Ask Dr. Drew - Kids With Kill Lists: Why Are School Shootings Getting Worse? Dr. Lisa Strohman on Keeping Teens Safe From School Violence – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 151

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

In 2020, gun-related deaths increased by 15% – but with over 250 shootings on school campuses this year, the numbers for 2022 are even worse. What is causing the alarming rise in school violence, and what is inspiring so many young teens to write “kill lists” of their enemies? Dr. Lisa Strohman – visiting scholar with the FBI profiling unit and founder of the Digital Citizen Academy Foundation – discusses the increase in school violence and how parents can protect their kids from dangerous peers. Dr. Lisa Strohman is a psychologist, attorney, author, and child advocate. She worked as a visiting scholar with the FBI profiling unit, as a legislative intern in Congress, and also founded the Digital Citizen Academy Foundation to help proactively prevent and educate students, educators, and parents on issues related to technology. Follow Dr. Strohman at twitter.com/drlisastrohman 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And welcome everyone. We're going to take things in a slightly different direction today. I've been very concerned about the consequences, particularly mental health consequences, of some of the excesses of our public health interventions as it pertains to COVID. And I thought no better than to bring our friend Lisa Stroman in here, who specializes in the care of adolescents, to talk about what she is seeing. We also have a concerned father who reached out to us about some of the stuff he is seeing in school since school has been back to in-person and some of the adjustments that both of them feel perhaps we should be making. I will be also taking calls a little later on. So hang in there if you want to be asking questions on Twitter spaces. Once I'm done with Lisa and Jared,

we'll take some calls, see what you guys want to talk about. And then Susan wants to give you an update as soon as we get to the show about what we were talking about yesterday. And this was on Twitter, too, as well as yesterday during the call-in about what it takes to get into the United States. We weren't really clear on it, but Susan looked into it a little bit, and so she'll give you what she has learned right after this. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopaths start this way. right after this. You go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say.

I got a lot more to say. We'll be right back. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs.

With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD, ready for you. All right, everybody, welcome. And as I said, we will start out with Susan's report from the Canadian-U.S. border. What did you learn? I made a smell for the paw.

Not really, by the way. At the end of the conversation about the guy who said that he can't come into the United States from Canada because he doesn't have a vaccine card, and I said, well, maybe you'll be able to get a COVID test instead because I've seen that that but they will not take that as of yet and i was wrong but i was just kind of throwing it out there that i mean maybe that could be a possibility we found that to be true in other countries we found that to be in true in cruise ships but you did find coming into the united states but you can't non-citizens you found out what if you have a contradiction to the vaccine.

Contraindication. Contraindication. I'm not a doctor. You can get a letter from your doctor stating that. But, you know, it has to be a real doctor. It has to be on letterhead. It has to have license. It has to have contact information.

We did that because we didn't want to get the boosters when we went on our vacation. And we got a letter and said we can't have the booster. Well, not everybody. Jordan got the booster. Douglas had a terrible reaction. But even if you have the one vaccination and you got COVID, that doesn't count either. You have to have two vaccinations. So it's still pretty strict.

Oh, for U.S.? Yes. You have to have vaccine and booster? Well, no. vaccinate so it's still pretty strict over us yes you have to have vaccine and booster well no if you've had one vaccine and you caught covid it doesn't work so it is still very strict hang on i want to make sure i'm hearing you so some people say oh well i had covid you know hold on hold on by one vaccine do you mean initial vaccine series yes two vaccines yes and and two vaccines you don't have the second vaccine and you caught covid and then you didn't hold on hold on you mean the second part of the initial series

right if you haven't had it if you had just so you're let's say you're getting pfizer and you got one and before you could get the second one you got covid right yes you still can't it still doesn't work but i'm i'm thinking that if you had a contradiction contraindication to the first vaccine and your doctor writes you a letter you could somehow get in but it the bottom line is it's easier to get the vaccine if you need to travel out of the country if you think that you that wasn't the complaint the canadians were complaining that how draconian the u.s is and we agree i agree too i agree too but you know i i mean i wasn't going to get another shot to go into europe and i we got letters from our doctor but i wasn't going

to tap dance my way in any way i could but they being reasonable governments and based on listening to the science they have eliminated those requirements yeah it's easier you still have to wear you have to you have to wear a mask in Spain on public transportation, but they just loosened it up, like literally as we were going. And I didn't know if we were going to be able to get off the ship unless we got a COVID test. So I know, but, but I'm sorry. I said, maybe you'll be able to get a COVID shot. I, a COVID test. I literally was just sort of throwing it out there. Yeah, that's how I understood what you were doing. You were just spitballing and saying, well, maybe in some countries, maybe, maybe.

And now you've looked into it, and it is not so, so excellent. Yeah, the CDC is still being- It's not the CDC, by the way. It was on the CDC website. No, I understand they report it, and they help set the standards. But it is public health policy in the federal government. And it's so ridiculous and i know they're department of homeland security so bureaucracies once again are cumbersome they

are unyielding they're irrational and i will give you as case a china susan i don't know if you have any feelings about what's going on there have you seen the videos no oh my god for me to watch oh my god it's the natural history of the policy that our government decided they wanted to follow. I don't know. Now, Dr. Fauci is on the record in a deposition saying they founded the policy of lockdown based on sending a scientist to Wuhan, looking around and talking to Chinese Communist Party leaders and then convincing the scientists that this is the way to go.

This is a government that founded itself on displacing millions of people, costing millions of lives, and are sort of proud of it, that they modernized China at the cost of millions of lives. You have to break a few eggs to make things go forward. Something you hear in this country, that's where it came from. Actually, it was Stalin that really first said that. So please, everybody, when people question the... Well, I just froze here. It does not work, and it leads to horrible consequences, loss of life. We have now people burning up in buildings because they're locked in from the

outside. We have people, God knows what the mental health consequences are going to be, what the medical consequences are going to be. And here's the data on COVID. How's the lockdown working so far, everybody? You can maybe slow a respiratory virus, maybe, but you cannot stop it from doing what it's going to do. And people say things like, what do you want to do? A million lives are lost. Yeah, this virus was going to kill a million people no matter what we did

maybe we could have done better if we had done focused um not just locking down a focused care of the truly at-risk individuals rather than the foolishness of what we did do but anyway that's a separate issue for another day well i'm I'm used, I, you know, I studied Chinese history in college and I'm used to this behavior. It's just the same thing over and over repeating itself. Right. This is the, that's communism.

It's totalitarianism. And if you like that, there are a few countries you can, the point is this, that is the anathema to what we're supposed to be about. And I can't imagine any Americans are looking at that and thinking that it's a good idea. No, I hope they're learning. Especially since it didn't work.

It doesn't work. I can't emphasize that strong enough. It does work. But let's say it did work. Let's say it, on the margins, improved things by 10%. Is that worth it? Is that what we want to be? Is that, you know? It's interesting now watching

communists trying to do this with no end in sight other than the elimination of COVID, which is a zero probability event. There's not going to be zero probability. The zero COVID, it's zero probability they're going to eliminate COVID. At least in this country, you can now look back on our history and go, okay, I can excuse the excesses because they were trying to get as far as they could until they could develop a vaccine. Now, obviously, we talk here all day about the shortcomings of the vaccine, but the policy of getting as safe as we can until we get the vaccine, what I call the safety uberalis until we get to the vaccine uber alice policy,

that actually is somewhat rational as compared to what's going on in China now, where it's the goal is zero COVID. That's a total fantasy. Never going to happen. Never going to happen. So it's astonishing to watch, but that was how we based our policy. That's what Italy did. That's where they based their policy. There was no evidence for this. There was no science behind it. There was actually what they were doing in Wuhan was actually,

they weren't being truthful about what they had done and what they were doing and what was likely to happen. We fell for it. And we should really be examining what we did. Here are some of the videos from Wuhan, I suppose. Is it Wuhan or somewhere else? These are reportedly, these are drones that are spraying chemicals in China.

They're supposedly spraying disinfectant chemicals on the streets. On what? For what? During lockdowns. For what? Yeah, exactly. I think that they're freaking out.

No science, no science in that, right? As though that's gonna somehow, so what you have is Chinese. Well, it's because you can't science. No science in that, right? As though that's going to somehow... So what you have is Chinese... Well, it's because you can't breathe. You have government officials, Chinese Communist Party officials. If you watch the series Chernobyl, you see how a communist system is set up.

You don't let anything get to the higher authorities. You lie, you cheat, you do whatever you have to do to make it look like you have everything under control, and you do whatever you have to do to get it under control, because if it gets to the authorities, you look bad, and you're in big trouble. And so these are non-medical people making non-medical decisions to save face and doing stupid things like this. There's no science for this.

There's no science for social distancing, as Dr. Kelly and I point out repeatedly. The six feet distance was something invented out of whole cloth. And it was all started with this policy. I'm worked up because now we're going to talk about what the consequences have been. So let me read Lisa's intro stuff in here. I know. He's getting into it. He didn't say this before, but we've convinced him now that China's not a good person to follow. Well, look, I was shocked that we adopted a policy that was strictly based on the whim of the Chinese Communist Party. You're like, why are they all these tanks going down the street, spraying around? At the very beginning. At the very beginning, I said, well, now it makes sense.

Where did they come up with these tankers going down the street spraying chlorine? At the very beginning at the very beginning i said well now it makes sense where did they come up with these tankers going down the streets spraying at the very very like the very day three of this thing i was like what is that now they're spraying it in the air it doesn't kill cove it doesn't do anything they know more than us maybe something else is going on i don't know all right so let's talk about i don't want to just talk about it would be working it's not working look at the number i don't want to talk just about gun violence, but I will report to you that in 2020, gun-related death did increase by 15%. Where did the numbers come from, though?

Who made that chart? What numbers are that? I don't trust anything anymore. I'm sorry. Well, that's probably reasonable. Let's see. Their school violence is up. It's inspiring many young teens to write so-called kill lists of their enemies.

Dr. Stroman, of course, was a so-called kill lists of their enemies. Dr. Stroman, of course, was a visiting scholar with the FBI. She was an attorney. She's in the profiling unit. She's also a psychologist. She's the founder of the Digital Citizen Academy, Digital Citizen Academy Foundation. And Dr. Lisa Stroman, let's welcome her to the program. Her Twitter handle is DrDRLisaStroman, S-T-R-O-H-M-A-N. Welcome back, Lisa. Hi, happy to be back. Thanks for having me. Good, happy to have you back.

So give us a little sort of bird's eye view of what you're seeing. Well, from a clinical standpoint, the schools are a mess. Kids are coming back delayed academically. They're delayed socially. Families are in crisis so it's a bit of kind of drinking from a fire hose rather than a straw at this moment working in psychology with the kids right now is it let's sort of care let's see if we can sort of describe what you're dealing with in other words kids were locked down kids were prevented from access to reasonably effective academic pursuits it just didn't work whatever that I'm assuming you're in Arizona right yes I'm based in Arizona but I've been in Wyoming

you know I've been I've been all over the country at this point since COVID. But I sort of want to frame it as the consequence of what we did here. So we tried this distance learning that did not work, correct? No. I mean, you have to, I guess the best place to start is to look at it from a demographic perspective. You had the elementary school kids and middle school kids, high school kids in the US. Each one of those groups is independent of one another. The elementary school kids really were dependent on having some guardian or person in the home that could facilitate these lockdowns. And quite frankly, we weren't prepared for it. And so they were handed devices,

unfettered, you know, my stance on regulation and oversight with kids. And then the middle school and high school kids, which should seemingly be independent and be able to figure it out, are really in that state. If we're looking at developmental stages, that's kind of the state where we're trying to figure out who we are. And if you give them too many freedoms and an online platform, they're going to use it to explore who they are, what is trending, how do I fit in, how do I make myself social. all impacted a little bit differently, but seemingly all negative across the board from my vantage point of going and talking to schools and teachers and kids themselves, actually. So essentially every kid in the country was adversely impacted by the lockdown. How about once they got back, the mask wearing? Yeah, I mean, you have to think about kind of the linguistic delays that we're having.

From my perspective, if you look at where we're reading one another, you and I have had this conversation multiple times of what makes a good clinician and what doesn't and is that ability to read another person and whether or not you're able to actually facilitate good communication with them. And when you take out half of a face and you block the ability to actually read a human, that's going to impact them. And it's going to impact all of us for the amount of time that we were masked in that sitting. I can just imagine though, the younger groups when they're relying on looking at mouths and faces so profoundly that I don't know. I just think

we'll have measurable effect. I, people always say, well, kids are resilient. Yeah. Yeah. They're resilient, but there are windows. If you miss those windows, they're, they shut forever. Developmentally. They, they do shut and they, and they trans it translates into where do our kids go to pick up the slack and how do they connect with others? So what I, there's some research that's out that's looking at the results of COVID in a psycho-linguistic way from online platforms. So kids actually went from reading people in person and having that connection authentically one-on-one to this kind of networking of connection. And so now we're looking at how are those things impacting them?

How did those short exchanges on the different platforms, I don't want to elevate anyone over the other, but basically they use shorthand in those scenarios and it changes the way that we operate globally when we start to do that. And so the impacts aren't even fully felt yet, but for the affect of the depression, the anxiety,

the hostility, the fear, all of those things that we're seeing. Well, interesting. You're adding things to your list. For the last couple of times I've talked to you, it's been anxiety and depression, and now we're adding hostility and fear. Talk to me about that.

I see a lot of kids trying to figure out their place in the world. And with all of the shifts that happen, you have to remember a lot of things happen at once during the pandemic. We had lockdowns. We had masking. We had a social rights movement. We had a lot of kids being told that, you know, depending on what their skin color was, whether they were okay or not okay, kids trying to figure out whether or not their sexuality is okay or not okay. All of these things went like wildfire,

sorry, on the platforms. And it was a communication tactic that made kids feel either safe or unsafe or accepted or not accepted. And a lot of that marginalized some kids. And I think that what we're seeing, you and I have talked about some of the data before, but what we're seeing in terms of that increase in hostility and anger, my opinion is it's based on some of those movements that have created these pockets where kids are just really trying to figure out where they belong can you be a little more specific about what you mean by pockets and figure out where they belong be more specific well I'd make a direct connection that and hostility so so if you think about a situation where we are in a place in a school setting and we've got

2,000 kids on a campus, we know where we fit. We are part of the jock group or we're part of the music group or band group or we have these little cliques that we can fit into. When you go into a global environment, so think about 7.8 billion people globally, you have like 5.1 billion that are online at any given time. And now you throw them into whatever said platform it is. If it's, you know, in our community, we have, you know, in Arizona, maybe we have, you know, 28 high schools. Those kids are all blended together it's really hard to stand out versus really trying to find who you are and be accepted on on a on a real scale um campus so i want to make sure against a larger crowd i want to make sure i get your your synthesis here your hypothesis is that we have particularly younger kids educationally

constrained because there were not parents or adults around to do the work with them they couldn't do it on their own so the educational progress was markedly diminished that in middle school and high school there was a similar decrease in in academic advancement but not as bad but the fact that they were not allowed to develop their social context their social um skill set they turned to what they were being um encouraged to go out onto which is the internet that's where they were that's the only connection they were having because they weren't being allowed to have any contact in the usual social domain and once they turn to the internet god knows right i mean we've you and i talked about their own subculture right and it could be god knows what right i mean it could be i mean who knows do our parents

reporting to you any any of this or they came to it late or that they're the ones that found out about it, that their kids suddenly hanging out with, I don't know, some sort of alternative group that they didn't know, never heard of? Oh, absolutely. Well, it's interesting. as we came back from pandemic settings and as the devices started to get peeled back a bit, you can't really, you know, Pandora's box was open. You can't really undo that. So I think what had the adults in the room, the parents, the administrators, they thought that perhaps we would go back to quote unquote kind of normal times after we kind of went back into real life classrooms. And unfortunately, my strong belief is education will fundamentally be changed forever. And it must go through a reform. It's broken at its core at this point, in my opinion. And we don't have the ability to come in and support

those kids the way that they need to and the parents are struggling they're contacting therapists counselors uh coaches like whoever they can get to and i i just don't think that there's enough of us that can can solve this problem enough people counselors that can solve this problem for parents right now um without additional real focus into mental health in the proactive state not the reactive state which I know we've talked about before too. Can you describe to me what it looks like on campuses now, what you're seeing? Cause you know, you're, you're talking about, you know, fundamental problems, but if one of my viewers or listeners walked onto campus,

what would they see that would be different from say pre pandemic? It's quiet. I, you know, I think that would be different from, say, pre-pandemic? It's quiet. You know, I think that if you think about going on a campus and getting into a crowd or being in the quad or being in a lunchroom where you have multiple conversations going and you hear kids talking excitedly and things like that, it is quieter than it has ever been. And it really is, you know, head down, you know, on their devices, not looking up or not sharing their world with each other. It is, what is next best out there? Am I being noticed? You know, kids want to be influencers now. They don't, it used to be that they wanted to go into professional sports and now they want,

they want to be influencers and they want to live online and they think that that world is very cool and interesting for themselves and how about that's what it feels like that's something you were seeing a lot of exposure to sexting and pornography that very very young kids yeah yeah the average age two years ago was eight at first pornography viewing for elementary school is now dropped to seven. You have to think that I think a lot of that is a drag down to the kindergarten and first graders that were given devices over the pandemic. It was a huge influx because, of course, what typically happened in those settings was that those devices were scrambled to get handed out to the parents, which are protected from going into any of those sites when they're on a school campus under the campus wi-fi but the minute those

devices left that that field of protection and went into the home into a different wi-fi there was no protections in there so you know you've got chronic viewing of pornography at 11. uh and so you know my belief is that we're kind of raising a generation of young men that really are looking in a very misogynistic way at women. I'm more worried about the women, the females that are exposed at very young age. It feels like they're extremely traumatized by what they've been seeing. And I wonder if it has some impact on what's happening later, both in terms of sexual identity, gender identity, all these different areas that kids seem so confused. I think all of the above.

I think that really what you're seeing with young girls i see an extreme aggressiveness uh my son is an eighth grader i mean he's being asked to sneak out at night he's got girls that are trying to send him things um obviously he has no social media because i already know that that would be like a wild like that's a just gonna be what is a dumpster fire at his age but i think that they they're going they're coming after him and they're very aggressive. And I think that a lot of times what that is indicative of is that the fact that these girls are exposed to what kind of societal demands are or expectations are of them. And they're trying to fulfill that. And they're trying to find that part where they matter, right? They're

trying to figure out how do they make their mark in the world and how do they get the attention. And what we're finding is that these young ladies are identifying with the fact that on these platforms that the more sexualized you are, which is evident, the minute you walk onto a campus, I can tell you pretty much between with a 90 percent accuracy of whether or not a child has social media or not based on the way that they're dressing. So they're following, they're watching and they're following and it is impacting them and it's making them guess and second guess and make choices that are in line with whomever they are algorithmically following. I also just wonder if I've had some conversation with younger women who've been saying things like, you know, I saw these horrible images of pornography, prepubescent sometimes, and just thought, that's a woman? That's not me. I don't want to be that. I must be, to me, I think that there's a lot of kids,

middle school specifically, where that's really their kind of identity of sexual identity processing starts to kind of like go on fire, right? The hormones come in, all of those things. But if they have been impacted by that, you're absolutely right. It's almost like the in-cell group, they've kind of decided conveniently that they might be in a position where they're just not, they're asexual and it's not something that they're interested in. And so it is, I think, long-term hurting young women. I mean, I think it hurts everyone at a young developmental age, particularly when they don't have the capacity to understand what it means. Yeah. I think we don't even know yet what the full impact of all this stuff is.

So take us now to, and we'll talk to Jared in a few minutes after we take a break, but how that then bleeds over into aggression and violence. So I think that what you find particularly with our young kids is that you figure out from a standpoint that they're they're trying to identify who they are they figure out that they're not meeting whatever that's that societal demand might be or they're cast aside or they're ostracized because they're not or even if they actually are participating a lot of times there's labeling and things like that that occur on there you know and their social groups and things like that that occur on their, you know, on their social groups and things like that.

And so that the feelings of hurt very quickly get turned into anger and very quickly get turned into hostility. So the number of fights on campus and the number of kind of like anger and frustration that occurs on the back end, whether it's at home or on social or whatever, bleeds into these schools and into their environments. Hmm. You know, when you hear about what you're describing, I get overwhelmed every time you talk about this. And it feels, it's obviously not getting better. um is there is there i mean i guess when we get into situations in mental health where there aren't enough professional services available to to have an impact or to significantly turn the battleship around i started thinking about peer support groups and that sort of thing um you know mutual aid societies is there anything like that for adolescent kids they're trying there's obviously i think that if you look at an average in the united states

there's typically one counselor per campus and so they really are only in a crisis state trying to respond you look at what the schools are trying to do from a safety perspective and you look at who are they bringing in right they're bringing the police officers and those associations with SROs, and they're putting it on the teachers to do drills. And, you know, these are the two most defunded and devalued to me careers that we have right now. And that has to be flipped on its head. And we have to understand and recognize that we need to support the institutions that can support our kids. And then we have to put in way more counseling and earlier on, because if we just cast aside a child that's making bad choices or a child that's doing something wrong,

what happens is we bump them out of one school district and they go to another. That's not solving the problem. And to me, they're like, you know, canaries in a mine shaft. Those little kids are the ones that are growing up and making bad choices. And we are not giving teachers the power to identify them and then do something. There's easy solutions to this. Just trying to get the control and power to be able to help make some. Give me a couple examples, then we'll go to break. So a great example would be, let's say we have an identified kid, and this kid has been bounced out of a school district. And once they're

out of a school district, they come out and we do a mandatory assessment for them. And once they have a mandatory assessment, they have to do a re-entry program where we really identify, okay, was that assessment or was that therapeutic intervention that occurred, right? Not punitive, but is there a therapeutic intervention that could be occurred? And can we do an assessment to see whether or not reintegration is going to come back? And we can facilitate that. We can actually help peer-to-peer counseling and mentorship within the program, not dissimilar from maybe the reading programs that you have, the reading buddy programs that you have in elementary school. It's really probably not

that difficult. It is, but where are we putting the resources and where are we allocating it? And are we actually looking at what is most important for our kids? And right now, I just don't believe we are. Are there any model programs like that out there or even? No, I just made it up. I mean, this is my idea. Like, you know me. I'm like, I see a problem and I'm trying to fix it, right? Like, you know, if we can get some dollars and some structure behind going in and make, you know, you know me.

I'm like Kevin Costner in the movie, whatever that movie is with the baseball. Like, I just build stuff and hope that we can make a difference. Field of dreams. Field of dreams, yes. Like the DCA program. I'm like, I'll just write a curriculum. We'll figure out this problem. So I'm still doing that in my free time of how do we fix this for people.

All right. Lisa Stroman, Twitter handle? Tell me that. Dr. Lisa Stroman. D-R-L-I-S-A-S-T-R-O-H-M-A-N. And other than Twitter, do you want people to go to anywhere else? I have an Instagram. I'm not, I don't, I advise you, but I haven't done a lot on any of the social platforms.

If people need to find me, they can find me. Fair enough. All right, we'll take a little break and we'll bring Jared in here when we get back. So be right back with you. I have some pretty exciting news. Our favorite skincare brand, GenuCell, is having a holiday preview sale. It just went live for all the products that Susan and I love. GenuCell Silky Smooth XV Moisturizer soaks right into my skin instantly. And with its immediate effects, you can see the fine lines and wrinkles disappearing within 12 hours. And Susan loves, of course, the GenuCell Vitamin C Serum,

infused with the purest vitamin C that absorbs to the deepest layers of the skin because of their proprietary skincare technology. I am a snob when it comes to using products on my face. The dermatologist makes a ton of money for me. But when I was introduced to GenuCell, I was so happy because it's so affordable and it works great. I was introduced to the Ultra Retinol Cream, which I love at night. All the eye creams are amazing. People notice my skin all the time, and I'm so excited because it's actually working.

And for a limited time, take advantage of the GenuCell holiday preview sale and save up to 60% off our favorite GenuCell products. 60% off. Treat yourself this holiday season. Go to GenuCell.com slash Drew. That's GenuCell.com slash Drew. G-E-N-U-C-E-L dot com slash Drew. My guest is Philip Patrick. He is a precious metal specialist trains at university

of redlands he has spent years as a wealth manager at citigroup and his current position is with birch gold group so gold has always been somewhat of a safe haven particularly in times of great turmoil uh much like our present moment i. Gold has always traditionally been a safe haven asset. Gold specifically has always been about wealth preservation, right? Gold has always held its buying power. You can look at as far back as you'd like in history and biblical times, one ounce of gold would buy somebody 400 loaves of bread. And today it does the same thing. So it's a store of value. But I would say in times like this, as you mentioned, it's particularly important when you're dealing with things like 40 year

high inflation, you know, the air that's coming out of a stock market bubble. These times in particular tend to drive gold and silver up quite significantly. If things are different, the solution needs to be different as well. So I encourage everyone to get informed. And we have a lot of good information here to help your listeners just a reminder i am not a financial advisor and i do not give out financial advice nor investing advice birch gold has an a plus rating with the better business bureau countless five star reviews and thousands of satisfied customers check them out now visit birchgold..com and secure your future with gold. Do it now. And we are back. And let's go ahead and bring in Jared.

There's Dr. Lisa Strom with us. And Jared has been struggling to try to get school districts to listen to him. He's observed some of the same things that Lisa has seen. And the schools seem to be insolent or unable to him. He's observed some of the same things that Lisa has seen. And the school seemed to be insolent or unable to change. Tell us what you've seen, Jared. So I spoke at a board meeting for the first time ever, because that's not my thing. And basically what I noticed was, and I'll tell you, was that a student brought a weapon to school, had it taken away, and proceeded to try and hurt a student and wrote a kill list of classmates later that day. That child remained in school

for days. The BHPD did an investigation, and the only thing I know is that that child is not currently in district. BHPD did the job the school administration didn't, which is to protect our children. So what I'm seeing is that schools are not really being that effective in helping children while the police are. And the school administration doesn't want the police in school because of the climate that they think police are bad. And so with this instance, the child literally remained in school for about nine days with not notifying any parents that could have been affected. So I would imagine if your child went to that school, you would want to know that a kid had a weapon and a kill list, essentially. So how do you handle that, Dr. Drew?

Well, first of all, what did the school say? What did they claim? The school claimed it wasn't a weapon, even though it was a box cutter, which I would say is a weapon. And they claim that the kill list was just a statement that the child made. So although it said, kill this person, kill that person. So their position was basically it was nothing from nothing. And did other parents accept that? Were you the only one that was sort of making issue of it? They didn't tell anybody.

I found out from another parent that this happened. And when I addressed it with the superintendent and gave my concerns, they called me erroneous. They said my statements were erroneous, even though everybody knew that they were true. And the erroneous part, I guess, was the fact that she didn't know that I knew the weapon was a box cutter and she called it an item. So my question to you is, how are we ever going to have any change if the school administration won't admit that there's a problem in the first place? Lisa, what are you saying with the administration? I'm sorry for you, Jared, and I'm super excited that you stepped up and said something at your

board meeting. We need more parents like you to stand up and start having conversations about it it's going to take probably a multitude of you to step up and say look this isn't right they're protecting themselves from a liability standpoint instead of looking out for their kids and that has to change and that's why I said that I think fundamentally the disruption of education has to happen. We can't have administrators protecting their brand over protecting their children that we as parents are trusting with them. And we can't have these silos of information whereby we don't have open communication.

So absolutely this is happening on a national level. I think there's many different boards that are being replaced. I think that there's a change that's starting to happen because parents like you stand up. So I encourage all of the listeners to look at Jared as an example and start to ask those hard questions because everybody knows that it was probably a box cutter and everybody knows who's on that kill list that is a student in that school because it goes like basically viral the minute that that information comes out. So we as the parents, once we get that information, we have to hold them accountable and we have to

have those conversations and we have to be reasonable about it, but we also have to demand it. And I think that that's the part that needs to be changed what did they do with one of the parents oh sorry go ahead one of the parents one of the parents in particular wasn't notified until five days later that their child was on that list and during that time their child was during that time their child was still in class with the other child and not told that their kid could be in danger so my question is doesn't the school have some form of liability by not telling parents this happened in the first place only when something bad happens so what did they do with this kid uh he was there for a numerous amount of days until the uh the berkeley heights

police department stepped in and he's just out of district now there was no they didn't tell us why they didn't tell anybody why they said he was out of district see i i to me i like kid yeah doing the same thing and so you know the the parkland shooter was a kid that had severe chronic mental illness did well in treatment was you know well contained appropriately managed doing well mom dies refuses to go to treatment you get a disaster i i don't understand you know why these kids aren't required to go to proper care. Certainly, do you think the Parkland kid is better off now because he didn't go to treatment, right?

Same thing is going to happen to this kid. If they don't require him to be in and stay in some sort of mental health services, this is going to go, well, it's going to end up where it always ends up, in the police system, in the criminal justice system. So I started. And somebody we had heard. Go ahead. So when this first started happening, I reached out to Lori Alladeff, who lost her daughter in Parkland and created something called Alyssa's Law, which is law in many states with panic buttons to get her input on it and she's been advising me on steps that i should

take to try and you know help make parents more aware that our voice does matter um and that's what i'm trying to do what go ahead tell we'll talk about it what do you got yeah so the the issue that you run into in towns is that you have two groups of i mean for some reason school security is political when it really shouldn't be everybody wants their kids to be safe but you have two groups of, I mean, for some reason, school security is political when it really shouldn't be. Everybody wants their kids to be safe, but you have certain people that'll say, well, why would we spend money on school security when we could spend it on, you know, on math, right? Well, I agree you do need math, but your kids aren't going to be able to be taught math unless they're safe and they're alive and well. And then you hear the normal thing of the crazy part is like you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than by being involved in a school shooting. Well, lightning is an act of God

and school shootings are preventable or mitigated with the proper steps. So what happened was the school said they didn't have funding for certain security measures. So I offered to donate an app that Lori recommended that her schools use. And I offered to donate it and try it out as a pilot program in one school with the hopes that it would be rolled out everywhere nationwide, rolled out everywhere in our district. And they, they declined my donation based on equity, saying that since it was only available in one school, it wouldn't be available everywhere, they would have to deny my donation, but they would take my money and spend it how they saw fit on security. So I was trying to make a difference. And they threw the equity card at me, which makes no sense because I was using my equity

to fund a pilot program to then be used in other places and then be called that, you know, that I was inequitable, which to me makes zero sense. So I've tried everything and, you know, it is what it is. I mean, private school might be the way to go, unfortunately. Well, I would say that it's probably not yeah sorry private schools horrible effects on yeah yeah no not private schools or something they have the same issues i mean i see private schools and i see public schools and i think yes your dollars would go further and you have a louder voice in a private school than you do in a public system. But I do fear that if we don't hold people to the, I guess, to me, the standard that we should all be living under, whereby our children should be able to go to educational settings where they

feel safe, where they feel connected to their educators, that they have the support of teachers and, you know, the administration and that they have parents connected to that school. I think that they really have a huge miss here when you have a parent who's stepping up and saying, let me be part of that solution. And instead of bringing that parent in and hearing that voice and letting that parent do some of that work with you so that you have support in a school, you're so worried about what it looks like in that situation from whatever social perspective that you don't try to solve that problem instead of trying to have your parent not feel like they're just getting

cast aside. And so to me that's that's the fundamental broken piece in it and and again we can't the privates the charters they can't they can't handle all of the kids um and they do have the same problems there so i am very concerned about this equity thing yeah the idea is to give we are all very different in terms of our abilities and the idea is to get each individual to be fully actualized to be the best they can possibly be but to say that every individual end up in the same place is is lunacy it's lunacy it's what i'm seeing in medicine right now where a 25 year old with you know

lice is supposed to end up in the same place as an 85 year old with in sepsis like oh they're going to be the same at the end that we're going to end up in the same place i mean what are we doing what is wrong with us but anyway jared you want to say something yeah i just want to say that you know i guess people the the issue that we have New Jersey, I don't know if you guys have it nationwide, is our superintendent really is like, she's only accountable to the board, right? And the board's elected and the superintendent is appointed. So the question is, is there's nobody besides the board that can get rid of the superintendent. The governor can't, the union county superintendent can't. The only one that can is the board of education. And clearly they don't want to, they don't want to do that because it's, they, you know, they voted for, I mean, they appointed somebody and been working with somebody and they don't want to seem as though they made a mistake, I would assume. So it's an uphill battle. I mean, clearly the superintendent has not been doing her job and has not been protecting

kids. I even had Wayne Black, I'm not sure if you know who he is, but he's one of the leading experts on school security. I had him talk to the superintendent, the police, and the president of the board of education, just trying to show that I'm trying to help them out. And their, I mean, his response was like, every school needs to have an SRO or a guardian or somebody. You know, there's $18 walkie talkies that you can get for each teacher. There's an app. There's a couple of things that you could do to mitigate school disasters.

And he said, budget-based security doesn't work. And he used a line that I'll never forget is how much is a kid's life worth? How do you put a dollar sign up? And is the app something that any school, any parent can get their hands on? Any school can get their hands on. It's SaferWatch. In fact, when they had the Super Bowl in Miami, they used SaferWatch to guard the stadium for proximity. It's in over 2,500 schools, I believe. And it's the app of choice of Lori Aladef in Florida.

So yeah, my hope was that I would purchase the app for the school. And then other parents around the country would follow suit and realize that we can make a difference if we all do it ourselves. Because we can. It's not that expensive and it's worth it to save lives, right? Like our kid's life is all we have. Do you have a website or anything you want to refer people to? No, I'm good. Um, I mean, people can learn more about it. if you go to tap into berkeley heights you could read the article and you can see the clip of when i spoke at the uh the board of ed meeting great thank you everybody get together and you know try and make a change try and make kids safer

there it is there's the link okay amen yeah i get overwhelmed when i but i appreciate you speaking up um and lisa are are you going to yourself going to administrators or going to school board meetings that kind of thing is that where you're having any impact yourself or you're staying just with the individual cases no i i work with administrators all the time and i and out and speak and try to educate and try to explain to them why the system and the reactionary results that they're doing are not working. And it's just a challenge in a lot of ways. And Jared is key to showing that this is what parents are starting to do. And I think if you knock enough times on that door and you stand up with other fellow parents and you say we want change, it is going to happen. And I know it's starting to happen. And I know there's some

states that are starting to roll out some of these things. So you have to keep up that together. And I just encourage parents to find support wherever they can. In the meantime, you want to give any advice on digital safety real quick before we wrap up? Sure. You know, my two cents on it is I think that kids are now moving into this digital platform that, you know, the metaverse is there and kids are really trying to figure out where they exist and live in this world. And so the trends that are happening, whether it be the food disorder, eating and the cutting and the Columbiners and all of the things, this is where this information is coming from the pornography, like all of this is floating into your children's minds. And so what I say to parents all the time is what we used to have is parents were primary education was secondary and

and tertiary we would have like churches or the non-profit organizations influencing our children's lives and now we have tiktok and snapchat and youtube and those three things are now the primary source of information and influence in our children's lives and if you're not paying attention to what those kids are following online then you have no idea how your kids are going to turn out on the other end. Any good software that we can install to help monitor it with us? Yeah. To me, I think that, A, as a parent, you should be monitoring any app that they're downloading. And if they're online, you should be following them, whether it's through a regular account regular account or ghost account it is not a right in our country to be on social media so

i encourage parents to understand that that children don't need it to survive i have 15 and a 14 year old and they are thriving my son is out dirt biking right now building ramps and doing things in the outside real world which might be scary for people but for people. But just pay attention to what they're doing. Look at their time online and do all of those things. Jared, any thoughts? Well, I will say real quick that I didn't say is that I'm in book publishing. And so I saw that this is a problem. And after learning this, I thought to make a difference,

we're going to publish a school security book called School Insecurity. And we're going to make it available to parents nationwide so that everybody can have a chance to learn more about school security. So I wanted to use what I do for a living to help people out and learn the stuff that I've been learning from people like Lori and whatnot. Please let us know if we can push that out and put it on our website and that kind of thing. I'm not the author. I'm not the author. I'm not the author. Well, whatever you'll help us,

help us bring awareness. All right. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us. Both of you, Lisa is always great to see you and Jared. Thank you for the fight.

And thanks for coming in on such short notice, but I don't know. I just feel like we have to band together and try to avoid more disaster in the future. I just feel so, maybe it's just because I'm older, but I feel so overwhelmed by everything. I know this is a disaster we're in. And I know it was self-created as so much of the messes we have in this country are. It just takes my breath away. Just ugh.

And so I'm glad you're out there. I'm glad Jared's out there. But it feels like too much. it's and i and i would encourage you like i think if you think of it in a global perspective it seems like it's too much but i think that if you break it down and chunk it into district by district school by school parent by parent it's not overwhelming it is simply understanding that if we come together and we support one another, we don't have to be distressed by it. We can get through it together. You simply need more than you.

It's power of one. Have one other person that you can lean into and say, okay, how do we get this done? And it's just doing it every day. And again, these are self-inflicted wounds. And so much of what's going on in this country, like we were just in Europe and North Africa last week. There's none of this. There's none of this stupidness. There's none of this silliness. Well, North Africa wasn't...

It wasn't a great economy, but they were believing... The women are covered up and look very unhappy there. Some of them. Not in Casablanca? People seem pretty good. In any event, the point is there was a— But I mean, the kids look okay.

Well, no. There were kids running down the middle of the freeway during traffic hour. It wasn't like—I'm not going to say North Africa, but Spain and Portugal, different story, definitely. What would you say about that? People seemed happy and living well and weren't, you know, putting up fronts of how, or they weren't, they weren't, they weren't offended. You know, they were just living their lives. It was nice. We've lost that curiosity. They just got stuff done.

They didn't, they didn't have ideology splintering them or worrying about it if somebody showed up with an app to do an ab testing on a school their response would be oh excellent thank you yeah let's see what happens uh not oh sorry we can't that's not fair to everybody else it's not fair it's not fair you know you know you know developmentally the notion of what's fair is something humans develop that what's fair and not fair in terms of their moral development. About age five. About age five. We can go well beyond age five moral considerations.

Fairness is the most primitive notion of morality. It's just where we start our morality journey. This country has gotten stuck on that, and it's so primitive and so weird. And also, it's not in reality. It doesn't help people thrive. So I get very upset about this stuff, but anyway. Well, before you move out of the country, we appreciate you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, don't go anywhere. All right. All right. I'll stick around for the time being. All right. We appreciate you, Lisa, too.

I know you're coming out here to a pod pretty soon or in January or something. Is that right? Yes. I think in January, yeah. Yeah, I'll settle on the date on that and come out with my good friend. Yeah. think in january yeah we yeah i'll settle on the date on that and come out with my good friend and um yeah and if if you want to go to my website asklisa.com i do have books on there happy to get them to them online digital too so all about this about the digital distress and what's happening all right beautiful thank you so much yep and i'm going to go out to twitter spaces and

start taking a few calls here and there. If those of you want to get on the show here with me, raise your hand, request. And if I do pull you up, you'll be streaming simultaneously on multiple platforms. Let's get Josh up here and see what he wants to talk about. Josh, what's happening? Hey there. I just wanted to know what you thought about the school shootings because they're very disturbing to me. And it does have something to do with mental health.

But I wanted to know what portion of this is about guns and then what portion of it is about mental health? Because you would know this, i just i can't figure it out well i'm not sure there's an answer obviously if you did not have access to certain kinds of guns or guns at all people be using other weapons and but they would not be as destructive the the almost without exception the individuals that engage in these acts have serious mental health problems, some of which were well handled until they weren't. Just look at that kid. The kid to me that was sort of the poster child for how foolishly we manage all these things was that neuroscientist in Denver who became progressively more psychotic.

He had schizophrenia, clearly. And he started telling people he was the joker and he had sort of violent and paranoid ideas. And the school's response to that was, hey, leave the kid alone. Don't put him on medication. I've not seen the full story on this, but I did read about the fact

that he was seeing this one psychiatrist, this woman, who couldn't get him to take care. And she appealed to the board. Each of these universities has a board to oversee some of these mental health issues. And I haven't seen the data yet because they've kept it under close wraps. But I guarantee you there was a distressed psychiatrist telling them to please help me this kid is going to go bad don't allow him to continue in school unless he takes proper treatment and she was told just forget it you who are you to say and that kid ends up shooting a theater up and killing dozens of people i mean it's scary when you think about

mental illness mixed with violence but the reason i've asked the mean, it's scary when you think about mental illness mixed with violence, but the reason I've asked the question, because it's obviously maybe a stupid question, is what's the tendency for someone who's ill to go to the gun? Because for me, and I'm sure for you, and for a lot of people, that's not the go-to response. No, as many people point out, if you have mental illness, you're more likely to be an object of violence than the perpetrator of violence. But with the particular drugs that people are doing, meth, which is the drug of violence, and with the untreated schizophrenia, which can sometimes become violent, you're going to see more violence by people with mental illness. That's just the way it's going to be. And it can include all kinds of, it's usually not mass shooters, right? If you look at mass shooters, they usually don't, they aren't the people with mental

illness per se. It's a much more complicated profile. But a lot of the stuff that's happening in adolescents and young adults, that is mental illness. That is kids with, and I don't know that people think about those as the same kind of mass shooter, as the guy that goes to the hotel in Las Vegas. That's a very different kind of thing.

But mental illness figures into this. Most mental illness, when I think about it, if they're violent, they are more locally violent. They're not so much picking up a gun and hurting people at a distance. That's not so much. It's only if they're in a massive delusional state like that kid was who was, uh, thought he was the, the Joker. Thank you, Josh. Let's bring in, uh, Shivan. Let me get him in here. Uh,

we spoke yesterday and you're back again today. What's going on? There you are. This is Shivan.. Siobhan, thanks for having me again. You know, first of all, this is just a fantastic discussion and a vital discussion to have. So I thank you and Dr. Lisa for having this. And I'm coming at this from a slightly different perspective, and I hope you will entertain this. So listening to Lisa, you know, I I'm listening to, you know, what is a crisis in the making? And I'm listening to a clinician's social behavioral perspective on what's happening. You know, there's there's something happening to our children. It's not good. It's again, you know, like we discussed yesterday, it's probably tip of the iceberg phenomenon. There's a lot of clinical cases that haven't come to light yet. And this is a train wreck in slow motion.

And one of the things that I have been researching for an article has been sort of the what is happening to dopaminergic transmission and other neurotransmittery pathways in adults in correlation to screen time? And we know at least there's preliminary data in adults saying, you know, there's a complete disordering of the reward pathways in the brain. There's rewiring and something is happening to adult brains where, you know, whether it's from social media clicks, Facebook clicks, or porn clicks, you know be at least in part what's happening to children? Because you know, as well as I do, that the dose-effect relationship is dependent on dose, magnitude of dose, and over time. And I think you already alluded to this, is that, you know, it may be too early to see this in adults. And in children who've been, you know, who've been under duress of the anxiety of, you know, this imminent death, you know, a lot of adults told their children, you know, the pandemic is really bad. You increase your sympathetic nervous system

overdrive and you end up unmasking quicker what would have been probably an inevitable epidemic, if you will, many years into the making. But, you know, is it possible that we unwittingly unmask this by, you know, the duress of what the children went through during the pandemic? I'm not, you're going to have to frame the question a little with a little more clarity. The answer is sort of yes to everything you're saying. I'm not sure I heard the question. So, you know, two parts to the question. One, to be really clear, is I want to ask you and Dr. Lisa, probably, you know, she's an expert on this. Has there been any research into, you know, what's happening with children into Oh, yeah. Into looking at disordered dopaminergic transmission. Disordered dopaminergic transmission is a dicey way to look at it because, you know,

I know we talk about these compulsive behaviors as though it's a simple function of dopaminergic systems. It's so, yes, the answer is yes. There are people looking at these things, trying to think of who is there guys down at emory looking at this there's a lot of concern about just the way we uh let's say nicotine if you're exposed to nicotine under the age of 16 your probability of being able to stop nicotine in your lifetime approach is zero. So there's very definite, a lot of research sort of directed at loss of control over relationship with the screen. But more of the research, I think, is being directed towards things like identity formation, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, body image issues. Obviously, those things are very much tied into what people

are doing online. And of course, that would necessarily also affect multiple systems in the brain, including the dopaminergic system. The system you're talking about, I'm trying to think about a way to describe, to talk about this that could move you forward. The real important part of compulsive behavior for which people lose control is the medial forebrain bundle, right? So it's the ventral tegmental input, most particularly into the shell of the nucleus accumbens, right? That's where we think, amongst other things,

that second messengers in the cells of the nucleus of the nucleus accumbens start to turn on and off some genes that change the relationship with the nucleus accumbens with the outside world. That increases the desire to do it again, so to speak. Ultimately, that's our survival system. I don't believe, I'm of the firm belief that there's no feeling, there's no conscious experience of alteration of the dopaminergic system other than I need to do that again. It's just a do that, do that. Cocaine is the purest example of that phenomenon. As the compulsion goes on, if you, again, use chemicals or particularly alcohol as another sort of example of this, other systems start to kick in, right? So there becomes a sort of a dysphoria system that starts to develop as the alcohol starts being used to make you feel better because being without alcohol now feels bad. So this sort of, I forget what Dr. Hoob used to call it.

It's like a dysphoric system that kicks in. And then there are other systems that start to get activated later on still where the frontal cortex starts shutting down. So there's different phases of these things and I suspect it's the same thing with the screens and exactly what you're looking at and how long you're looking at it and whether it's extremely stimulating like pornography

or just sort of curiosity like looking at certain kinds of clothing people are wearing, whatever it might be. Ultimately, there are no doubt developmental windows that if you're exposed to this behavior and these phenomena things are going to be worse and more difficult to control as you get older so as you as you get as you said uh we're unwittingly exposing something i'm not just sure exactly what that something is i do appreciate you calling in i gotta get some other callers here.

Thank you so much. This is Cornflake Girl. Let's see what that is. Cornflake Girl. I'm hungry. You are. Does that mean you want me to wrap up? No, I just want Cornflake.

Oh, I see. You got to unmute yourself, Cornflake. I did, I did. There you are. Hi. Hey there. I'm so excited to hear yourself, Cornflake. I did. I did. There you are. Hi. Hey there. I, I'm so excited to hear you guys talking about this. I've been looking into this for about three years with our school district.

I would submit to you that this is not about COVID. It's not about social media and it's not about screens entirely. Okay. The school admin, they're using COVID as the excuse. However, I would encourage you guys to read a book called Why Meadow Died about the Parkland shooter. These kids are not being put into the programs that they would traditionally go into because of equity. Schools are putting equity above everything. It's diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. They're not using the multi-tiered systems of

support anymore. They've put social workers multi-tiered systems of support anymore. They've put social workers on the front line with every student. They're doing a social emotional learning program in the service of DEIB, which has social workers doing things like restorative justice circles and essentially group therapy with these kids in the classrooms, and it starts in kindergarten. I think you guys really need to look at what they're doing with social emotional learning and the changes that are being made in the service of DEIB. What do you call socio-emotional learning? That sounds like a euphemism for something else. Well, they call it SEL. For me, I call it untrained group therapy.

I call it psychological manipulation. If you look into CASEL, which is the governing body, the Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning, they will tell you in their webpage that in 2019, they have changed their focus to, they call it a transformative SEL, where they are using social emotional learning as a lever to implement diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. So all of these lessons, the kids will call it circle time. We almost lost my daughter to this. After about three years, we finally pulled her, and she's now in a private school and is thriving without this program. But they were, I'm still kind of, I'm looking into this. They were breaking her with what they were doing. She's very, very agreeable. And they put these kids into situations where they're essentially doing therapy and they ask them to confess things in front of their peers. And much of the focus is about things like racism, homophobia, gender issues. And these girls were starting to

use that as a weapon in about fourth grade. So one day she was crying and said, you know, this one girl wants me to call her tomorrow in the morning, but by noon, she's changed her name to Jupiter. And if I don't call her that, she tells all of the kids that I'm transphobic. And this is all being, they call it the use of generative materials. They're putting things in the classroom that are prompting kids to talk about these things. And they call it circle time, and they have a curriculum. Our school used Second Step, which if you look into that, it's pretty concerning. But they encourage the kids to explore these ideas. And then it's open-ended discussion with a teacher or a social worker.

I think it's causing a lot of psychological problems with the kids. Why are these social workers not trained? They should be trained for group therapy. Why are they not being trained? Are they not licensed? Okay, well, let's talk about the setting. Where does group therapy normally occur? Does it occur in a classroom with eight-year-old kids?

No, not normally. My son was asked to play a game last week where it was called Four Corners, and the social worker would make a statement. And you had to get up with your body and go to the corner that corresponded to you and what you've done. He's in sixth grade. And she would say things like, used a racial slur. And if you had done this, you had to go to one corner. If you had seen this happen to a friend, you had to go to another corner. If this had never happened to you, or you had never seen this, you had to go to another corner. And the kids have to actually

get up with their body and go to that corner. And my son said, some of the kids were lying about it. And the next question she asked was, and he couldn't remember what the word was. He said, it's like a bad thing and it sounds like a question mark sentence. And I said, derogatory? And he said, yes. She said, if you've said something derogatory. And when they asked what that meant, she said, you know, like gay. Yeah.

It's uncanny to me how much this same shenanigans was going on in the 70s and i i believe that it was so grateful to get over the 70s and to the fact that it has come back again 50 years later is just so hard to understand yes what they're doing with these kids is called restorative circles we we had stuff like that when i was in sixth and seventh and eighth grade lots of it you didn't have that too then nah i and i was in public school and most of the kids just thought it was dumb public school back in the day they well that's that's my concern is there's many of the kids think it's dumb my son thinks it's dumb but if you have a young girl who's high in agreeableness traits and she wants to make the social worker happy, and she wants to make her friends happy, and she already has a hard time setting boundaries, and she has a hard time saying no.

No, I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with all. You have problems. And these are the girls who end up cutting themselves and changing their genders. Yeah, that's the problem. And your daughter's doing well now. Yeah, that's the problem. And your daughter's doing well now. Please.

She's doing much, much better. My husband said we have our child back. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm so glad you got through and raised your awareness. Where's our awareness about this? Again, name the book. Please look into SEL. The book. I've got it up on my website, on my computer.

The book again that you recommend? It's called Why Meadow died. It will, it will connect all three of you and your two guests, what you're all saying that will show you this comes from back in 2015, the dear colleague letter, you had Arnie Duncan, Eric Holder and Obama threatening to come down on schools with the justice department if they didn't have equity. And what they do is they say, well, we have to do an equity audit. And if you have significant disproportionality in your

discipline rates, then we're going to take over and investigate. And the whole situation at Parkland will explain how that happened. But the way that our school got around it, because the admin, they wanted to find significant disproportionality. So what they did is they took students of color who had discipline problems and they assigned them the label of severely emotionally disturbed. And that makes them kids with disabilities now. So what we had was significant disproportionality in kids with disabilities being disciplined. And then the money starts flowing in for you to address the equity problem.

Wow. And that's where much of this comes from. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. You bet. Thanks for the time. I appreciate it. Of course.

That was interesting. I couldn't understand half the stuff she was saying. I'm glad you had her break it down. No, I got it. Okay. We are sort of out of time. That's crazy. You're hungry. No, I no i'm fine i'm just i don't know you want me to keep going she had a food name oh no cornflakes no i'm fine um your crew is downstairs waiting for you yeah i figured that'd

be important that was good i'm you know what thank you everybody for joining in on the conversation yeah it's different they're a different topic, different kind of way of looking at these things. We'll be talking about COVID again tomorrow, so we'll be back. Well, but we're trying to learn stuff, trying to examine things, learn things. I mean, our kids are our future. It's scary. You know, when I heard this story, I was just— Jared's story.

Yeah. I mean, I don't typically just say, oh, yeah, come on the show. But he really wanted to get passionate about it. And then I said, well, we haven't had Lisa Strowman on for a while. And she really, I haven't talked to her in so long. I mean, kids, the last time we spoke to her, she said porn was like age 12 or 11. And now it's down to seven. So it's pretty scary.

It's getting worse. And then this interesting sort of, I guess it'd be an administrative overlay that Cornflakes was just telling about. Oh, I know. Very interesting. The bureaucracies are not doing us any good. Caleb, can you put the book up? Why, uh-oh, what was the last name? Why, Meadow.

Why Meadow died? You got that? I'd have to find it. Let me see if I can find it. Okay. Okay. So could we put it maybe on the website later or something? Yes.

Actually, that's what I'll do. I'll put a link on the website right after the show. I'll just type it out on the internet. Okay. He'll put it up. All right. Thank you guys for calling in. Thank you for participating.

Thank you to Dr. Stroman and Jared for coming by here. Tomorrow, we are joined as always with Dr. Kelly Victory. It's our Wednesday show. And we're going to be speaking with Dr. Ryan Cole. A reminder, next Wednesday, we are speaking with the Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joe Lapido. I hope I pronounced his name right. He's really excited. I am very excited about that. There's Dr. Lapido. I just really admire that guy. I hope he remembers. Well, let's see if we can get him.

I really admire that guy. He just has stood up, made some tough calls, stood by them, defended them. He's just doing what he's supposed to do. That's the job. He's making risk-reward analysis and reassessing things constantly. He's doing what he's supposed to do, and it's not supposed to be a political decision in any way, and it has not been, I guarantee you in his case so all right so uh until tomorrow at three o'clock we will see you all then ask dr drew is produced by caleb nation and susan pinsky as a reminder the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care diagnosis or treatment this show

is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me, call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.