental health of children.
00:01:45.000And then, you know, when you're good at something, it more of it comes to you.
00:01:49.000I started seeing way more teenagers and then I became inundated with teenagers.
00:01:53.000So more and more of kind of I had a hard life as a teenager.
00:01:57.000So that's where my sympathy, that's where my heart lies, really.
00:02:00.000And doing the calculations, you've got two teenagers now as well.
00:02:03.000I do. They're having an easy time so far.
00:02:07.000They'll tell me they're having a hard time with their own life.
00:02:10.000Yeah. And obviously, there's a lot going on with teenagers nowadays.
00:02:22.000You know, when when I was a teenager and when you were teenagers, in a way we kind of we had just about left repression.
00:02:31.000We were just starting to kind of find our way.
00:02:34.000I know some people say, oh, no, we were repressed and so we were kind of pulling out of it.
00:02:38.000It might have been quite difficult to be gay.
00:02:40.000It might have been certainly difficult as a girl to find your, you know, sexual place.
00:02:46.000You know, I mean, it wasn't particularly easy, but where they are now is just horrendously difficult.
00:02:53.000It's no comparison. There's no doubt it's a lot worse.
00:02:56.000And I thought like up until really up until the end of the 20th century, arguably, you know, life was getting better and better and better.
00:03:06.000But mentally, it's like we've regressed in quite a significant way in the last 20 years or so.
00:03:11.000And that is absolutely borne out by all the evidence.
00:03:14.000I mean, the research shows that very clearly people's I mean, it's subjective.
00:03:18.000So we don't know whether it's genuinely happening, I suppose, or whether it's people feeling worse.
00:03:24.000You know, they think they're feeling worse, but they can't, you know, we can't compare.
00:03:34.000It's very subjective, because if a kid thinks they're really depressed and I meet them and they tell me how anxious they are and how depressed they are.
00:03:42.000And you look at them and you think, I know you think you are.
00:03:46.000But actually, if we look at the actual facts of your life, they're not that bad.
00:03:52.000Certainly compared to your own mother who might have had, you know what I mean?
00:04:26.000You know, like kids coming in and they kind of say, I think I'm depressed and I think it's clinical and have all this language.
00:04:34.000And I'm like going, I think you are very distressed and I think you are very in plugged into the mental health industry, which has sold you, frankly, a line that it could be serious and you might need serious attention.
00:04:48.000As if there's a man behind the green curtain who'll come out with some sort of magic elixir that will kind of make them better rather than actually the human condition is quite difficult.
00:04:59.000Being a human, once you get into adolescence and you complexify your brain, you realize actually life is really difficult.
00:05:06.000And they haven't often figured that bit out.
00:05:10.000They think I'm finding life really difficult.
00:05:13.000So actually, to go back to your question, I do think they're lost and being lost is a particularly horrible place to be.
00:05:20.000And they're incredibly uncertain of everything.
00:07:23.000It was very consumer culture, but it was still very attractive.
00:07:27.000But arguably the sexualization of the teenage girl has happened since then.
00:07:32.000And arguably since then, maybe since then, I don't have data to back it up.
00:07:37.000We weren't checking out the mental health of teenagers in the 30s or the 20s.
00:07:41.000But there's a, there's a, there's a question to be asked about the sexualization of girls because anorexia arrived in the 70s and then bulimia in the 80s.
00:07:54.000You can see these are girls who hate their bodies and you can't help but think, well, teenage girl as a thing hasn't gone very well, has it?
00:08:03.000And the concept of teenagehood is what you're actually talking about.
00:08:08.000More and more, I'm thinking because everybody says adolescence is awful.
00:08:12.000And I'm like, yeah, we don't actually know what was it like to be, I don't know, a 15 year old in any other era.
00:08:20.000Because there was no such thing as a teenager.
00:08:23.000So they kind of, they grew up and then they worked.
00:09:42.000Do you remember when, you know, in the 1950s and when I was a kid, like you could buy single cigarettes around the corner because they knew all the children were smoking.
00:10:25.000And they become incredibly judgmental of everybody else's looks and their own looks.
00:10:30.000And they're obsessed with their look, whether it's not only just vanity of, of, but like they know about their, whether their lips are nice or their nose.
00:10:38.000Their eyes are nice or their nose is nice or their eyes are nice when they're 10.
00:11:15.000It's a direct line between if you're constantly looking at yourself and, you know, putting filters in of yourself and then kind of trying to improve your pose at all times.
00:11:26.000And then you're comparing yourselves with others.
00:11:30.000I remember Time magazine did a study of the different platforms and they were kind of astonished to find out that Instagram was the one that made people feel worse.
00:11:40.000The one that's supposed to be, which is classic of this world.
00:11:43.000What you think is never what you think.
00:11:46.000The one that's supposed to make you feel good is the one that actually wrecks your head.
00:11:49.000But with girls, what it, what it moves very quickly from vanity to kind of a very critical analysis of what's wrong with them.
00:12:00.000And they generally hate various aspects of them.
00:12:03.000I remember one girl who came in to me and she, we had a lovely relationship and it took a while, you know what I mean?
00:12:08.000And I'll change the details of this, but effectively then after a while she said, well, you know, you know, my eye and I says, what about your eye?
00:12:16.000And she's like, my eye, as if there was this massive thing.
00:12:20.000I couldn't even tell which eye she meant.
00:12:33.000All those Zooms, I suddenly thought, oh my God, all those things wrong with my face.
00:12:36.000But this girl had decided that there was something wrong with her eye.
00:12:39.000It was so minor, you couldn't see it visibly.
00:12:42.000From just looking at herself all the time, looking at herself critically.
00:12:46.000But it turns, it sounds silly and it is in a way, but it ends up not silly when you got gripped into either anorexia or a body dysmorphia,
00:12:58.000which is an obsession about one part of your face, maybe your or your body, your nose or your breasts or your eye or whatever.
00:13:04.000And the grip of mental illness, then it's not funny.
00:13:08.000Then it's a it's a hell. It's a prison. It's really awful.
00:13:12.000So when you tip in just because you've tipped in because of a vacuous culture that was all around vanity doesn't mean that when you've gone in, it isn't extraordinarily powerful.
00:14:14.000And when you chat with them on a deep level, which I would be doing, you wouldn't you would think at core, you know, that they know it's all crap.
00:15:47.000And she's like, I used to be gorgeous.
00:15:49.000She said to me, like she used to be able to get anything like that.
00:15:52.000Like an awful lot of doors slam in your face when you're not as pretty anymore.
00:15:57.000But I think I have to say one thing I've noticed, like when, let's say I was growing up in the eighties and nineties and the boys were joyfully unselfconscious in many ways.
00:22:24.000However, my my reason for writing the book was to kind of encourage parents to take control of their own families and not to immediately triangulate by bringing in the experts, by bringing in a psychotherapist, by bringing in a CBT, because actually, in my experience, it hasn't gone very well.
00:22:41.000That we've kind of got this lightweight pseudo mental health industry that is making everybody kind of think that they need therapy and it's not going well for these teenagers.
00:22:54.000So the teenager might be, as you said, all the adolescents, it's quite a hard place to be.
00:22:58.000They're a bit depressed, distressed in the middle of depressed and they get shuttled off to a therapist and it all gets professionalized and pathologized and weirded out.
00:23:09.000And the kids think they're especially upset and it's suddenly turned into this crown kind of major event as opposed to you're just suffering from the human condition.
00:23:21.000You've complexified your brain and you've realized life is deeply unfair and incredibly unsatisfactory in many ways.
00:23:29.000And that's something you're going to have to get your head around, maybe with art or literature or music or film.
00:23:36.000Charging off to the therapist is sending a very wrong message to young people that they can be fixed and that there's this kind of golden world out there where there's golden people and golden friendships.
00:23:51.000And, you know, you get out of bed and you feel good and you feel good all the way through the day and you never have moments of despair and anxiety.
00:23:58.000That's what we're selling them by by sending them to the therapist too early to think, you know what I mean?
00:24:04.000It's their first juncture of, oh, my God, life is hard.
00:24:08.000And they say, oh, you think life is hard.
00:24:11.000OK, well, you know, let's get you to the therapist.
00:28:36.000And then it's just bang, really hard, very quickly.
00:28:41.000And I think that the massive change has never happened before, because when we were kids, there was a dawning at a much earlier age that all of this, that life was actually harder.
00:29:08.000And one of the things he was talking about is the lack of initiation rituals that we would have had in the past.
00:29:14.000I mean, we say primitive and then technologically they're more primitive, whether they're culturally more primitive is another conversation.
00:29:22.000But for boys, for example, you're a boy and you stay with the women for a while and you're not really part of the male society.
00:29:31.000And then when you hit puberty, it's like you go out and you kill a whatever, and then you wear its horns on your neck or whatever it might be.
00:29:39.000And from this point on, you get treated like a man and that means different things are expected of you.
00:29:44.000And this like, you know, comfortable world that you live in, you are now rewarded by being initiated into the male world to which actually all boys aspire, actually.
00:29:57.000What happens when you're 13 or 12 or whatever it is, nobody initiates you into a different world.
00:30:02.000And I imagine there would have been a similar thing for women where there is obviously a natural transition from girlhood to adolescence, to sexual maturity.
00:31:07.000And as a result, you've got people who are just very anxious.
00:31:11.000It's no wonder that's what they are, because there's nothing they can rely on.
00:31:15.000There's no certainty. There's no solidity.
00:31:17.000And as a man, something I'm thinking about, what can you do with your son to offset that as much as you can?
00:31:25.000I think if at all possible, I think it's important.
00:31:28.000And that's where I'm really into like parents kind of going for it and saying, well, what can I do?
00:31:32.000Well, you can bring in a kind of a very definitive knowledge of your ancestors.
00:31:37.000Easily done. You know what I mean? You look it up.
00:31:39.000But so that they know where they came from and they know that there was different walks of life in their families.
00:31:44.000And secondly, you can bring in rites of passage.
00:31:47.000I don't know what it would be, but you look through your culture and you figure out what you should bring back.
00:31:52.000Just because society has got rid of it doesn't mean that you should allow it to be got rid of for your kids,
00:31:58.000because I think it would make a huge difference so that they realize they're part of the circle as opposed to they're just cast into this 21st century digital age.
00:32:08.000And this is why religion actually is so valuable in many ways, because I was raised Catholic.
00:32:13.000You had your first communion. You were baptized.
00:33:27.000But when you look at some of the anxiety that's manifesting, you really start thinking about the post religious age.
00:33:33.000Because OCD is very is a very good example.
00:33:36.000OCD is often very much about repetitive gestures.
00:33:41.000And there's a lot of kind of what would you call them symmetrical gestures with OCD.
00:33:48.000And when you look at a lot of religious ceremonies like blessing yourself and the rosary beads and all those kind of they were like for the anxious people who were inclined towards looking for a framework.
00:34:01.000The feeling that God's in his heaven and if I do, you know, seven decades of the rosary, I'll be OK.
00:34:07.000It was so calming for anybody that there was somebody looking after them and they didn't need to think all that much because there was actually something going on that they didn't understand.
00:34:17.000And all of those people have been plugged out of that framework.
00:34:22.000We took it away from them and they have nothing.
00:34:27.000I remember reading this extraordinary kind of account of this this boy who just kept on blessing himself, even though he'd never had anything religious.
00:34:35.000And I thought, yeah, that's that makes sense to me now that we've left religion, that it feels it's not accidental for thousands of years.
00:34:45.000They had all these symmetrical gestures that calmed people and then we took them away and they're coming in in different ways.
00:34:52.000And you no longer worship God, but that doesn't mean you're going to stop worshipping something or someone, which again is when the social media thing comes back into it.
00:35:01.000When you worship celebrity, you worship follow accounts, you worship all of these things.
00:35:40.000It's like we've taught the entire generation of kids coming up to be quite vacuous because that's what we've given them.
00:35:48.000We've given them quite a quite an empty culture, which is funny and, you know, great for passing attention in every 10 seconds.
00:35:57.000But it's like we're like if we're not careful, we'll create a generation of epsilons where they're just never thinking a long thought, never thinking a deep thought.
00:36:41.000So going in with depth is much more nourishing than maintaining this silly, vacuous thing that society is teaching us to kind of maintain.
00:36:52.000And it's also as well that I feel that more and more and I saw it when I was a drama teacher, actually.
00:37:00.000It seems that every year the kids got a little bit worse at relating to one another because a lot of drama is, you know, you create long form improvisations and devised improvisation and devised improvisation is where people create a play.
00:37:15.000And it doesn't have a script, but they create it and then they perform it.
00:37:20.000And it just seemed more and more that the kids were losing the capacity to listen and share ideas.
00:37:27.000And not only that, they've lost the capacity because they've measured this to kind of rough play has really gone to pieces because they're hitting each other too hard because they've no ability to hit each other lightly.
00:37:40.000Their actual physical interaction skills haven't been nurtured in the way they would have been in other generations because they had screens instead.
00:37:48.000So, you know, the way you have to practice a lot of times before you get it right.
00:37:52.000So when you're two and three and stuff, you're practicing.
00:37:54.000Well, they didn't get to practice. And so, yeah, they their their ability to interact has been walloped by social media.
00:38:03.000And it's happening all over the place where you can see it.
00:38:06.000And I, you know, it's amazing because it was happening and everybody was talking about it.
00:38:11.000And I was writing about it. You were talking about it. No, everybody was.
00:38:13.000And then COVID happened and it just, you know, multiplied by by a magnitude during COVID.
00:38:21.000And so those kids are literally coming out every teacher because I often talk to, you know, teachers because I'm working a lot with teenagers and they're all saying these COVID kids like there's a significant issue because they've been on screen so much there.
00:38:35.000The ability to handle social life is really reduced. So a lot of the teenagers I'd be working with.
00:38:42.000So they were very lonely during COVID and loneliness is is awful.
00:38:45.000And then they were very reluctant to become back friends after COVID.
00:38:51.000They were anxious because, you know, the world had made them frightened of a disease that doesn't affect them.
00:38:57.000Yeah. Yeah. That they were never going to die.
00:39:00.000It sparked that they were anxious for that reason.
00:39:03.000And so they'd be very, very, very often telling me how they're messaging their mates.
00:39:08.000And I'm like, isn't your mate like doesn't doesn't she live 200 yards from you?
00:39:12.000And they're like, ah, yeah, but we prefer messaging or like another kid.
00:39:17.000And every time he called over to his friend, his friend would send him back home saying, let's just talk on Xbox like you go home.
00:39:25.000And I said, I'm going on Xbox, you're going on Xbox.
00:39:29.000We can talk or whatever it was, PS4, whatever, because not massively comfortable being in each other's company, much happier.
00:39:40.000But you go back to your house and I'll talk to you on on Xbox.
00:39:44.000This is really common, this and this kind of late night text.
00:39:47.000And so they're they're kind of very vacuous, very vain, very funny and silly, arguably in school.
00:39:53.000Then real life comes in because you're on your own and bedroom and stuff like that.
00:39:57.000And they're sending really quite dark messages to each other late at night, which will be filled with real kind of revelations about their self harming or their eating disorder or some really quite awful distressing things.
00:40:10.000And it'll be done by text, which is not the same as if I spoke to you or if I spoke to you and we had a real hard time.
00:40:17.000There's a feeling of nourishment or something.
00:40:20.000Now, if it goes bad, it's awful and it's very vulnerable making and you feel very alienated.
00:40:24.000If it goes well, you feel really like we've deepened our relationship and it's actually very hard to describe how much of an impact that makes.
00:40:36.000Obviously, I'm generalizing wildly, but just to make the point, because it's notable among the different age groups is they're messaging each other.
00:40:45.000So I'm hurting myself and all that. The kid might write back, oh, that's awful.
00:40:50.000That sort of thing is happening. And then the next day and it's go, hi.
00:40:54.000And it's back to bakery. And then that nice, dark messaging again.
00:40:59.000That's not that's that wouldn't have happened in any other generation.
00:41:03.000So in terms of social media and all the rest of it, then is I mean, do your kids have smartphones?
00:41:13.000Well, I mean, yeah, I'm all over them, if that's what you're asking.
00:41:18.000Well, I guess the question really is, should kids have smartphones?
00:41:21.000I don't. Yeah, I think, you know, I think they shouldn't have them as long as possible.
00:41:26.000I think as we get older, I imagine by the time your kid has grown up, it won't be so ubiquitous by the time they're 13.
00:41:34.000I was very resistant to them getting them. And when they got them, they got crappy ones that didn't quite work.
00:41:39.000And we're old phones of ours that just press lots of times and kept going out of battery.
00:41:43.000So they kind of got a very stilted introduction to it.
00:41:46.000And I'm all over them, like get them out of the bedrooms and you know what I mean?
00:41:51.000Have them plugged in outside my room at night and stuff like that.
00:41:54.000But yeah, I think trying to raise a kid without a smartphone, a teenager without a smartphone, it's such a Herculean task that I wish you well if you do it.
00:42:06.000But I think it's really hard these days.
00:42:08.000I think you'd be better off just like learning everything difficult in life, you'd be better off learning, teaching them how to handle themselves, how to put it away.
00:42:19.000It's like junk food and it's like alcohol when you're older. Do you know what I mean?
00:42:23.000You have got to learn how to deal with this. Do you know what I mean?
00:42:26.000Yes, but we know with both of those things, there are some people who are not capable of dealing with it properly without really like, you know.
00:42:34.000Totally. And I think there's the same with smartphones.
00:42:37.000Oh, no doubt. There will be people whose brains are literally broken by the thing, for sure.
00:42:41.000And by the way, I say people, there are times that I found when I had COVID, I had it three times, it made me incredibly angry.
00:42:50.000I was constantly very angry all the time, which is the natural go to place for me when things aren't the way that I want.
00:42:56.000It's my natural response, which I generally keep really under control most of the time.
00:43:01.000But when I had COVID, I was really angry and I was a prick to everyone on social media, right?
00:43:06.000So I'm thinking, what if I was 13? My brain is completely unregulated.
00:43:34.000I think even 10 years from now, I think there'll be more knowledge not to have control.
00:43:39.000For example, when I was first started talking, so my first book came out in 2015 and I was all over social media saying parental controls and all this.
00:43:47.000There was massive resistance from parents.
00:43:50.000Now they're like, it's accepted that there should be parental control.
00:43:53.000So I've seen that happen in eight years.
00:43:56.000That just a kind of acceptance that either you should be controlling it or you're guiltily not controlling it.
00:47:49.000And it's so so much such a part of me.
00:47:51.000And I kind of in the midst of all my mental health world, I realized what are they doing with kids?
00:47:59.000Kids like me, kids who had the experience that I had and they're medicalizing them so that they'll be one day infertile and a different sex and have impaired sexual functioning.
00:48:09.000I was horrified when I realized kids like me were being medicalized.
00:48:14.000Of course, obviously, it's completely imposing my own experience on these kids.
00:49:05.000That's very different to men transitioning when they're older.
00:49:09.000Why can we not have a conversation where we look at all of these things individually as opposed to lumping them all together under the umbrella of trans?
00:49:26.000I suppose we're living in a soundbite culture that wants the quick solution very, you know, what's the headline on that, Francis, is what they're saying.
00:50:21.000And then suddenly out of nowhere, the teenagers who had never before been seen in the literature, vanishingly rare, no kind of no studies on them because nobody ever saw teenagers seeking medical transition.
00:50:58.000And that kid is very often, like you say, neurodiverse, very often autistic, ADHD, a little bit isolated, a little bit lonely, often after a traumatic incident.
00:51:29.000And there's a perfect storm, which is extraordinary to study.
00:51:34.000Of everything that's going on that lands them into queer theory and they might be trans.
00:51:39.000It's weird when you see it because you're like, how's this happened?
00:51:43.000Well, when you actually unpick it, you can see exactly what's happened.
00:51:46.000It's such a profound point because when I remember when I was growing up, you know, you talk about a kid who was neurodiverse and a little bit, you know, I had a lot of friends, but very sensitive, blah, blah, blah.
00:51:57.000I listened to, you know, the bands of my generation, like Nirvana, talking about, you know, teenage angst, not fitting in, not being part of the world, wanting to withdraw.
00:52:06.000You know, there's also the element of putting two fingers up to the world.
00:52:12.000Those kind of pop culture bands, which had and garnered huge followings, they don't really seem to exist anymore.
00:52:20.000I remember the first teenager I had working with counselling, not, she wasn't the first one that I ever had, but the first one who said, no, I don't like music.
00:53:07.000I actually am not that into music now, but now that you are talking about it, I remember, as you were talking about it, when I was a teenager, I used to listen to music all the time.
00:53:25.000We're going to go to locals in a second where our audience are going to ask you their questions and we'll continue the conversation with some of our own.
00:53:31.000But before we go to our last question, just very quickly, give us a kind of like toolkit or some kind of practical ideas for parents.
00:53:39.000And if there are teenagers listening, you know, how do you deal with some of this stuff, all of the stuff that we've talked about?
00:53:45.000What are some of the things to just to focus on, to think about, to maybe do when you when you are in a difficult place?
00:53:51.000Just a little two minutes on what people can and should do.
00:54:00.000And, you know, first of all, in a way, you have to kind of think I'm going in and there's a kind of a level of confidence needed because, you know, you ask the kid what's going on and you very much zip it yourself.
00:54:12.000You don't give Hollywood coach and with a towel around your neck kind of inspiring speeches.
00:54:18.000Instead, you ask them to clarify what's going on, because often you'll think it's a and it'll actually be B.
00:54:23.000So it might look like it's their friends, but it's something else that's going on.
00:54:29.000You don't jump in like you're grueling them, but you ask them questions to clarify.
00:54:33.000And when you've clarified and any good therapist would know this, when you've clarified, you check that you've got it right.
00:54:39.000And you say, am I right in thinking that I'm trying to help you and I mightn't have it right.
00:54:43.000But am I right in thinking that what's really upsetting you is the fact that you're not doing as well as your other friends in school and it's making you feel stupid.
00:54:51.000Is that what it is? And be very open to rolled eyes and no, that's not it.
00:54:57.000Because when somebody doesn't understand you and you're upset, it's very upset.
00:55:00.000And so you can be very the kid can be very harsh about that.
00:55:04.000Let it go. Just just keep plowing on because you've committed to the fact that you want to help them when you've actually when they actually say, yeah, that's what it is.
00:55:12.000You'll usually see a physical kind of a sigh, a shoulders, a kind of, yeah.
00:55:18.000You know what I mean? And that's a real crucial point, because so many of us as parents were terrified of our of our kids pain.
00:55:25.000We're terrified of their distress. We want to think it's just little kids, little problems.
00:55:29.000And so we think, oh, you'll be all right or just it'll be better.
00:55:33.000And instead, have the courage to have the empathy to kind of get into the trenches with and say, oh, now I get it. Now I get it.
00:55:41.000That takes a kind of emotional bravery.
00:55:44.000And then when you've gone in there, I get it.
00:55:47.000Then try not to jump in with massive solution very quickly, because that diminishes it.
00:55:52.000And it's more along communicating solidarity of, OK, I can see this is a big problem.
00:55:58.000I get it. We're not going to fix this today or tomorrow.
00:56:00.000Like I will look up things and I'll look for solutions, but you're kind of shown a seriousness to it.
00:56:05.000So let me let me help you work with work with you on this.
00:56:09.000And it could take us ages and we could take loads of wrong turns.
00:56:12.000But just know I've got your back. I'm on your team shoulder to shoulder.
00:56:18.000So if you can just do that, if you can kind of clarify what it is, have some empathy and then kind of say, we'll give it some time.
00:56:25.000Let's try lots of things. That's an amazing feeling.
00:56:28.000It's an amazing feeling for anybody to think they get it and they know it's not easily fixed and they're willing to try it in the long term.
00:56:39.000But honestly, if you took your time at that and that could take a couple of months to do, it would be worth its weight in gold for any kid.
00:56:47.000That's really good advice, because I think we do live in a kind of quick fix Hollywood speech kind of environment.
00:56:58.000So before we go to locals, our last question in this part of the interview is always the same, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be?
00:57:10.000I think what we're not talking about is that there is a kind of a really thick online culture of Reddit and, you know, different social media where they're all affirming each other in a very female empathetic way.
00:57:29.000And it's making people feel worse and worse and worse. So it's kind of toxic empathy where everybody's, oh, it's really hard for you.
00:57:35.000Oh, it's really hard for you. And nobody is willing to do the hard kind of the hard challenging conversation with people.
00:57:51.000But I'm talking about the teenage world where everybody is so empathetic and kind to each other and it's all, oh, don't worry, don't worry.
00:58:01.000And it's it's very on nourishing because nobody will give to you straight.
00:58:07.000Yeah. And depth has a value and it's vacuous.
00:58:10.000And I think it's I think there's a real genuine toxic culture.
00:58:15.000I know everybody says it, but I think we're not talking about just how toxic it is to be a teenager these days.
00:58:20.000I think it's I think it's really hard.
00:58:23.000And I think they're suffering on a on a deep level.
00:58:26.000And I think it's it's really unfortunate because we've never had it so good.
00:58:31.000Stella and Mally, thank you so much. Head on over to Locals where we continue the conversation.
00:58:35.000My daughter is currently six years old. How will I keep her respect and trust if stroke when her or her friends views and desires conflict with mine?