Name: The Coddling of the American Mind: Haidt/Lukianoff
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T17:27:45.000Z
Duration: 1 h 42 min 10 s
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So I'm here today with author Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Tight.

Greg is president of Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and Jonathan Height is, Ah, an eminent social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business.

They have co authored a new book called The Coddling of the American Mind, which is an elaborated version of Ah, famous Atlantic Monthly as, say, they published a while back.

And so today we're here to talk about their new book and in both the state of the universities and I suppose, society at large.

So thanks guys very much for joining me today.

So I thought maybe we'd start talking about the book.

So do you guys want to provide some background?

Uh, maybe you could talk about the Atlantic Monthly essay and what led up to the book, and then we'll get into the details.

Sure, sure, that over the great Well, um, So it all started in 2007 when I was lucky enough to have a full on medical level depression.

I talk about it in some sordid detail in the in the book, I realized it's actually the level of which I don't even I realize I wrote about it with details that might.

My wife doesn't know My family does that, that there's that weird privacy thing that sometimes happens when you talk camp.

You know, dictating into a computer that you come like this just between me and a computer.

But the thing that saved me the thing that ultimately helped me deal with my depressions general, was cognitive behavioral therapy.

In a sense, it's sort of like applied stoicism.

You talk back to the really exaggerate one's.

That does include things like generalization, uh, catastrophe izing, binary, thinking, thinking.

Everything has to be there all good or all bad.

I'm actually predictability of these, and amazingly, if you just actually learn what these distortions are and practice every day to sort of talk back to sort of the more anxious or depressed voices in your own head, it's an incredibly effective treatment for depression.

Anxiety and change absolutely changed my life.

Meanwhile, asked this is changing my life.

I'm so the president of fire, which means I defend free speech and due process and active freedom on campus.

And while I was learning all of these intellectual habits all these ways to sort of talk yourself down.

I was looking around at what administrators were doing and then asked and saying to myself, Wow, it's actually kind of like the administrator to single, By the way, do engage in cognitive distortions.

Do engage in binary thinking, do over generalizing most of all catastrophe eyes all the time.

And I remember thinking to something to the effect that well, thank goodness the students don't seem to really be buying it.

And that's what changed in 2013 2014 prior to 2013 24 teams since I started in 2001.

The worst constituency for free speech on campus was actually administrators.

The best, most reliable fans of free speech you could run into on campus were generally the students themselves.

And then sometime around 2013 2014 we saw you know, suddenly they were demanding, you know, everything trigger warnings to my progression policies to dis invitations for even people.

But but both the left and the right on the spectrum.

And it seemed that, like we said, it seemed to happen almost overnight.

And this, Ah, and when I want to talk Thio John about it way become friends through a mutual friend.

And I said, It's almost that I talked about my whole theory that we're teaching a generation the the habits of interest and depressed people from Cargo Bay bro therapy.

John got really excited about the idea of and asked if I wanted to write about it.

And I was already a fan of John's work, so I was like, Absolutely yeah, So I thought that his his insight into what had changed was absolutely brilliant.

I had just begun to notice this in my own teaching.

I've been teaching since 1995 theorist Virginia originally, and it was a bust, seemingly overnight, right around 2014.

These new ideas, you know, students, of course, our political.

What was new was the idea that his words are going to arm and me not just offend me, not just be unjust harmed me.

We have to protect It was this idea that since our fragile and need protection protection should come from administrators from adults.

Where were you guys talked in the book about concept creep, you know, in envy and the over generalization of the idea of trauma.

And, you know, one of the things that's really struck me as interesting about the safe space movements and the micro aggression policies and all the bodies that it does run so contrary to what every clinician worth his or her salt knows about treating anxiety or depression.

And it's one of so that's kind of a remarkable phenomenon in itself.

Is that what we know clinically has been absolutely inverted by people who are hypothetically agitating on the part of students mental health?

And it's not as if the mental health community has stood up on Mars and denounced this so and I also don't I don't understand that I also don't understand how we got here.

You guys talk in the book a little bit about you're a little bit of you had thought that I was a little bit about the Internet generation, right?

You don't put the finger on the Millennials, but but let's talk a little bit about why you think things changed in 2013.

Just first, say your point about about how this is not his holster.

These is nobody's or not clinically supported.

Uh, something that we suggest in the book.

We don't know if the depleted which this is going on.

To what extent is this a sincere desire for protection and a sincere belief that students are fragile?

The pursuing of of a political agenda and making political points and using mental health is a cover.

I think both our operative and so animate, depending on the context.

So why do you Why do you think the 1st 1 is operative?

Because this runs so contrary to everything that's known about the actual protection of mental health.

I'm very skeptical about attributing, um, positive motivation to it.

Like it seems to me that it's fundamentally driven by resentment.

Well, it's so, uh so you're absolutely right that the psychological community does not support this but yet has not stood up very vocally to condemn it.

So I we are hopeful that psychologists and psychiatrists, everyone we spoke to agreed that wrongly, yes, that's right.

That exactly the worst thing to D'Oh for someone who suffers from PTSD is to sweep clean their daily life of reminders, thereby denying that the chance to to devote to habituate to dina de condition the power of these quote triggers in the real world.

Oh, it's worse in some sense, too, because one of the things you do when you expose people who have anxiety disorders to the things they're anxious about is not make them less anxious, but make them more courageous, right?

And that's why generalize is because the psychoanalysts thought that exposure would just mean the fears would pop up somewhere else.

But they don't and it's because people learn that there's more to them than they thought.

And then when you protect them, not only view, not exposed them, which is a big problem, but you also teach them to generalize the idea of their weakness, which is a really terrible thing to do.

So you couldn't invent a more counterproductive mental health movement and instituted on campuses if you set out to design it and that that's something that we always try to emphasize and that love is a base so interesting for us to look at was the one thing because, you know, the third and I free speech movements coming from students in the relatively recent past, the late eighties and early nineties, for example.

But the thing that was so striking was that they were medicalizing all all of these claims And like, you know, of course, they're sitting there going like that doesn't sound right eye Doctor John.

And we interviewed for the original article, maybe seven different clinical psychologist CBT experts.

You know, for example, and the thing I keep on trying, but I keep on explaining it is it's as if returning up.

But what could be a minor aversion into something more like a phobia?

Because we're giving it so much more power.

And the worst thing of all that we're doing so much of our campuses were turning into a schema.

We're turning the idea that I'm actually in that I'm broken into into.

It's a permanent sort of self definition.

So that's why I do think that there's sort of a mixed motive thing going on here.

I think that we have a self fulfilling prophecy going on to some degree.

But I do think that that some of this kind of hopeless ideology is actually genuinely Harvard students actually making them more interesting, depressed.

It's really incompatible how you have a You also cites statistics to that end.

So one of the things you guys concentrate on the book, these statistics indicating that there has, in fact mean there is evidence of decline in mental health over the last.

What is it about the last decade since around 22,009 to 2012 is when things that's the elbow, that's where things begin to our up and then they go steadily up, um, to about 2015 2016.

We don't know if they're still going up there flat towing, but this is what's going into a little bit of detail because it was just an article in The New York Times Richard Friedman.