Saturday Bonus Podcast - ​Are We Overmedicating Our Children

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. Welcome to our bonus podcast. President Trump,
along with Bobby Kennedy Junior, is trying to make America
healthy again. They've looked at the connection between vaccines and autism.
They've re established a presidential fitness test in schools. They're
looking at the chemicals put into our food by the
food industry. Another issue we've seen rise dramatically over the

(00:24):
last couple of decades is the over medication of our children.
It's dangerous. Doctor Leonard Sachs, physician and psychologist, joins prager
U CEO Marissa Striit. By the way, Prager You does
some great work some good organizations out there, TPUSA, prager U,

(00:45):
Hillsdale College, and they discuss the toxic culture, weak parenting,
and a corrupt medical system and how it is working
together to fail our kids. They discuss the crisis of
over medicaid children, ADHD and antidepressant epidemic, and why the

(01:05):
best parenting mix means mixing love with firm boundaries. I
hope you find this interesting and maybe you find a
place to apply.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
It, Doctor Sachs. People ask me all the time, what
are doctors telling me? Because I have access and I
can hear the whispers of the things that the doctors
are saying, and I get to ask these questions. And really, frankly,
one of the reasons why I even started this show
was because I have the ability to call somebody like
you or other doctors and say, you know, things make

(01:36):
no sense. There are things that make no sense that
our children are going through. And you know, people come
up and say to me, you know, Marissa, it's so
hard to be a parent these days.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
And I'm sure that.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
The difficulties of being a parent has changed over the years. Right,
Maybe we're a little less worried about finding food, we're
not living through the Great Depression, but we have other challenges,
whether it's screen time and mental illness. And on the
one hand, we're so wealthy as a nation. On the
other hand, we're so depressed as a nation. And it

(02:07):
really is hard to figure out what is it that
we're doing wrong as parents and why are children suffering
so much? Is it really that hard to be a
parent these days, or has postmodernist parenting just made it
so difficult in a culture that is pervasive against the
family unit and what is needed in order to raise

(02:30):
a child.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
I think the key problem is that our culture has changed,
and American popular culture has undermined the authority of parents.
So the first chapter of my book, that Collapse of
Parenting is titled the Culture of Disrespect. American popular culture
has become a culture of disrespect. So I'll give you
an example from my own practice. I'm a family doctor.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Mom, you're also a psychologist, which is rare, right, a
family doctor and a psychologie.

Speaker 4 (03:00):
I'm a family doctor, MDM, and I'm also a PhD psychologist.
But an example from my own practice. So mom says,
you know, doctor Sex, I don't understand what's going on
with my eight year old son. He's so defined, he's
so disrespectful. I don't understand the words coming out of
his mouth. His father and I never talk like this.

(03:22):
Where's this coming from? And I said, does he watch
Disney Channel? Does he watch Nickelodeon? Nick Junior? And she said, well,
of course. I said, lock it down, no more Disney,
no more Nickelodeon, no more Nick Junior. I said, I'm
not saying all TV is terrible, you know, nothing wrong
with Home and Garden television, but no more Disney Channel.

(03:44):
And three weeks later she called me she said it stopped.
He was learning this from the Disney Channel. You watch
the Disney Channel. People think Disney is family friendly. It's not.
You watch the Disney Channel. Shows like Dog with a
Blog are unbelievably disrespectful. The father, supposedly a school psychologist,

(04:06):
knows nothing about children. The talking dog is always wiser
and more insightful than the idiot dad. Live in Mattie,
another Disney Channel show. The mother, also supposedly a school psychologist,
knows nothing about what teenagers need or want. The two
girls roll their eyes in disbelief at the ridiculous, clueless,

(04:27):
stupid suggestions made by the out of touch mom. These
shows teach kids that being disrespectful to parents is cute
and funny. No Disney Channel, no Nickelodeon, no Nick Junior.
Do not allow these into your home. But it's not
just the Disney Channel. When I talk about the culture

(04:48):
disrespect again my book The Class of Parenting, the first
chapter goes into great detail about how all of American
popular culture, the culture the kids experience. If they speak
English at home and they have a device with internet access,
it's not just TV. It's the most popular songs, it's

(05:09):
the most popular YouTube videos. The culture of disrespect breaks
the bonds across generations. In order for parenting to work,
kids have to respect their parents. They have to listen
to their parents, you know. I begin the new edition
of the Collapse of Parenting with something that happened in

(05:29):
the office last year. When I was writing the new edition,
Mom brought her daughter, a six year old girl, into
the office. She was sick. Mom explained, had a fever
and a sore throat. And okay. Mom's explained that. I
said to the girl, okay, got to open wide and
say ah, an order to sugar head. No. I said, okay, Mom,

(05:51):
looks like you're need your help here. Would you please
ask your daughter to open wide and say ah? And
Mom said her body her choice. Okay, my body, my choice,
longtime slogan of abortion rights activists. Mom is adopting this
slogan to defend her daughter's refusal to allow me, the
examining physician, to look at her throat. Look. Parenting only

(06:16):
works if parents have some authority. But this notion of
authority for many parents now they're uncomfortable exercising authority. Got
to go back to Deuteronomy six. I have to etnidecha.

(06:37):
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your might. And
these words which I command you this day shall be
upon your heartsinan tom levenecha. Now that next phrase is
usually translated teach them diligently to your children. But you
know Hebrew, you know that's not quite what the Hebrew says.
It would be easy to say that. In Biblical Hebrew,
the verb for teach has lemaide, but that's not the

(07:00):
word there. The verbus chanan shannane doesn't mean to teach
In Biblical Hebrew, it means to chisel in stone. So
a better translation of that would be chiseled these words,
and size and scribe these words in the hearts of
your children. And I include an exit Jesus of Deuteronomy
six in my book That Collapse of Parenting, And right

(07:21):
alongside that exe Jesus, I have a I cite a
column from the New York Times my longtime columnists Jennifer
Finney Boylan, where she wrote a column on enlightened parenting,
and she says enlightened parenting means and I quote setting
your child loose to decide for themselves their own right

(07:42):
and wrong. And if in so doing your child becomes
a stranger to you, then so be it. That's the
New York Times. Well, if you set your child loose
to decide for themselves their own right and wrong, what
they'll discover is little nas x Drake's Siza mainline pornography.
It's a dereliction of duty because it's a toxic culture.

(08:02):
Biblical parenting means you incize these laws on the hearts
of your children. But many parents have listened to The
New York Times and National Public Radio and set their
kids loose in a toxic culture, and the result is
kids who are defiant and disrespectful, and confused and anxious

(08:24):
and depressed.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
You know, it's interesting that you don't only bring up
the culture, but you bring up the sheenan tom, the
portion of chiseling the truth into a child. And I
have a master's in education, and I remember going through
my education degree and they would say to us, you know,
children don't come with a manual. And you know now
as a parent and as an adult, but even then

(08:45):
I thought to myself, well, you know, the Torah, the
Old Testament is kind of a manual for raising children.
It is a manual for understanding human nature. It's just
this again postmodernist approach that the youngest are the one
who are the wisest, who know everything, and there's nothing
to learn from the past.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
And so you know this.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
You talk about this culture of disrespect, and so much
of it is being taught through Nickelodeon and frankly even NPR.
Do you know that when I was getting my degree
in education, they would tell us teachers that we need
to listen to NPR every morning in order to know
the truth. That's what they would teach us. And then
here you are a practicing physician who brings up companies

(09:28):
like NPR as a warning something that we should actually
not listen to because it would teach parents and adults
that the child knows best right. The child could pick
their own gender, the child could pick what they want
for breakfast. If they want to eat Skittles and M
and m's for breakfast. You know, maybe that's okay, it's
mind boggling, and it's absolutely silly.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
But why do you think this is happening.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Why would NPR and Nickelodeon, Why are they making shows
that you know, we all know are bad for our kids.

Speaker 4 (09:59):
Yeah. When people ask me what do I mean by
the collapse of parenting, they often think I'm blaming the parents.
I'm not blaming the parents. I'm blaming the culture. The
culture has changed, it's become a toxic culture, and you're
asking why. So I think we have to look a
little bit at American history, and I look especially at
this interval between roughly nineteen seventy two to nineteen ninety seven.

(10:24):
It's really interesting if you actually go back and watch
a press conference from the nineteen fifties of the nineteen sixties,
the reporters were so respectful. When you look at a
press conference with President Eisenhower where he's in President President Kennedy,
it's almost like they're bowing to the president. Mister president,

(10:46):
if you would, if you would be so kind, like
they're treating him like royalty. In nineteen seventy three, President
Nixon said I'm not a crook in nineteen seventy nineteen
ninety seven and Bill Clinton said I did not have
sex with that woman. They were lying to us. In

(11:09):
nineteen sixty four, Gallop pulled the American people, and the
American people more than eighty percent of Americans said you
can trust the government to do the right thing all
the time or almost all the time. It's incredible. Today
more than eighty percent of Americans said you cannot trust
the government to do the right thing. The concept of authority,

(11:33):
the concept of trusting people in power to do the
right thing is gone.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Well, they lost our trust and.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
They lost our trust. And I'm not asking people to
trust the government. I'm not. I'm not. But the problem
is when we lost trust in the government, we lost
trust in authority, and the concept of trusting authority took
with it trust in appearance. And the problem is when

(12:02):
you lose trust and the concept of parenting, you lose
something something very important because parents have a unique responsibility.
Parents have to teach right and wrong, and kids are
living in a culture of you do you whatever floats

(12:23):
your boat, if it feels right, do it. And unfortunately,
many parents now teach right and wrong in the same way,
and they will literally say to their kids, you know,
I personally wouldn't cheat on a test, but you know, hey,
that's just me. You do you whatever floats your boat.
And there has been an explosion in cheating over the
last twenty years, which I document in my book The

(12:43):
Collapse of Parenting. If you're going to teach your kids
not to cheat, you have to teach that there is
such a thing as right and wrong, and you have
to do the right thing because that's the right thing
to do. In order to teach that, you have to
teach from a position of authority. How do you do that?

(13:04):
It's very difficult to do that if you haven't taught
your kids that parents have authority. If you don't have
a moral framework, you have to ideally have a moral framework.
So I urge parents, you must establish a moral framework.
You must establish a firm foundation, and you must assert

(13:30):
your authority. Otherwise your kids are going to be drifting
and your kids will be at risk. And this is
for the sake of your kids. So, for example, there's
a chapter in my book on overweight. In nineteen seventy one,
four percent of American kids were obese. Today, more than

(13:53):
twenty percent of American kids were obese. Now, there are
multiple factors driving that, all of which I go into it.
It's a lengthy chapter, and it's a detailed chapter with
many scholarly references. But why did this happen? One big
reason this happened is because in nineteen seventy one, American
parents told their kids what's for supper, and today American

(14:14):
parents asked their kids what's for supper. I was speaking
to parents in Chapaquad, New York, which is an affluent
suburb of New York City. And after my talk, husband
and wife came down and they told me how they
made a healthy nutritiou supper for their kids. And their
kids looked at their supper and said, yuack, we don't
want to eat that. Let's just order pizza. And so

(14:37):
Dad got out his phone and got pulled up the
Dominoes app and daughter ordered her personal pizza with her
favorite toppings, and son ordered his personal pizza with his
favorite toppings. And I asked, Dad, why'd you do that?
Why didn't you just tell them this is what's for supper?
And Dad said, well, I don't believe in starvation as
a means of discipline. I said, they're not gonna star

(15:00):
Look fifty years ago, if mom made a healthy supper
and the kids didn't approve, she didn't run out and
buy them at pizza.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
They went to hungry.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
She would say, if you don't like this, you can
go to bed hungry. But today parents won't do that.
Today parents will order Domino's pizza. Now, if you let
twelve year olds decide what's for supper, there are a
few twelve year olds who will choose broccoli, Brussels sprouts,
cabbage qualifierspins, and kale. But there are many more twelve

(15:31):
year olds who will choose pizza, French fries, potato chips,
and ice cream. If you let kids decide what's for supper,
you're going to get a lot of fat kids. That
is one one of several reasons why there are many
more fat kids today, because parents have abdicated their authority.
What is childhood for? What is the point humans are

(15:52):
maturing for more years than most animals live? Why we
don't have to wonder? We have scholars like doctor Connor
at Emory, who has devoted his career to addressing this
question and wrote a tome eight hundred pages Oxford University
Press titled The Evolution of Childhood, looking at development in
our species and comparing it with development in all these

(16:15):
other species, mostly other primates, addressing the question why why
does it take so many years? Why is childhood and
adolescent so long in our species? And the answer he
and of her scholars give is it takes so many
years because it takes many years for the adults to
teach the kids right and wrong. Setting your kid loose

(16:39):
to discover for himself his own right and wrong is
not only an abdication of responsibility, it's profoundly unhuman. It's
not in our DNA, it's not what we're programmed to do.
Inscribe these laws in your hearts of the children. That's
biblical parents, and it is evidence.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Based common sense.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
You know, doctor, When you mention the impact of politics
on parents and parenting in America, I can't help but
think about the Department of Education, which was created essentially
to tell the parents that they don't know what they're doing.
And there is a Department of Education that is going
to help oversee what values and what is truth and

(17:28):
what should be taught to kids. And I think that
that it would be interesting for somebody to look into
whether there is a shift in the mindset of parenting
around the same time where you had these large teachers'
unions and you had these large conglomerates of again Department
of Education NGOs that came back to the parents and
basically said, don't worry about teaching values to your children.

(17:50):
Separate the church out of the education of a child.
And essentially your role as a parent is to bathe
the child, feed the child, and bring them in to
the school so that the values can be taught not
by the parent, but by the supposed government experts. And
I think that probably led to that. I remember when

(18:10):
I was an educator, I was told to tell parents,
please don't worry about doing homework with your children. Please
don't worry about educating your children. You don't need to
be stressed out with that. Please just make sure that
they get a nice, healthy meal at the end of
the day and in the morning so they can come
back fresh so that we, the experts, can teach them everything.

(18:32):
And this is basically the opposite of what you're saying.

Speaker 4 (18:35):
The first teachers of virtue must be the parents, and
the parents should work in collaboration with the schools to
teach virtue to the children. And I attended public schools
in Ohio, K through twelve, and I am alarmed by
what's happening in many public schools across the United States.

(18:58):
You know, as I mentioned, I visited over five hundred
schools over the last twenty four years. And if you
go to my website leonardsax dot com, you can look
at my list of visits and if you go back
twenty years, you'll see it used to be mostly public
schools and now it's all Christian schools because I'm not
welcome at the public schools anymore. So I am concerned

(19:23):
about what's happening at the public schools, and I tell
parents you need to be on your guard. I recently
joined with other psychologists and the Alliance Defending Freedom to
write a Friend of the Court brief my old school district.
I was a family doctor in Montgomery County, Maryland for
eighteen years, and Montgomery County, Maryland decided to launch a

(19:46):
program to indoctrinate kids in kindergarten, first grade, second grade
and have the teachers read to them these stories about
transgender kids. Trinity's Rainbow, a boy who becomes a girl,
and a girl becomes a boy, and a CONSORTI of Pearans, Christian,
Jewish and Muslim said we want to opt out, and

(20:08):
the school district said, no, you can't, and so they
sued and they lost, and they sued and they lost.
And they went to the Supreme Court and we wrote
a Throne to the Court brief in support of the
attorneys representing those parents, and the Supreme Court heard their
case in April and then recently ruled in favor of

(20:30):
the parents.

Speaker 3 (20:30):
This is the Mahmood versus Taylor.

Speaker 4 (20:32):
Yes saying yeah, and again it's common sense. The Bill
of Rights and the Constitution gives parents a right to
free expression of their religion. And in Islam, in Christianity
and Judaism, if God has made you male, it's not

(20:55):
in your authority to remake yourself as female. And the
school district by contradicting that is basically interfering with the
parents constitutional right of free expression of their religion. So unfortunately,
you now do have to be on your guard and
recognize that in many public schools your constitutional rights are

(21:19):
being interfered with. So, yeah, that's a problem.

Speaker 2 (21:24):
You talk about the religious element of it, but you
also have the scientific receipts for the absolute fact that
there are differences between the sexes and there are two
their males and females. And your research on this, which
I think you brought with us with you to look at,

(21:46):
is absolutely fascinating, and I think so many of the
cases that are now making it to the Supreme Court.
The underlying issue here is, in twenty twenty five, scientists
can't tell the difference between a male and a female.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
It's that ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
But physicians like you have to generate studies that show
the absolute obvious that males and females are in fact different.
It's not just a biblical truth, it's also a scientific truth.

Speaker 4 (22:19):
Well. It is troubling because, as I said, I've visited
a great many schools, and I can tell you that
in many many public schools, particularly in the large school
districts now, teachers are officially prohibited as a matter of policy,
from using the words boys and girls. You're not allowed
to say boys and girls. Would you please line up?
Boys and girls? Please settle down. That's prohibited. A teacher

(22:41):
can be disciplined now if she uses those words, if
she uses the words ladies and gentlemen, she'll really get
a hot water because using the words boys and girls
reinforces the header noormat to binary. And anyone who reinforces
the head or norma to binary must be a Republican.
And you're going to be and that's really unfortunate because

(23:04):
we now have, as you mentioned a moment ago, we
now have this some extraordinary new research that shows how
profound these differences are, so if.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
You may look at them.

Speaker 4 (23:15):
So this is a really astonishing study from Stanford. Neuroscientists
at Stanford looking at data from one five hundred young
adults from across the United States as well as from Germany.
So they did a bunch of things with these young adults.
So they're in a high resolution MRI scan. They're looking

(23:35):
at brain activity in these young people. And the first
thing that they did was what's called neural fingerprints. So researchers,
neuroscientists have known for many years that every human brain
has a fingerprint. So what they mean by a fingerprint
is when you're just sitting not doing anything, your brain
doesn't shut off. You're thinking, you're thinking about what you've done,

(23:57):
what you're going to do, where you've been, where you're
going to be, and that fingerprint of brain activity, it
turns out, is unique to you. It's more unique to
you than the fingerprint on your own finger. So the
researchers wondered, how does the fingerprint have brain activity differ
If you look at men compared with women, does it differ?

(24:17):
Maybe it doesn't differ. And this is what they found.
All the women are at the top left hand corner,
all the men are at the lower right hand corner.
No overlap, huge gap between men and women. What does
that mean? What that means is that whatever's going on
in the brain of brains of women at rest is

(24:39):
completely different from what's going on in the brains of
men at rest, with no overlap between the two.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
But they didn't start imagining what the men are thinking about.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
We don't know. But they went further. They didn't stop there.
With all this high resolution analysis that they they were
able to do, they were able to determine by analyzing
brain structure and brain function. They were able looking at
the men, roughly seven hundred and fifty men from across

(25:12):
the United States and Germany, they were able to determine
just by looking at the brain structure and function, they
could predict cognitive functions such as intelligence with high accuracy.
But that model, and I'm now showing you that some
of the graph from their chart. The graph on the
left shows the graph among the men, showing that they

(25:33):
could predict very accurately the cognitive functions such as intelligence
among the men that the male model applied to the
women doesn't apply at all, and likewise among the women.
What that tells you is that the brain structure and
function that determines intelligence among men is completely different from

(25:54):
the brain structures and functions that determine intelligence among women
and vice versa.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
How does this impact people who are saying, well, maybe
somebody is transgender, they identify as a female or a male.
Where do they fit into anyone of Is it what
you're born at birth?

Speaker 4 (26:12):
Basically, I would argue that this research completely undermines that argument.
This research shows that sex is binary. You are male
or you are female. Now you need to distinguish between
sex and gender. Sex and gender are two very different things.

(26:34):
Sex is you are either male or female. With the
very rare exception of intersex individuals, there is something called
intersex which is very rare. Less than two and ten
thousand individuals in a sample of fifteen hundred, you may
not have had a single intersex individual. So an intersex individual,
for example, might be an xxxy chimera, an individual who's

(26:58):
a fusion of half xx and half x Y that
particular anomaly occurs with a frequency about one and two
million live births in our species. But with the exception
of intersex individuals, every human is either xx or x Y,
so you're either male or female. But gender is masculine

(27:20):
or feminine, and we're all a mix of masculine and
feminine trace So for example, I love to shop for groceries.
I get a big kick out of it, and I
love grocery shopping. I could spend three hours in the
grocery store. My wife hates to shop for groceries. If
we relied on her, we would starve. I don't know
how to fix our lawn tractor. I don't do it,

(27:43):
and I wouldn't know how. I was raised by a
single mom. My wife's late father was a mechanic, and
she's very adept at fixing the lawn tractor. So in
some respects, she's more masculine than I am. We are
all a mix of masculine and feminine, and that's fine.
Is complicated, and that's okay. We're all a mix of

(28:04):
masculine and feminine. Some boys love to dance ballet, some
girls want to be fighter of pilots. That's fine. We're
all a mix of masculine and feminine, but we are
all either male or female. So again, there's a lot
of confusion out there. I was recently counseling a young
man who happens to love ballet and is convinced that

(28:31):
he is a woman and wants to transition. He's not
He's a gender atypical boy. He's a feminine boy. He
is confused because he's immersed in a toxic culture and
he's fallen in with some very confusing people. But he's
not a woman. He is a gender atypical boy. So unfortunately,

(28:54):
we've got a very toxic culture now that are leading
a lot of these kids astray. So again, this study
got a lot of attention, and again the left of
center people who insist that genders just a social construct
responded and they said, well, all the subjects in that
study were twenty to thirty five years of age.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
This is the Butler feminist study.

Speaker 4 (29:15):
Yes, the respondence to that, the people who responded that
study said, they're all twenty years of age or older.
They've had twenty years of being subjected to the heteronormative patriarchy,
the toxic patriarchy. So that just proves that this sexist
patriarchy warps your brain. Well, I respond to them that

(29:37):
we have other studies where they looked at women in
the third trimester of pregnancy and did high resolution MRI
scans of the baby in the mother's womb, and on
the left, you see rich connections in the brains of
the female baby that you don't see at all in
the brains of the male baby. And you see rich

(30:00):
connections on the right in the brains of the male
baby that you don't see in the brains of the
female baby. This is in the third trimester of pregnancy,
before the baby is even born. And what these studies
show us is that male and female are not merely
social constructs, they are biological realities.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
As a family physician, I imagine that you see many
people with all of this confusion, including the gender confusion,
where they want to go on medication. I can't even
tell you how many children I know in Los Angeles
who are taking puberty blockers, all kinds of medications in

(30:41):
addition to the other types of medications that children are
prescribed these days for anxiety, and I just it is
mind boggling to me and very concerning to me the
long term impact while they're growing up, going through preuberty
and taking all these meds, and I just what is
the warning to parents. So many physicians are telling them, well,

(31:04):
you know, it's not a big deal, you know, just
have them try it for a few years and see
how they do well.

Speaker 4 (31:09):
I think those physicians are very unwise. We're learning more
and more about the dangers of puberty blockers on fertility,
on bone health, but we're also learning that all these
countries across Europe are banning them for children under eighteen.

(31:30):
In the United Kingdom, doctor Hillary Cass was commissioned by
the United Kingdom to conduct a multi year study and
she did, and she and her colleagues looked at every
study published in every country, and last year they said stop.
The evidence does not support the use of these medications.

(31:50):
A medical approach using puberty blockers is not supported by
the evidence. And her work was so comprehensive that the
National Health Service in the United Kingdom immediately said, all right,
we're done. There will be no more use of these
medications in children under eighteen. We're shutting down the gender clinics.

(32:11):
It's done. And I think the United States is now
an outlier Western Europe, and the United Kingdom has said no,
we're not doing this anymore. And now the United States
is basically alone among Western countries in continuing to experiment

(32:33):
on children when Sweden and Denmark have stopped, which is
really strange. So it's scary, it's unwise, and there is
now so much evidence, and it's happened so quickly. You know.
I started a medical practice, a family practice in Montgomery County, Maryland,

(32:56):
in nineteen ninety from nothing, from scratch, and we went
from zero to seven thousand patients. And I knew my
patients well and they confided in me. And we had
many gay patients, We had many lesbian patients. How many
transgender patients did We have? None? Zero? Not one. As
of two thousand and eight, we had none. This was

(33:18):
not a thing. In nineteen ninety four, the American Psychiatric
Association said how common is transgender? They said, it's so rare,
it's very hard to estimate, but we estimate that one
in thirty thousand men and one in one hundred thousand
women are transgender. Two years ago, the CDC surveyed American

(33:45):
high school students on sexual orientation and gender identity three
point three percent. More than three and one hundred high
school students in this country now say that they are trans.
So between nineteen ninety four and twenty twenty three, in
less than thirty years, we went from one in thirty

(34:05):
thousand to more than three and one hundred. That's a
change of more than two orders of magnitude in thirty years.
How did that happen? Why did that happen? Well, what
we've learned is that gender identity is much more fragile
than we thought. And that's a surprise. That's a surprise.

(34:28):
So I wrote a book called Why Gender Matters back
in two thousand and five. First edition, published in two
thousand and five by Double Day, had one paragraph on
transgender because it really wasn't a thing back then. Then
the publisher asked me to write a new edition, and
the new edition has twelve chapters, the last four of
which are gender not Conforming, Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and

(34:50):
a deep dive into this question of why did it
become so much more common? It became so much more
common because we dropped the ball. We failed to teach
boys to become men and girls to become women. We
set them loose in a toxic culture that is teaching

(35:14):
all the wrong things, where it's cool for boys to
be girls and girls to be boys, to break the boundaries.
So again, I was consulted about a girl who was
depressed and saw a TikTok video that said only girls

(35:39):
are depressed. If you transition to being a boy, you
won't be depressed. And she told her parents that she
wanted to transition to being a boy, and they consulted me,
and I said, I know that your daughter is not
trans How did I know this? Let me share with
you a few more slides to tell you how I

(36:02):
could be so certain. So neuroscientists have known for many decades,
for more than forty years now, that there are two
visual systems in the brains of all higher mammals, including humans.
One visual system is looking for what what is its color?
What is its texture? The other visual system is looking
for where, where's it going? How fast and moving is

(36:24):
it colliding into something. I'm not going to go into
the anatomy too much, but this is really relevant for
parents because if you give your kid a blank piece
of paper and a box of crayons, and your kid's
five six, seven, eight years of age. What do they draw?
Girls draw people, pets, flowers, and trees. And this is

(36:46):
true of every girl, including girl who hates dolls and
would rather play with the basketball. She's still drawing a
girl with a basketball. But most boys don't draw people, pets,
flowers of trees. Most boys try to draw a scene
of action. Human figures. If present are stick figures lacking eyes, mouth, hair,
and clothes. It's not a well organized two dimensional picture

(37:08):
on a horizontal ground. This is another boy's picture.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
Another tank. Yes, are these boys getting kicked out of school?

Speaker 4 (37:14):
This was sometimes they are. I try to speak to
the teachers when I can and explain that this boy,
who I know well, actually another patient of mine. This
boy is a very loving, kind, sweet boy who's never
hurt anybody. So this finding is robust. It doesn't matter
if we're talking about a Japanese girl in Japan or
an American girl in the United States. Girls everywhere draw people, pets, flowers,

(37:36):
and trees. And Jared and Alexander colleagues at Yale have
shown that the peace system, the system that has color,
detail and texture, predominates in females. Incidentally, not just in humans,
but also in chimpanzees and monkeys, whereas the m system,
the system looking for speed and collision, predominates in And

(38:02):
this helps to explain the differences in the pictures that
they draw, as well as the fact that when you
give monkeys a choice of playing with dolls or trucks,
the girl monkeys prefer to play with dolls. The boy
monkeys great, they prefer to play with trucks. So these
differences are robust across species. But going back to this girl,

(38:25):
this is a girl who always loved to play with
dolls throughout her childhood, always insisted as dressing as a
princess for Halloween, wanted to be a fashion designer. Then
at age fourteen, there was a family stress. She saw
that TikTok video that said that only girls are depressed.
Boys aren't depressed, and she decided she wanted to be

(38:47):
to transition to being a boy. But her parents showed
me the pictures she had drawn. This is one of
her pictures. And here's another of the pictures that she
has drawn. That's a girl's picture. And I could tell
the parents with great confidence she's not a boy, She's

(39:07):
a girl.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
So what ended up happening with her.

Speaker 4 (39:09):
I could tell her with great confidence she is mistaken.
She's not trans she's depressed. The correct diagnosis here is
adjustment disorder and depression. Allowing her to transition to the
male role is not in her best interest. She's mistaken,
she's confused. Fourteen year olds are often mistaken and confused.

(39:32):
That's not unusual, and she should not transition. She should
get good therapy. She should probably be an antidepressant medication,
but she should not transition to the male role. Putting
her on testosterone is the last thing she needs. She
needs consultation, psychotherapy, and antidepress in medication. She doesn't need testosterone.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
So doctor, I'm going to close this because we can
talk a little bit about medication.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
It's something happened to be you know, very concerned about.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
I can't tell you how many kids I know are
on antidepressants. It's not just the gender purity blockers and
all kinds of stuff like that. It's the bipolar medication.
It's the anti anxiety medication. You wrote a book. We
were talking about this earlier. I want to actually grab
your books back again because I think there's so much
interesting stuff in here. I will never forget what you

(40:23):
told me that when you translated your book about boys
and your book about girls into French and combined it
into one book, the French told you that you don't
need the chapters about ADHD because apparently in France they
don't have children, or at least that many children who
are taking medication for ADHD. So clearly America is more

(40:49):
medicated than most countries, maybe all countries around the world.
And it's not just the gender issue, it's the depression
and everything else. And so you know, what are we
going to do that? And how did we even get here?

Speaker 4 (41:02):
Absolutely so, the ADHD issue is what I've been writing
about for more than twenty years, and there are so
many problems with that. One is what I call the
medicalization of misbehavior. So let's imagine a boy in school
and he is defiant and he is disrespectful. Thirty years ago,

(41:28):
the teacher the principal might have said to the parents,
your son is defined he talks back. The next sentence
would have been, this is unacceptable. You need to teach
your son what is expected of minimally acceptable behavior in

(41:48):
a school setting. Today, the same behavior from a boy,
the teacher, the principle, the counselor is likely to say
he may meet criteria for oppositional defined disorder, he may
be on the spectrum. Have you thought of having him evaluated?
This is what I mean by the medicalization of misbehavior.

(42:13):
And the next sentence, of course, is well, where would
you recommend that we take him? And he goes to
see the professional and he is very often put on
a medication, and the result is a generation of kids

(42:35):
who are being medicated. Kids in this country are much
more likely to be on medications like adderall or vive
ants and kids outside of North America. Kids in this
country are much more likely to be on antipsychotic medications
than kids outside of North America by factors of ten
or more, which is really alarming. And why is this?

(43:03):
Why is this so? Senator Charles Grassley was chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee when he summoned doctor Joseph Bieterman,
who was chair of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, to
the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, and he said, doctor Beieterman,

(43:27):
you've really been pushing adderall for children. You have said
that if a doctor prescribes adderall for a child and
the parents do not promptly fill and dispense the medication.
You have said that those parents should be considered for
charges of criminal child neglect. Doctor Bieterman, are you, by
any chance accepting money from the drug companies that you

(43:47):
haven't publicly disclosed? And doctor Beieterman said well, certainly. And
Senator Grassi said, doctor Bieterman, can you tell the committee
how much money you have reached the accepted And doctor
Biderman said, well, I don't know, maybe three four hundred
thousand dollars. And Senator Grassy said, doctor Biderman, I want

(44:10):
you to return to your offices at Harvard Medical School
and return to this committee under subpoenaf necessary and give
us an accurate account. And he returned a few weeks
later and said it was just over one point six
million dollars. That number was never independently verified. It could
be more. For all we know now, Doctor Beiterman broke
no law. There's no law against doctors accepting money from

(44:33):
the drug companies, and there's no law requiring them to
disclose it. His action was not illegal, but it was
unethical in my judgment, he was acting as a paid
spokesperson for the drug companies. He's getting more money from
the drug companies than he was getting from Harvard. He
was promoting their medications, and that's a problem. So Senator

(44:53):
Grassei then summoned doctor Fred Goodwin, who was chief of
the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the NIH,
arguably the most prestigious position an American psychiatrist can hold.
He stepped down from that position to accept a position
with National Public Radio NPR to host a program called
them for them, called the Infinite Mind. And as host

(45:17):
of the Infinite Mind, he did a section a program
on ADHD where a mom called in and said, Doctor Goodwin,
my son's been on medication for ADHD for years. He's
been on adderall and he's been on this medication for years,
and I'm thinking I should take him off the medication
over the summer maybe and see what he's like off medication.

(45:40):
What do you think, doctor Goodwin? And doctor Goodwin said, oh, no,
certainly not. He said. My good friend and colleague, doctor
Biederman at Harvard says, these medications are for children with
ADHD just the same as insulin is for diabetes. If
your son had diabetes, you wouldn't take him off insulin
for the summer. Would you no, of course not. His
medications are perfectly safe. You should keep him on the medication.
And Senator Grassy said, doctor Goodwin, have you accepted money

(46:06):
recently for the drug companies that you've never publicly disclosed?
And doctor Goodwin came prepared. He said, yes, I have.
It's just over one point three million dollars one point
three million. That's a fair chunk of change. Doctor. Don't
you think you should have disclosed that to your listeners
on National Public Radio, that you were getting a lot

(46:28):
more money from the drug companies than you are from NPR,
that you're basically functioning as a paid spokesperson for the
drug companies. Shouldn't you have said that? Certainly? Not? Well,
why not? Doctor? Could you explain to the committee why
you didn't feel any need to disclose that. Doctor Goodwin said,
because it is standard practice. Everyone in our industry does that.

(46:52):
And that was the most troubling line of testimony that
Senator Grassley heard in my judgment. Here's doctor Goodwin, one
of the most renowned and distinguished leaders of psychiatry in
the United States, telling us it is standard practice for
all the leaders in his field to take millions of

(47:12):
dollars for the drug companies not to tell us. Why
is it the case that kids in this country are
many times more likely to be on medication medications like adderall, vivans,
rispadel saraquell Zyprexa compared to kids in other countries. It's
because the leaders of child psychiatry in this country and

(47:33):
not elsewhere, are pushing these medications. Why are kids in
this country more likely to be on medications compared with
other countries Because in this country and not elsewhere, medication
is the first resort. In this country and not outside
of North America. Doctors will say, well, let's try vivants
are an adderall and see if it helps. So I

(47:55):
spoke at Harvard University at a conference titled Learning and
the Brain, and I would love to tell you that
my presentation was the buzz of the conference. It was
on why gender Matters, But it wasn't the presentation everybody
was really excited about. It was a presentation by doctor
John Gabrieli. Doctor Gabrieli somehow got permission to give powerful

(48:19):
stimulant medication to normal kids and withhold stimulant medication like
adderall on byvance to withhold medication from kids with severe
add and then study the ability of kids to learn
on and off stimulant medication.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
There's experimenting on children.

Speaker 4 (48:41):
Yes, he got permission to do this.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Where are the parents?

Speaker 4 (48:45):
He got permission to do this? Now, other researchers have
told me they'd tried to get permission and permission was denied.
Doctor GABRIELI got permission. We can argue about whether that
was ethical, but he got permission to do it. And
he found that medication helps normal kids more than it
helps kids with add What does that mean. It's a

(49:07):
tremendously important finding. So many times parents have come to
me and they've got the Connor scale from the school
and the kids off the chart, not paying attention in class.
But because I'm both a psychologist and a family doctor,
I'm comfortable doing the evaluation, which many family doctors and
pediatricians are not. But I am. So I'll do the
evaluation and I'll say, look, your kid doesn't meet criteria,

(49:31):
your kid does not meet criteria for ADHD, And the
parents will say, yeah, but the other doctor prescribed the
vibe ance and it was so helpful. The parents are
interpreting the response to medication as though the response to
medication has some diagnostic significance. The medication was prescribed for ADHD,
it was very helpful, Therefore the kid must have ADHD. Right, wrong, right?

(49:55):
Doctor Gabrieli's study and others like it shows that these
medications help normal kids as much or more than they
help kids with ADHD. So I'll give you another example
for my own practice. So another boy, middle school boy,
off the chart on the Connor scale counter scale is
just to form that the teacher fills out. Is this

(50:15):
kid paying attention? Somewhat not paying attention? Not are all
paying attention? He's off the chart, He's not paying attention
to any class. He goes to psychiatrists. Psychiatrist looks at
the forum. He's not paying attention to any class, says, well,
let's try five an since see if it helps. It's
tremendously helpful, and he's doing much better. But now he's
got palpitations, he's got no appetite. So parents see something

(50:37):
I wrote in the New York Times about the natures
of the medications, So they bring them to me for
a second opinion, and I do them more careful sleep history.
I say to mom, is your son getting plenty of sleep.
She says, oh, yeah, we make sure he's in his
bedroom every night. At nine o'clock at night, I say
the boy, do you have a video and game console
in your bedroom? He says, of course. Then everybody, I say,
we were playing last night? And of course when one

(51:01):
two Mom's side, you were playing video game at two
am last night. So he's playing video game past one
thirty in the morning, he's trying to wake up at six.
He's getting less than five hours sleep at night. He's
sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics ADHD of the inattentive variety.
There is no Connor scale, there's no Vanderbilt interview that

(51:22):
can distinguish between inattention due to sleep deprivation from inattention
that's drew due to true ADHD. What's adderall? What's five inns?
They're amphetamines. Their speed, they will compensate for the sleep deprivation.
But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not
schedule two mphetamines. So I say to Mom, you gotta

(51:45):
get the video game console out of the bedroom. No
more video games in the bedroom, no phones in the bedroom,
no screens in the bedroom and you know what, the
inattention goes away. He never had ADHD, he was sleep deprived.
This happens a lot.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
What do you think are the long term effects on
a child growing up with antidepressants.

Speaker 4 (52:11):
Yeah, so I can speak to other medical professionals and
I have done about the treatment of depression. I have
many concerns about SSRIs and I think they should not
be the first choice. I recommend trecodone as a first choice.
I think trecodone is underutilized. It is the safest of

(52:32):
the antidepressants, it is less habit forming, it's the easiest
to get off of. I do not, as a rule,
as a family physician, prescribe antidepressants before puberty is pretty complete.
I don't prescribe antidepressants to pre prebescent children.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
You know, these are one of the things that it
keeps running through my mind is how hard it is
to find health presitioners that we can trust and that
we can really lean on. And you know what I
keep saying to all the doctors that come on the
show is for those who are brave enough to speak
the truth and go against the culture, the narrative, the pharmaceuticals.

(53:15):
There are sadly few and far between. And so what
advice would you give to a parent who is scared?

Speaker 4 (53:22):
Many?

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Many, many, many parents are scared. They're scared to hear
that their child could commit suicide if they're not giving
the given the puberty blockers. They're scared to not give
their children the antidepressants because they're afraid that they're going
to commit suicide. We're constantly told that if we don't
medicate our children, they're likely to commit suicide. And parents

(53:45):
are getting confused and they're scared, and we don't even
know who to trust anymore.

Speaker 4 (53:49):
Well, let me address each of your comments there, because
each of them require a response. Would you rather have
a live son or a dead daughter? Was a line
that the transgender activists have used for many years. When
the daughter says she wants to transition to being a boy,
claiming that by transitioning to the mail role, you decrease

(54:12):
the risk of suicide. We now know what certainty, that
that's a lie. Transitioning to the mail role does not
decrease the risk of suicide. It doesn't. We know this,
So that's simply a lie, pure and simple. And this
came out very dramatically this past December when the ACLU attorney,

(54:32):
Chase Stratio, was argue in this case, the Scremti case
at the Supreme Court, and came very close to making
this claim. And just as Samuel Alito had done his
homework and asked him point blank and confronted the ACLU attorney,

(54:52):
Chase Stratio, and he had to acknowledge the truth, which
is that there is no evidence or the claim that
transitioning decreases the risk of suicide. So I would say
to parents, if anyone ever claims that a child or
teen who thinks they're trans has to transition to decrease

(55:14):
the risk of suicide, you can tell them there's no
evidence to support that. And as a family doctor, I
have seen these unfortunate individuals who have been sucked into
this rabbit hole and have transitioned and it doesn't help,
and it's a mess. There's no easy effects. So your

(55:37):
second point was antidepressant medication. I want to say a
word in defense of other doctors. Speaking as a medical doctor.
We medical doctors live in fear of you, the patient,

(56:00):
that you're going to post a bad review, and we
are trying really hard to please you because nasty reviews
can really hurt us. So you have to shop around
a little bit. You have to find someone who will listen,

(56:20):
who will not just try to get rid of you
by writing a quick prescription. There are good doctors out there,
but you might have to shop around a little bit.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Yeah, it's a very fair point.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
I think that people think that when they go to
a doctor, they always have to walk out with a prescription.
It's what we've been sold. You know, my kid has
an ear infection. I go to a pediatrician. I think
I'm supposed to come out with something because I waited
in line and I paid for it. And you're right,
we have created a consumer market for medication. Right the
parent is going to the pediatrician or to the physician

(56:55):
and says, fix my child. He won't sit still, and
he's not getting great grades in school, and therefore you
need to give me something to fix him right away,
to mute him, as opposed to changing the entire conversation.
And I think I do think that America is waking up.
I do think parents are waking up. I do think
many parents are now going to physicians and saying, wait
a second, what can I do before you prescribe me something,

(57:18):
talk to my child.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Let's talk together.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Let's talk about their diet, let's talk about their sleep,
let's talk about their habits. And I think that if
you know, more people listen to physicians like you who
are willing to work with parents like us, who are
basically saying, sometimes you need medication, but it should not
be the first resort. It should be the last resort,
and let's try to work together to help the child.

Speaker 4 (57:41):
It also gets back to what we were talking about earlier,
the medicalization of misbehavior that child. So suppose your child
is on the autism spectrum, and that's a real thing.
There is no medication that's going Never use MEDICAI, never
use a diagnosis as an excuse. So your child is disciplined,

(58:07):
and the parent is upset and says, my child's on
the spectrum. He can't help it. And I say to
that parent, never use a diagnosis as an excuse. I understand.
I understand that Jake is on the spectrum, and that's true.
He is on the spectrum. That means you're going to
have to work that much harder to explain to him

(58:31):
that he does have to listen, that he does have
to play by the rules because self control is required.
Self control does predict good outcomes for all adults down
the road, and that's going to be true for Jake,
just as it's true for everybody else. And it's going
to be harder for him than it is for other kids.

(58:52):
But that doesn't excuse him, that doesn't let him off
the hook. It means it's going to be harder for him,
and you have to work with the school. The school's
not your enemy. You have to work with the school.
You have to be in partnership with the school to
help Jake to learn the rules.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
I'll end with this something that I learned from your
book about parenting, and that is that being too strict
is not going to backfire. I agree about that when
it comes to parenting. I'm pretty strict parent and I
think you need to give child love and boundaries and
boundaries is really important, and I think that the same
should be applied to physicians. Being strict should not backfire. Right,

(59:31):
You have to stand with the truth and stick to
the truth, even if it is against the culture, even
it means that you're pushing back against what people don't want.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
You're in a.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
Position where you took an oath to protect us, and
that means that you need to be strict even when
we push against you as a physician and as parents,
when our children push against us, they're just doing their job.
That's their job as a child to push against us.
In our job as a parent is to show them

(01:00:02):
the boundaries during those years that were forming their identity
and forming their character and forming their vision and view
of life. And if we're not strict with them, what's
really going to backfire is that is that they're going
to just be set loose in a challenging world that
does require a very deep understanding of human nature.

Speaker 4 (01:00:23):
Well, Dana Baumram speaking of strict parenting, Dana Boumernd was
a great pioneer of parenting research. Before Dana Baundrend, the
gurus of parenting were people like doctor Benjamin Spock, who
were basically sharing anecdotes from their experience as pediatricians. But
Banna bound Rend was the first pioneer of parenting research,
and she and her colleagues would go into homes and
spend dozens of hours over weeks just observing parents and

(01:00:47):
seeing how they parented. And she and her colleagues coined
the terms created the terms authoritative parenting, authoritarian parenting, permissive parenting,
and then all of these kids over decades to see
what are the outcomes. And they found if parents are
too too strict authoritarian and they're and they're beating the

(01:01:11):
kids and spanking the kids authoritarian parents, those kids end
up being criminals. They are incapable of sustaining romantic relationships
because they never received love. They can't give both. The
permissive parents, who are very loving, but they don't enforce
the rules they're they're permissive, those kids end up being anxious, depressed,

(01:01:35):
They have terrible credit ratings, they don't pay off their loans.
No boundaries, no boundaries. The best parents are the authoritative
parents who are both strict and loving.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Both strict and boundaries.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
Yes, love and boundaries exactly. The best parents are the
authoritative parents who are both strict and loving. And by
the year two thousand she had just so much evidence
and so much data over decades of research, everybody agreed
best parents are authoritative parents. No arguments. But in the
years before her death in twenty eighteen, she herself wrote

(01:02:13):
that American parents have become confused. They now mistakenly think
you have to choose between being strict.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
Or loving, love or boundaries.

Speaker 4 (01:02:23):
They don't realize the best parents are both strict and loving.
And that's the point I try to make the new
edition of the Collapse of Parenting that the best parents
are both strict and loving. You've got to learn from
Dana paum Rent.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
I love that book. I love your book, The Collapse
of Parenting. I recommend it. I think for anybody who
comes up to me and says, wow, it's so hard
to be a parent, I say, just read doctor Sachs's book.
I think it's just going to clarify a lot of
the things that are in your gut already but make
total sense. And it does take a little bit of
courage to go against a herd, but that's what parenting
is about, having courage to do the right thing for

(01:02:57):
our children. Thank you, Thank you, doctor, it was great
happing you on.

Speaker 4 (01:03:01):
Thank you. If you like the Michael.

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
Berry Show and podcast, please tell one friend, and if
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(01:03:27):
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(01:03:53):
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(01:04:13):
bless the memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, be
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(01:04:34):
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