00;00;10;11 - 00;00;32;13
Jasmine
Hey there, and welcome to Psych Attack. I'm doctor Jasmine B. MacDonald. Today I have the pleasure of catching up with Dr Will Dobud again. Will joined me in episode nine to discuss his practice and research in the area of outdoor and adventure therapies. If you haven't had the chance to check that episode out, you really should please go back and have a listen to that one.

00;00;32;15 - 00;00;46;03
Jasmine
So Will has written a book with Dr Nevin Harper called Kids These Days, which is currently on pre-sale and is being released late September, and Will's kindly come along to have a chat with me about the book. Welcome. Well.

00;00;46;05 - 00;00;48;08
Will
It's awesome to be back.

00;00;48;10 - 00;00;59;11
Jasmine
It's absolute pleasure to chat again. I get the good excuse of collaborating with you in between and get to talk to you anyway, but I love to share you and your work with other people.

00;00;59;13 - 00;01;06;24
Will
It's so fun to be here and this will be a fun topic about kids these days and what's going on.

00;01;06;26 - 00;01;23;18
Jasmine
Yeah, so we're going to have a bit of a deep dive about the book. The key, topics within it. I wonder if you might just start off with a little bit of background about yourself. You know, your journey in social work and kind of expertise in mental health has kind of led to this book.

00;01;23;21 - 00;01;50;22
Will
Yeah. So I am a psychotherapy nerd. I have been a psychotherapy nerd since about 18, when I first started working as a field guide in the woods in America with young people. And I don't know if it was directly related to having been a therapy veteran myself in my childhood, but I just thought, I think there's probably some better ways that we can do a lot of this, and not necessarily that I thought I knew the better way.

00;01;50;22 - 00;02;12;06
Will
I thought, I need to learn more about how to do this work. And so when I came to Australia, I started a small nonprofit, and we were working with youth, and I just got the research bug. So during Covid, we slowed down the, nonprofit a lot. Hope to bring that back up in the next year or the year after that.

00;02;12;09 - 00;02;45;23
Will
But I work as a social work lecturer with Charles Sturt University, where I get to write and and really geek out about outdoor therapies and then, experiential learning and then teach sort of how to do this talking stuff with our clients. And so, that's sort of been my journey is, I guess, balancing that act of practitioner and researcher educator and so trying to keep my feet in both worlds rather than just sticking with writing about something that you're not doing anymore.

00;02;45;24 - 00;02;50;22
Will
Always seemed a bit odd to me. So. So I guess that's where I'm at.

00;02;50;25 - 00;02;59;04
Jasmine
Nice one. And what about Nevin? So Nevins, a coauthor on this one. You've written other things together before. Could you share a bit about Nevins background?

00;02;59;07 - 00;03;25;29
Will
Yep. So Nevin is, was someone whose name I've known about since probably around 2009. And Nevin was one of the first PhD students to do a PhD about these wilderness therapy programs in the United States. And Nevin, being a Canadian, sort of saw different ethics from the Canadian view of involuntary treatment to the United States. And again, that's broad generalizations.

00;03;26;01 - 00;03;51;18
Will
So in 2010, Nevin wrote an article called Evidence Based Practice and Adventure Therapy A False Title. And when I found that paper in like 2016 and I was reading the same literature, he was reading, then I was like, we're going to be friends. Nevin is a professor, I believe, now in the Faculty of Health. Like all universities, they've changed names and it's tough to follow.

00;03;51;20 - 00;04;14;27
Will
At University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Nevin has worked in the outdoors for a long time. Weird. Synchronistic. Late. Nevin was a good hockey player, ice hockey player. Much better than I was ever. And so we just had a lot in common and we hit it off. And, so we've been writing together since 2017, 18, and it's just a wonderful partnership.

00;04;14;29 - 00;04;34;05
Jasmine
Lovely. It's cool when you see someone else's work and you think not just this is significant, but we're going to be friends. Oh, yeah. All right, so the book is Kids These Days. Give us an introduction. Why why that name? Why that kind of focus for the book?

00;04;34;07 - 00;05;00;13
Will
So I had just finished a few years ago, a solution focused outdoor therapy book. And while I'm biased to solution focused, I kind of, I don't think solution focused is better or worse than anything else. What I wanted to write was sort of how outdoor therapy providers could actually really conceptualize of their work from the beginning, from working with different populations to how to do supervision, how to evaluate your performance.

00;05;00;13 - 00;05;24;13
Will
So really thinking about how to have a really broad but grounded theoretical orientation. And when I finished that with Doctor Stephan, net and Chuck in the UK, I was pooped. I did not want to do anything. And Nevin kept calling and saying, let's try to write about youth mental health in a nonacademic way. Something like kids these days.

00;05;24;13 - 00;05;50;27
Will
What's going on with kids these days? So the title didn't really hamstring us, but it was always the working title of the book. And so what we started reading about mental health rates and things like this. We started seeing that there's a lot of judgments that happen about kids. And when you start reading about not only that, talking and Pooh poohing on kids these days has existed for millennia.

00;05;51;00 - 00;06;14;01
Will
You know, we're going to 600 BC. There's records of the Greek philosophers saying kids today are lazy. They're out of shape. They don't have good manners. And then we look at today where we're going, they're all mentally ill. They're all anxious. And we kept seeing this. And then we see that we're talking about kids as if they're so unwell.

00;06;14;01 - 00;06;26;10
Will
We have the term fragile. Now, I understand what they mean as fragility kind of being one end of a spectrum of resilience. At the same time, it's a it's kind of an awful term to think of somebody as fragile.

00;06;26;12 - 00;06;26;21
Jasmine
Yeah.

00;06;26;22 - 00;06;54;29
Will
And so what Nevin started doing. Well, I was quite reluctant to really dive into writing a book. Nevin just started interviewing experts in the field. He interviewed Doctor Martin Broken Leg, who is a Lakota man. That's the coda native American man who wrote a book called Reclaiming Youth at Risk, which in the 80s and 90s was just that was the best youth workbook that existed.

00;06;55;01 - 00;07;26;25
Will
And so talking to him, he starts talking about some spiritual connection that that youth today are just starving for connection and repair. And connection is much easier than medicating your way through something or things like that. And then we just listed all the the most famous people we could lean on to talk to, and all of a sudden what started to emerge is maybe one thing that's not good for selling a book, because a lot of books today have a very simple thesis.

00;07;26;27 - 00;07;52;27
Will
Our kind of guiding mantra was youth mental health from 40,000ft. What are all the things that are kind of going on? And then what emerged was then going, whoa, who have we not spoken with? So we have a chapter about environmental toxins, which a lot of the stuff that we live around is all correlated to increased behavioral issues, increased anxiety rates.

00;07;53;00 - 00;08;15;14
Will
And then what we saw was most of the arguments that were being portrayed in the media were always picking one problem. One thing that's harming youth today. And so that was sort of the working thesis of the book. And then as we had all of these, you know, we didn't want it to seem like a bunch of different essays about a different problem, how to put that together.

00;08;15;20 - 00;08;48;24
Will
We started realizing that actually, there's a lot of adults out there that are doing wonderful things for young people. Regardless of qualification, if they're a parent, if not a parent, a teacher, all these people. And we started writing a book targeted at those folks that are really being there and being present for young people today. Given all the complexity of the current environment, whether it's politics or the social world, that we all live in or the technology, having too much information at our fingertips.

00;08;48;24 - 00;09;03;16
Will
So it's it's really broad, but it's been an absolute labor of love to be able to bring in the creativity of not writing an academic text in many ways. And to have a publisher to back us up is is really nice as well.

00;09;03;18 - 00;09;23;03
Jasmine
I pick up a sense from you of, passion and interest for all of the content included. And of course, you only speak to people that you were really keen to speak to and made an important contribution. But I'm wondering if you could share just another example or two of some deep dives in the book on topics or conversations you had with some experts.

00;09;23;05 - 00;09;45;11
Will
So we talked to Doctor Simon Davidson, who he is a psychiatry now retired in Canada, and he was a chief psychiatrist in Ottawa. So he was a top person. And he talks a lot about getting in trouble for not being quick to diagnose, to care more about being a lighthouse for the young person. And so we wrote a chapter.

00;09;45;11 - 00;10;15;02
Will
We called it identity Politics, which is kind of just being tongue in cheek, but we wrote about how in mental health, a lot of times young people, well, everybody, the diagnosis almost becomes part of forming an identity. Now, Erick Erickson, who created our stages and changes of human development, he argued that adolescence is the time for securing your identity of who you are or having a role.

00;10;15;02 - 00;10;41;29
Will
Confusion. And one of the things we learned from Simon Davidson was not only do we have to have these labels because of the system that we're in, where we say, this person has depression and here's the medication for it. So that's the system. But we also really want to protect young people from not internalizing these identifiers of yourself, which doesn't technically happen in any other form of health care.

00;10;41;29 - 00;11;06;08
Will
For example. Yes, there's narratives about when someone gets I remember my mother getting a breast cancer diagnosis, and she was really in an odd place, not an odd place, probably a very normal place. About the surgery she had to have about losing her hair. And that changes her identity, of course, but she never walked around saying, I am cancer.

00;11;06;10 - 00;11;32;02
Will
Where we say I am depressed I am attention deficit. And so in the book I wrote never and I were both, old enough to not be vaccinated. Chicken pox. Right. So we all had chicken pox but no one said I am chicken pox. So in many ways the labels have gone from something someone is experiencing to who they are as a person.

00;11;32;04 - 00;11;52;01
Will
And so we found research that actually if a young person self-identifies through the label of a mental disorder, the quicker they drop that label, the sooner their self-esteem increases regardless of mental health. Symptomology.

00;11;52;03 - 00;11;53;04
Jasmine
Interesting.

00;11;53;07 - 00;12;19;15
Will
So we found these fascinating things that we thought weren't talked about enough in the mainstream and then touched on contentious topics like that. But we got to blame the experts that we interviewed for the idea. So we're just we're just the messenger. So that was a big one. The the how people identify with things where like, I think I was, really lucky as a kid to be to be a punk.

00;12;19;15 - 00;12;38;03
Will
And I dyed my hair and I wanted more tattoos. And in many ways, if people said, no, you cannot be a punk. I would have doubled down and been more punk. And so kind of being there. And Simon, we have a quote from Simon that ends that chapter and he says, I want you to know, I hear you.

00;12;38;04 - 00;12;59;19
Will
I really want you to know that. And I want to know where these ideas came from, and I want to know all about them. So we don't argue as people are forming their identity. We give them sort of a mirror to bounce these ideas off of. Obviously, if we're talking about internalizing problems, obviously I'm in Adelaide, the home of narrative therapy.

00;12;59;21 - 00;13;19;28
Will
It's easy to start talking about externalizing the problem, not using words like depression as an adjective to describe somebody. Yeah. You know, thinking of, you know, how does this depression impact you? So we have some, I guess, coaching. You know, you've known me a long time and I'm not really a I don't like cheering on people or telling them what to do.

00;13;20;01 - 00;13;42;09
Will
So thinking about how we can help people to externalize some of the problems or labels, stuff like that. So we tend to stuff outdoor play overprotective and the safety trap we have talk about psychotherapy, environmental toxins. But you can't talk about kids these days without the phones. So there's tons of stuff that we've, that we've touched on.

00;13;42;09 - 00;13;51;23
Will
And so that makes it really broad. And what we hope that we've done, at least well enough, is to have a good narrative arc of how we've organized these things.

00;13;51;26 - 00;14;02;13
Jasmine
Totally. And one of the things that you focus on or highlight in the book is this idea of we could problems. Could you talk about that a little bit.

00;14;02;16 - 00;14;35;10
Will
Yeah. That's our introduction is titled Wicked Problems. This was this was an idea from urban planning researchers at Berkeley in California. And they said there's these ideas of wicked problems. Wicked problems means there's no simple solution to this. There's no definitive formula to solving this. Additionally, there's what's called a no stopping rule, which means we will never know if we've solved a youth mental health crisis because we change the way we count these things.

00;14;35;16 - 00;14;57;06
Will
We count anxiety much more often than we did in the 50s. So it's hard to say what's going to solve. And then there's also a problem that simple solutions often tend to lead to more problems. The good example from our Australian context the introduction of the cane toad. It was a simple idea. Cane toads will kill the cane beetle.

00;14;57;13 - 00;15;27;02
Will
We won't have a cane beetle problem. Now all we have is a huge cane toad problem. And so simple solutions often lead to what we call regrettable substitutions. This is what we learned from the environmental toxin researcher. So in the environmental toxins world, a lot of people, say 40 or 50 years ago were falling asleep while smoking so they'd light their couch on fire, burn their house down, or hurt themselves.

00;15;27;02 - 00;15;52;16
Will
Right. So we started putting flame retardants in furniture that has a direct link to increased cancer rates and neurological issues. And so the the substitute action ended up being regrettable. A way to think about this in schools is we used to hit kids in schools. And then today rates of medicating children in schools. We're just sedating them through school.

00;15;52;18 - 00;16;19;02
Will
So Wicked Problems is kind of a warning sign of be kind of weary of really simple solutions in, for for those in Australia. I know those internationally have social media bans are everywhere and it seems like it feels right. Again, we don't want young people with access to horrific pornography, access to cyberbullying, access to, you know, misinformation.

00;16;19;02 - 00;16;49;24
Will
However, we define that political issue. But at the same time, the simple solution might lead us to find a new issue, a new problem, right? I'm going to probably cop flak about this jump in in some ways. But, you know, youth crime internationally has been deteriorating for a long time. In the 90s, the reduction of youth crime is often linked with getting lead out of gasoline, lead out of paint these things.

00;16;49;27 - 00;17;14;19
Will
And what was interesting, like the city of Melbourne, the most lockdown urban city during Covid. Youth crime is up 30% now. I haven't done the research to say what's caused or correlated anything. It could be how you count youth crime that's changed. It could be anything, but it could be viewed as that could be a regrettable substitution. We did a simple solution and it could have exacerbated a different problem.

00;17;14;21 - 00;17;34;19
Will
We wanted to show some other regrettable substitutions that have happened along the way. And so that was a good way to look at wicked problems. So youth mental health, there's so much going on. And we often as humans think these things are new. Like, over protection is a new phenomenon. But that was being talked about in the 80s and in the.

00;17;34;19 - 00;17;51;09
Will
So that's the kids these days. In fact, it's all kind of generational amnesia, right? So it's it's it's interesting to think, oh, we have to solve this problem right now in this simple way, while at the same time going, oh, hold on a second. Let's really think about this.

00;17;51;11 - 00;18;17;27
Jasmine
Because there isn't a simple solution how complicated this is and not take away from the uniqueness of experience for every young person, right? When you first mentioned that, you know, the basically this attitude of kids these days is over 2000 years old. I just I find that really I think it's really powerful. I was, recently reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius here.

00;18;18;00 - 00;18;43;02
Jasmine
Yeah. And there's a part in that where he says something like intensity and balance in all things that we do. And the paragraphs that follow is basically where we're up to burn out thinking now, and you, it's like it's kind of humbling and comforting, but also frustrating to know that we seem to, as a species, continue to struggle with the same kinds of things.

00;18;43;04 - 00;18;49;03
Jasmine
And that idea of generational amnesia that you mentioned, I just think that's a really eloquent way to put it.

00;18;49;06 - 00;19;13;05
Will
Well, there's there's funny ways in the research that we found to think about it. One of them is the best music that's ever existed was from your adolescence. No matter your age, the economy was always better during your 20s, no matter your age today. So the graph is everything was better when I was young. The kids were better.

00;19;13;05 - 00;19;35;11
Will
We were smarter. We read more books. And there's a study that we found that studied this kids these days effect. What they found was the more conservative in the sense of people who believe in old fashioned values, people who believe we should honor the forefathers. The the higher you ranked in that, the more likely you were to talk about kids manners.

00;19;35;11 - 00;19;51;23
Will
These days, they don't respect traditions. The more you've read in your life, the more likely you are to say, kids today don't read. They don't learn anything, you know? So there's the issue. The joke of kids these days as a book is it's actually adults these days.

00;19;51;26 - 00;19;58;27
Jasmine
Yeah, it's very egocentric, isn't it? It's like relative to me and my experience and what I believe. That's the problem with you.

00;19;58;27 - 00;20;25;19
Will
Yeah. I'll give you a funny example, is Nathan was a top researcher for Outward Bound and in Canada and Outward Bound emerged from Kurt Hahn and a lot of other people that don't get credit, as always, with new movements and Outward Bound, Kurt Hon famously said, these are the declines of modern youth, and it's like they're out of shape because of advanced locomotion.

00;20;25;21 - 00;20;55;26
Will
There's too many stimulants and tranquilizers. They don't have compassion. All this list of things that was like the 1930s. Advanced locomotion, like the fastest car with like 40 miles an hour. Right. Like the like you have no idea how much this stuff is going to advance. Right. So what was interesting was what Kurt Hahn said as the antidotes, which was kind of formulaic to the way we thought about this, he said.

00;20;55;26 - 00;21;17;23
Will
And this is a key theme through our book. So he has this kids these days going on in his head, right? He's like the kids today, lazy, out of shape, no compassion. And they had they have spectator writers, he said. They're on the sidelines. They're spectators. Right. And Kirkhorn said we need to treat young people as crew and not passengers.

00;21;17;26 - 00;21;31;00
Will
That became a really big thing where in psychotherapy, research, often our clients we work with are treated like dependent variables. It's like, I better do this so that they change.

00;21;31;02 - 00;21;31;19
Jasmine
Yeah.

00;21;31;24 - 00;21;54;28
Will
Or a neglected factor where the truth is and all the research shows this for 100 years, kids have to be treated as resources that have something to contribute. And so when you look at the problems it's often toxins is a different one. Let's throw that away for a second. But kids can't handle the phones. They need diagnostic labels.

00;21;55;00 - 00;22;15;23
Will
They're the hardest people to work with in therapy. They need over protection. They they they don't go outside anymore. This is a it's all a kids these days fiction where it's dreaming of a world that we grew up in, not what the world is today. When I'm if I'm going to the ice rink, I drive past three skate parks.

00;22;15;26 - 00;22;37;00
Will
No matter the time of day. There are kids. They're playing outside unsupervised playing. And then we see on the news there's damn kids don't go outside anymore. They need to stay outside till the street lights come on. I could put my kid in my front lawn until the street lights come on. He wouldn't know where to find another kid, right?

00;22;37;00 - 00;22;55;10
Will
It's not. We don't all live on a cul de sac and leave it to Beaver. It's not the world anymore. So we want to avoid that amnesia in that way. So, yeah, it is. It is funny. We try to poke fun at some of these ideas and the kids these days affect is a very funny way to go.

00;22;55;12 - 00;23;05;08
Will
Wait a second. Hold on. Are we actually thinking about youth or are you thinking about. I have a really disruptive kid in my classroom, and I'd like them to sit still.

00;23;05;10 - 00;23;29;01
Jasmine
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. It's making me think of a recent conversation that I had with Raheem about envy, and he was saying in that episode that when we are critical of other people, it's often and we point things out like they're not respectful and they don't have minutes. It's often it could be a reflection of this sense of envy.

00;23;29;02 - 00;23;37;27
Jasmine
In my youth, I didn't have the freedom to speak like that. In my youth, I didn't have the freedom to. Is there a connection there? Am I? Well.

00;23;37;29 - 00;24;01;03
Will
I think that there's sometimes a cognitive dissonance here. And and I'll explain one that's a big time cognitive dissonance in the country where you and I both work. Australia. The book The Anxious Generation, which was published March of 2024. By late November 2024, the Australian Federal government says we're banning all social media for people less than 16 years old.

00;24;01;05 - 00;24;22;25
Will
Again, that just kind of feels right. We need to do something to help them prepare for for social media, which is going to take over their life right? But the criminal nature of responsibility in Australia is ten, so we need to protect them so they become more responsible, responsible. But they're old enough to know right from wrong.

00;24;22;27 - 00;24;23;16
Jasmine
Yeah.

00;24;23;18 - 00;24;49;05
Will
And that to me is a dissonance that we have to start squaring about how we think of youth. They're either responsible enough for something. And what we know is that when youth have responsibilities, they usually step up anyway. Right. And then the other sort of disconnect, I had a student in a, a lecture and she asked me about the phone bans in this, and I said, well, it feels right.

00;24;49;05 - 00;25;10;09
Will
But I'm also who's going to verify age? Are we going to give every 16 year old, every 16 year olds driver's license, or are we going to give that to big Tech because they have a track record of not being that good with privacy, and that's a minor's privacy. Right. And she said, work it. She works in a high school with high risk students.

00;25;10;09 - 00;25;27;01
Will
And she said, well, when that news broke in late November, a lot of the students said they felt very confused because during Covid it was, don't worry, you're going to do everything online. Don't worry. Your whole life is online. Everything is online. You're going to have to navigate online. You're gonna have to integrate this into your everyday life.

00;25;27;03 - 00;25;57;04
Will
And then four years later, you're not responsible enough to be online. So it's it's moving goalposts of youth as well. And I think that is one of the things that keeps going on with young people is, you know, your brain is going through, as an adolescent, one of the strangest, most uncomfortable times. It's the biggest development. Then what you'll experience from 0 to 2 years old and then at the same time, it's frustrating for adults.

00;25;57;04 - 00;26;12;00
Will
Your kids stop talking to you. They don't want to be around you, but that doesn't mean they still don't need you or any other adult to be a part of that journey. That they know where they can go, where they can come to to be with you.

00;26;12;02 - 00;26;23;11
Jasmine
Yeah, right. And so it is that to say that some of the intended audience for the book is parents and practitioners, like who who would you like this book to reach the hands of?

00;26;23;14 - 00;26;44;26
Will
Well, we, we call it in the introduction. We said, this is a book about youth mental health for adults. So we don't hold punches. We're talking on contentious topics. That's not to gain rank in a popularity contest of controversy, but we want it to really lift the veil on what's going on. And that actually felt really refreshing to go.

00;26;44;28 - 00;27;10;10
Will
What if Nevin and I just maintained a dialog with with ten or something different experts and then just shared what we learned instead of being nervous about what we found and what's going on, things like that. So I would say any adult that's in the interest of educating youth, raising youth, helping youth, coaching youth, I think the book could be a useful idea to them.

00;27;10;12 - 00;27;30;16
Will
And then also in some ways we wrote it as this wasn't intentional. But like if you picked up the book and you go, I really want to see what that environmental toxins dude said, you can flip to check that part and not think that you missed a lot at the start so you can jump around. I think. I think that's nice and in some sense.

00;27;30;18 - 00;27;38;08
Jasmine
Definitely, yeah. Pick and choose those parts and then probably you get really captivated and then keep writing from there. But you don't have to read order.

00;27;38;15 - 00;27;41;15
Will
You have to read a book.

00;27;41;17 - 00;27;52;25
Jasmine
You mentioned something in the book that I hadn't heard of before. What a pleasure. I love new things. And that was this idea of positive deviance.

00;27;52;27 - 00;28;26;01
Will
Yeah. So I learned of this from, as you know, my favorite writer, a to go on this book called better at the end. He talks about positive deviance briefly. It's not a central theme in the book. And I just did a little bit of a deep dive in the 60s and 70s, actually. Nutrition researchers were using this term because remember the food pyramid that was created by big grain or big flour and said, bread is your most important thing to eat every day, right?

00;28;26;03 - 00;28;49;07
Will
There were researchers, the Save the Children Foundation. They went to Vietnam. Malnutrition was out of control for youth, especially really impoverished youth, and they didn't have a lot of funding. So what they did is they actually started just finding the healthiest of the poorest children. And what they found was these families bucked societal norms. They broke the rules.

00;28;49;13 - 00;29;19;00
Will
So societal ideas, like at the time in Vietnam was like, if your child gets diarrhea, don't feed them until the diarrhea is gone. But these families were feeding their children so their children were healthier, something like the sweet potato. Most families were throwing out the skins. These families were eating them. It was high in nutrients. So what they did is they started bringing all families together to learn from the experts that already existed.

00;29;19;02 - 00;29;46;04
Will
So they didn't make a new food pyramid. They didn't coach them in the Western version of how to be healthy in Vietnam. So this idea is kind of that, and I pulled you a quote for it. In every group, there are minority of people who find better and more successful solutions to the challenges at hand, even though they have access to exactly the same resources as the rest of the group.

00;29;46;06 - 00;30;12;11
Will
It's their uncommon practices. The deviation that helps them to flourish. And so many of the people we interviewed, I thought were like, this is radical, but it's actually nothing new, right? This is just everywhere, right? And so that started us thinking, who are the radicals in our in our world of youth, mental health or medicine and things like that.

00;30;12;18 - 00;30;44;28
Will
So like people like Doctor Semmelweis who found out washing your hands is important in medicine. He was institutionalized for his views and died from an infection during the institutionalization. It was only well after one of his students started championing his work that we all realized, oh shit, we should probably wash your hands. That seems nice, you know? So sometimes the deviant has clues, but maybe they don't feel comfortable to stand up to something to speak out.

00;30;45;04 - 00;31;07;11
Will
So there's five sort of ideas of how to be a positive deviant, which was what guided us in writing the book. Ask unscripted questions. So instead of is there a youth mental health crisis? Think about a different way to ask this question. Don't complain. Now, I like to complain a lot, especially in private. But yeah, complain as you wish.

00;31;07;11 - 00;31;27;20
Will
Do whatever you want, but that's a funny one in the list and then count something. Investigate what you think is important, write it down and then see what happens when you change and see what comes out of it. So I really like that as a guiding principle of Nevin just started interviewing these people and saying, what's going on with kids these days?

00;31;27;22 - 00;31;37;05
Will
And then it was a conversation, and then people just talked and talked and they're fascinating discussions about what's going on.

00;31;37;07 - 00;31;44;05
Jasmine
It's awesome. The book is on pre-sale. What is the best way for people to, you know, get their hands on the book?

00;31;44;08 - 00;32;06;22
Will
I think Amazon is probably the way to go with getting the book. And, what is also pretty cool is we, our publisher as far as North North America is concerned, is the most, ecological friendly publisher in North America. So I think somewhere in the books type in the book's cover or the first few, you know, copyright pages.

00;32;06;22 - 00;32;18;05
Will
It'll say somewhere that though we don't recommend it, I think you can eat the book if you want, which was something that was really nice for us to be a part of, to to have that as a possibility.

00;32;18;08 - 00;32;23;04
Jasmine
It's it's awesome. It's also hilarious. I love it. Yeah.

00;32;23;07 - 00;32;24;13
Will
It's hilarious.

00;32;24;15 - 00;32;34;00
Jasmine
Before we wrap up, well, is there anything else that you want to, emphasize other stuff that you had never know working on or any other kind of, final? Which about the book that you want to make sure you share?

00;32;34;02 - 00;33;04;25
Will
I think something really interesting to think about with kids these days. And then also, especially if you're someone aligned to the mental health profession, is a lot of the people that we teach is really important about, you know, conceptualizing what is being an adolescent, how do we help adolescents? A historical context is really important because a lot of different mammals don't have a drawn out adolescence like humans have.

00;33;04;26 - 00;33;24;29
Will
Right? You, you, you, you're born, and then eventually you're an adult that has to provide for people. So, so humans are interesting this way. And one of the things Nevin and I started finding and this was so this riles me up. I find it so interesting. It took a lot of people to champion getting you children out of factories.

00;33;25;01 - 00;33;44;27
Will
Right? Imagine being a factory owner. You have all these kids, you can pay them virtually nothing. There are two disorganized to go on strike or form a union. And parents are like, wow, at least my kids are making some money this and that. So it took priests, social workers, a lot of people to get children back in school.

00;33;45;00 - 00;34;11;29
Will
Right? And a lot of people think this is because of ethics. We did this because the ethics of kids working is a problem. I just want to share this quote from Erick Erickson. We've talked about him. This is Erick Erickson. This is written in 1950, right. We learned not to stunt a child's growing body with child labor. We must now learn not to break his growing spirit by making him the victim of our own anxieties.

00;34;12;01 - 00;34;17;14
Will
We must learn to let live and plan for all the growth that is there.

00;34;17;16 - 00;34;18;10
Jasmine
That's awesome.

00;34;18;10 - 00;34;44;04
Will
And I go. There are more quotes from the early 1900s about how to not interfere or intervene with youth. Too much. Obviously, if someone needs medical or professional help, go for it. But just make sure that we're protecting and advocating for the youth instead of having this increased interference. The three parts of the book are interference, intervention, and ideology.

00;34;44;07 - 00;35;09;19
Will
They all seem to stream together. And if our ideology is the kids these states effect, what will happen is we will keep intervening and pathologizing adolescence. And so we need to keep treating kids as resources with something to contribute. And that way they can adventure through adolescence while learning more about their own identity and who they are.

00;35;09;21 - 00;35;20;09
Jasmine
That's awesome. Well, it's an awesome book. I'm really excited that I get to have you on Snack Attack to discuss it. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much.

00;35;20;11 - 00;35;32;07
Will
Absolutely. Thank you so much for letting me geek out about the last few years of my life.