Sickness Unto Junior High
18th March 2024
groupthink-inflected whims of morally demented and empirically discredited experts?
The answer should be easy, but the question typically isn’t put that way. Rather, it’s: “Don’t you care about your child’s mental health?” And if the answer is, as it must be, “Yes,” then it follows that you must trust the mental health professionals.
Liberal norms currently prohibit questioning the wisdom of mental health experts. But, until very recently, liberal norms also prohibited questioning the wisdom of chemically sterilizing and surgically mutilating gay and autistic children who’d fallen down the wrong TikTok rabbit hole. Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage highlighted the horror of such self-evident barbarism, is now asking whether a field of self-anointed soul-experts—who are still getting such an obvious question so perversely wrong—could also be wrong about everything else.