Abigail Shrier: So I always start a book with a question, and my question was, why are the kids who've gotten the most mental health resources, had the most therapy, the most diagnoses, the most psych meds, the most wellness tips, the most coping tips, etc. They should be the picture of mental health. Instead, they're the picture of despair. And I wanted to know why.

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How many kids are on psychoactive drugs and in active therapy?

Shrier: We only stopped talking about ADHD not because it was being diagnosed any less—there are more diagnoses—but because so many young kids are on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) today, the antidepressant. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just cleared Lexapro, which is a very strong antidepressant, for 7-year-olds. In fact, we've been going in one direction, putting kids on more and more and more psychotropic drugs, anti-anxiety medications, and various forms of speed for ADHD.

So in 2016, one in six kids between the ages of 2 and 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Those kids weren't on social media. They didn't have smartphones, certainly not in 2016. They don't have them today. So we know that this diagnosis has been exploding. And also mental health treatment has gone in one direction. So, nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has been to see a therapist already. And I'm not the only one to have noticed this—a team of researchers did a year ago and called this the treatment prevalence paradox.

What they were noticing is that with treatment of illness, the more treatment there is, the more the point prevalence rate of a disorder should go down. We saw this with breast cancer treatment and other things. The incidence of death from breast cancer went down with more pervasive treatment. Here, there's been vast expansion of treatment and the rates of depression and anxiety have only gone up.

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Most schools probably didn't even have school counselors or psychologists or anything like that on staff. But now, everywhere you look, that is considered part and parcel of K-12 teacher education, right?

Shrier: And that's why we're seeing so much increase in anxiety, depression, and the known harms of therapy, because we are treating a vast population, and mostly they are well. And here's the thing with iatrogenesis or when a healer introduces harm: If you have a problem, if you have a serious cut and you need stitches, it's worth the trip to the emergency room. But if you have a minor scratch, then you only stand to face risk, right? Because you don't stand to benefit, really.

So all the exposure to MRSA and other bacteria at the E.R., now you're just facing risk. And that's what we're doing with this generation. We're taking healthy kids who are a little bummed out, a little anxious, and we're loading them with intervention, as you say, much of it through school, through social-emotional learning and all the therapeutic techniques now going on in school. And so all these kids face is risk.

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But in general, most psychotherapists do not track any harms they make, no effort to see, "Gosh, have your relationships gotten worse since we started? Has your anxiety gotten worse? Has your depression gotten worse?" And that's a huge problem because those are the known side effects of therapy. We know that when they've studied burn victims, breast cancer survivors, first responders to catastrophe, in many cases, the ones who went to therapy ended up with worse symptoms than those who didn't go to therapy at all.

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