Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - "Digital Heroin: How Screens Are Destroying Your Kids." - With Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Ph.D.

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Have you ever wondered what happens to the brains of children who begin using iPads before they speak full sentences? How might their brains develop? Is severe screen usage from a young age contributing to the ADHD and autism spikes that we’re now seeing in children? As the digital world becomes more real, kids can’t seem to get away from screens. They use them for play, as distractions at the dinner table, for communication with family, and in school. Even the parents who said they’d never l...

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That's SAS. And use code Alex. It wasn't until this year that I learned, there are teenagers so addicted to gaming that they don't even stop playing when they have to go to the bathroom. They just urinate and empty Gatorade bottles and line them up under the TV.

The Department of Defense has had to create an entirely new protocol to track child deaths due to parents being distracted by technology. Infants who sit in front of iPad screens from birth are unable to use building blocks because of their screen addictions. When I got my first phone ever,

it was a pink razor in eighth grade. It never occurred to me how fast our technology would progress. Now, anytime I'm out to dinner, there is a child, and I'm talking under five even with their face glued to a screen to keep them distracted. And I'm not a mom yet, but I cannot help but think, how are we allowing kids to be so good at using phones so young, so used to having screens in front of them, and are adults actually making a generation of kids into addicts? I went out to dinner just the other night with my boyfriend in Newport Beach. That's where he lives. And I could barely hear him talk because the family sitting next to us was letting their baby watch a show on an iPad

the entire dinner with the volume up full blast. I was obviously personally irritated, but also I was concerned. Does no one wonder what that does to an infant's brain? So, of course, I got to researching as I do all my parenting questions and found an amazing book about this. And I had to get the author on immediately. He is a psychologist, writer, former Clinton. He is a psychologist, writer, former clinical professor at Stony Brook Medicine and a world-renowned speaker. He specializes in addiction and is one of the top addiction experts in America, specifically when it comes to young people's addictions to tech and screens. And I am so excited to say that he is here today to dive into the digital addiction,

plaguing America's children, what makes tech so addicting, society's lack of purpose, and how it influences young people, how it influences brain development, and what all this ultimately means for the future. Please welcome the author of Glow Kids, Dr. Nicholas Cardaris, to the spillover. You know, Dr. Kay, when I would hear people talk about addiction when it comes to screen time or video games and children, I always thought people were using it loosely like an exaggeration. Oh, my son is addicted to video games. And then I read the stories in your book about some of the clients that you've had before,

like the teenagers who wear diapers when they're gaming, the ones that have brains that are basically so warped from games, they don't even know what is the real world and what is gaming. So I wanted you, if you don't mind, to just share some of these anecdotes with us to really illustrate what true addiction looks like in a child or teenager because some of this stuff was so wild to me. I was like, this can't even be real. Right. Yeah.

Some of it was pretty shocking. And so it's like anything else for addiction, there, there's, a continuum, right? So there's an extreme end with anything. So people can say that I'm addicted to strawberry ice cream or whatever the, you know, passion may be. And people might use that expression sort of metaphorically. But real clinical addiction, the main symptomatic or the main clinical criteria for clinical addiction is it really adversely impacts your daily functioning. So that means like people's addiction, whether it's a substance addiction or a screen addiction or, you know, screen addictions fall under the umbrella of what are called process addictions,

and that tends to be behavioral addictions like gambling or sex or technology. Is the habituation or is the infatuation with that behavior really affecting your quality of life, your social relationships, your school, your work, relationships, your mental and physical health? And so in the extreme end of that, yeah, I mean, I have a treatment program in Austin. We've really treated some people that have had everything from video game psychosis to severe episodes of just what we might call failure to launch with depression and self-harm. And I think I wrote, well, the opening in Glokids that I talked about,

I talked about a young man who really was my first eye-opener to this whole issue of video game addiction and there's much more to tech addiction as well. was a young man who had blurred the lines between reality and his gaming. And he had come into my office as I described in my book, Glow Kids, and he was blinking hard and he didn't know where the game ended and where reality began. And he had been playing World of Warcraft for eight to ten hours a night for several weeks in a row. And essentially, he was in the Matrix and didn't know where he was. And he was psychiatrically hospitalized because it looked like, for lack of

a better way of saying it, video game psychosis. And this was a young man that didn't have a history of mental illness or didn't have any other psychiatric red flags. It seemed to be genuinely a case of gaming-induced reality blurring. And that was 10 or 12 years ago when I first dealt with that young man. And since then, I've dealt with a whole host of young people who have had extreme types of behavior. The other one that I want to, that I like to give as an example, it's in the forward of

the paperback edition of Glow Kids is I was asked, right before the pandemic, I was asked by the Pentagon by the Department of Defense to do a training for the therapist. The military has a mental health staff that gives mental health services for the Air Force, the Army, the various branches of the armed forces. And they asked me to do a training for their mental health staff about gaming addiction. And I said, you know, what's the Army and Air Force want me to do a training for? And the woman who runs their mental health program said quite, what's the word? She was quite embarrassed almost. She said, well, gaming has gotten so, so significant in barracks throughout the country, throughout the world, because essentially these are 18, 19-year-old

teenagers who have come up through gaming culture. They've been gaming so excessively because they can't drink or drug because they get drug tested on. base. So if they're bored or if they have some level of PTSD, they're escaping and gaming. And it's gotten so bad that in the year prior to them asking me to do this training, they had five babies, five Air Force infants who had died in the crib from parental neglect because their fathers have been gaming for multiple days in a row and they collected to feed or attend to their baby. The problem was, and that really knocked my socks off. And I asked her, this happened in the last year in the Air Force and she said, yes, we're trying to keep it quiet because she was embarrassed.

Most of our people tend to have really low rates of child maltreatment. But with gaming in particular, the problem was so significant that the Department of Defense had to create a new designation for the death certificate called death by electronic distraction. And so when I speak at conferences or I talk to people and they're not convinced that this is a real addiction, my retort is if your baby is dying in the crib because you're so obsessed and habituated to your gaming platform that you don't attend to your baby and your baby dies, the walk, sacked a duck and quacks like a duck. That's a pretty severe form of an addiction. Yeah. And speaking of that. Okay, so the boy that you're that you described who couldn't tell, he was in a video game psychosis, couldn't tell what was real and what was fake. His mom was a single mother, right, who had asked for your help because she noticed something was wrong with her son.

Okay, this story floored me because the mother asks for your help. You say he needs psychiatric help. They put him in a facility or whatever, right? He gets out and then she gets mad at you, correct, for saying to the son, you need to throw all your games away. because you're addicted to them and you need to, you know, go outside, play sports, hang out with friends. And the mother got mad at you because, number one, she was a single mom who was like, you don't understand how expensive these games are.

I had to work extra hours or whatever to afford these games. And then said, and also it is dangerous for my son to be outside. Why are you suggesting for him to be outside? And so she didn't even want to throw the games away even after he was clearly addicted and experiencing signs of psychosis. that's exactly right that's a good detailed reading of that anecdote because that was my other big takeaway not only did this kid have a matrix-like experience with gaming but the parent and by the way the young man himself advocated he said help me to break free from this I want to get rid of the games

how do I do it so so I was you know encouraging him and I you know we don't always want pats in the back but I thought that the mother would be grateful and when I got as as you mentioned an angry mother twofold, right? Games are expensive and now you want them to go out into this dangerous neighborhood and you know,

truth could tell they weren't, they weren't a moderately dangerous neighborhood. I would consider it it was a suburban neighborhood that had some level of you know,

I don't want to even call it gang activity. Yeah. But yeah, but she felt her son was safer indoors regardless of what he was engaging in and what was happening to him indoors. So it was surprising. It was surprising to share that reaction.

Is that a pattern that see with a lot of parents with kids who are really addicted to screen time is that they just feel like, well, this has to be safer. Yeah, they're on their video game or they're on their tablet for hours and hours a night or on social media, but at least they're not outside. I know what they're doing. They're safe in their room. And so parents are just rationalizing that the screen is kind of a babysitter and ultimately they're safer. That's exactly right. Alex, he had the nail right on That's exactly right. When I do a formal presentation at mental health conferences, and I go through the history of how we got here, how we got to the, let's call it to the screen

kid and how we went from being, you know, outdoor children to indoor kids. And a turning point was 1979. And in 1979, it was one of the most high-profile child abductions in the United States, Aton Pates in New York City, was he was certainly not the first kid to be abducted. If you really studied child abductions, gone back over a couple of hundred years. There were horrific cases of child abductions. And in fact, according to FBI statistics, this is the safest era for children to be living in in terms of child abductions. But what happened in 1979 and 1980 was it was the advent of CNN. CNN and Ted Turner were unveiled in 1980. And so now you have the 24-7 news medium. And so you had a high-profile child abduction. And

the new news formats, which, you know, before people forget, you know, and I'm of a certain generation where I remember the before times before cable. You had, you know, you have the three half hour evening news shows. So you got all your news in 30 minutes. You had, you know, Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw. And that was it. Once CNN came around and then all the other 24-7 use cables, they had to fill content. And there's an old saying in journalism, if it bleeds, it leads. So a lot of these news shows started really scaring the hell out of parents. So now all of a sudden, it was an abducted child anywhere in the country was going to be part of a multiple-day news cycle.

And Aiton Pates was that first young man that got so much national notoriety for being abducted that parents became increasingly frightened. And so over the course from 1980 to 2000, 2010, you started seeing parents who started having shorter and shorter leashes on their kids. we were no longer son up to send down children like I was raised, where just be home for dinner. And that's increasingly gone away because exactly like you said, parents felt like, well, if my kids in their bedroom, they're safe.

And now we know that they're not safe because essentially the computer is a portal. And it's a portal to some very, not just gaming and social media platforms, but chat rooms and predatory sites and all sorts of other unsavory ways. of discovery. Yeah. And the little boy you're talking about the case. That was the first kid to ever go on a milk carton, I believe. Yeah.

That's right. That's excellent. Very good. That's right. He was, that's right. And they never found his body. And there's one person in jail now for his murder.

But it was, it was sociologists have pointed to that as sort of a cultural moment where we shifted as a society to being much more fearful. And it was the intersection of that abduction. and 24-7-use cycles. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So how are we seeing brain development affected, in particular, in millennials and Gen Z, compared to generations like Gen X, who during the start of the 80s, they would have been like the latchkey kids coming home from school.

Their parents were both working. Their parents were divorced. They kind of took care of themselves. But then it was late 80s, more early 90s. We started seeing all of these parents, like you said, becoming more helicopter parents. and then giving your kids screens, letting them grow up with screens. So how are kids' brains developing differently now? Yeah, so we can begin to look at it, I think, in two buckets and two different ways that we sort through it.

So there's clinical impacts, right, that are, by clinical impacts, I mean depression and ADHD and anxiety. Those are clinical effects that are happening. I'll explain how the modern screen immersion leads to those, you know, an increase in things like depression. And then there are neurophysiological impacts, how it actually changes the wiring and the physical structure of the brain. Now, some of this was the most fascinating. And recently, when I say recently, over the last eight to nine years, we have now black and white fMRI brain imaging studies that show that screen time impacts the brain in exactly the same way as chronic substance addiction. And primarily, that's one of two ways. Screen time, there's a part of the brain

And it was Dr. Bartsockis, was a neurologist at UCLA that did fMRI studies on the brain on chronic substance addicts for decades, decades ago. And we have a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex right behind our forehead, which is our executive functioning. That's our decision making. That's our consequential thinking. That controls our impulsivity. And what they found with chronic substance addiction was that that part of the brain begins to shrink over time. it actually physiologically atrophies. And it's called the DGM, the dense gray matter of the prefrontal cortex gets smaller.

So a person who has a compromised prefrontal cortex is much more impulsive, much poorer decision making. And that correlates to a whole host of problems, which is why addicts have a hard time moderating or not being addicts because it's a double whammy. The further down a substance addiction you go, the more compromised your brain becomes to make good decisions. So it's kind of a catch-22.

Similarly, now we've had at least a dozen studies that showed these same effects with excessive screen time. And people had a hard time understanding this, that something that you weren't ingesting, because people could, I guess, understand if you were ingesting a substance, it can change your physiology. But now we understood that watching something was changing our neurophysiology. and that DGM, the dense gray matter of the pre-pupil cortex, shrank as a result of excessive screen time. So now you had kids that were much more compromised in their executive functioning,

impulsivity, language, decision-making. And sure enough, there was a study from JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association, Pediatrics, the pediatric magazine, peer-reviewed magazine that came out two years ago that looked at the screen impacts of children between the ages of two and five, cognitive delays, cognitive impacts for kids who had more than an hour of screen time without parental supervision, who was creating developmental issues. And so there's a whole host of studies that show that you're going to be pronged, that essentially what we've done for this generation of screen kids.

If you were raised, if you were basically one of those kids that had a tablet dropped into the crib or one, two, three years old, you were given the smartphone or any kind of device. We were developmentally stunting that child, right? So we were priming them for impulsivity. We were affecting their cognition. And one of the things that gets really underappreciated is not just the ADHD impulse piece, but the ability for kids to be creative. Yes. If you're a parent, the best thing that you can do for your child developmentally is to allow them to be board. A bored child has to then develop what's called an active imagination and creating that

imagery creates neurosynaptic muscles of creativity. When their kid creatively plays and plays make believe, that's really healthy for a child. But children don't play make believe anymore because their imagery is now already pre-baked for them and sort of drilled into their heads. And so that part of their brain that creates an imagines atrophies. So when I work with teenagers or young adults or Jen Ziers, and I could tell right away when they were given, you know, if they were a high screen kid, if they were given the tablet at age two or three, they have absolutely no creativity.

They can't draw you a picture or tell you a story or write a poem. There's sort of this shoulder shrugging, apathetic, overly stimulated, to get underly curious population cohort. And it's really sad to see because we're not doing our kids' service. And part of it, and I'm going to say this and shut up, it's we as the adults in the room drank the Kool-Aid that somehow we're in a high-tech society and our kids will be behind if we don't drop a tablet in the crib or give them a tablet by their kindergarten in first grade, they're going to be behind.

And so we want to keep up with the Joneses. And yet what we've done is we've stunted our children because Sergei Brin and Larry Page, the Google Boys, Montessori students. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon King, a Montessori student. All these brilliant minds and technology didn't have tech when there were kids up until age of 13 or 14. I've shared quite a bit about my volunteer work as a court-appointed special advocate with kids in foster care. And part of what I do is spending quality time with the kids on my case and getting to know them. So I know how to advocate for what they want in court and also personalize them to the judge. And I have two sisters right now.

The oldest just turned 11. And I'm always looking for creative and special activities to do with them. And she happens to love art. And she's very good at drawing in particular. I heard about classy artist box. And so I had to sign her up right away. She gets this whole box, an art class basically in a box with four projects and lessons each month tailored to her age or skill level. And each classy artist box project has a corresponding video tutorial.

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And I want to get into that because there was some stuff you said in your book that I was like, oh my gosh, that is a bomb drop. Okay. Is there a direct link between the ADHD epidemic that we're seeing in kids who grew up with screens, in autism in kids that grew up with screens? Yeah, unquestionably. Unquestionably. So the ADHD is direct, and anybody who wants to look that up, it's Dr.

Christakis, Demetri Christakis is the head of the University of Washington Pediatrics unit. He's the main guy that's done all the ADHD and screen time research, and the screen time research in ADHD is undisputable. It started way back in 1990 with television screen time. we knew through Dr. Bart Christakis' research that for, okay, so the key ADHD window is the ages of two and six. That's when a child develops their ability to attend, to pay attention. And if during that key developmental window, a kid in 1990 or, you know, 2022, for every hour in front of a television set, increase the rates of ADHD by 10%.

So if you had a three-year-old in front of a TV for three hours, they had a 30 percent. higher rate of ADHD. Now, they did that research again in 2010 and later on with interactive screens like tablets and Chromebooks and iPads. And the effect was exponentially higher. How much higher? Something like to the magnitude of two or three times higher. Oh, my gosh. And because, and here's the, here's what, here's the problem. My generation, I'm of a certain age. We, when we were raising our kids, I think the mistake, that we made was that we conflated, we, yeah, we conflated modern screens with television. Most of us grew up on TV. We felt that they were fairly, you know, and there was some

panic around television back in the 70s and 80s and violence on TV, but for the most part, it was viewed as fairly innocuous, but modern screens are different than old screens. This isn't just a smaller TV. It's a more interactive and immersive digital platform. So when we were watching TV as kids growing up and there was a TV in the living room and we were 10 feet away from it, we were a passive viewer of a digital experience. Now our children are interactive participants and they're immersed in this digital landscape. And so it has a much more powerful stimulating and high arousal effect than watching TV used to. So the ADHD effect is more pronounced. Essentially what we're doing is we're habituating our kids to.

being overly stimulated. Because if you watch any kind of, you know, if you watch an infant or a kid who gets hypnotized by, you know, the smart bone or anything that they're watching, they get habituated to having to be, to have all the bells and whistles to keep them entranced. Now you take away the device and their attention wanders because now we've habituated them to needing the belts and whistles to be able to focus. So that's what we're doing. We're not engaging them in a healthy way.

where we're habituating them to need high stimulation to be able to focus. What about autism? And that's why we're seeing. So it's interesting. One of my colleagues, Dr. Dunkley, who is also a screen, she's an adolescent psychiatrist in Los Angeles. She wrote the book, How to Reset Your Child's Brain, and how to do a digital detox. She's found that she's seen over a thousand kids over the last 10 years.

And she's found that over 70% of them, she won't diagnose her Medicaid, any child or teenager until they've done a four or six week digital detox until they unplug. And she's found that up to 70% of their presenting symptoms go away just by just by unplugging. So that's mood disorders, personality disorders. And she says, and yes, even spectrum and autism disorders that she's found that even in autism, if you catch, if you unplug them early enough, you see that effect or the present the presentation of autism dissipate. Now, I do think there's real or organic autism. But I think we're either exacerbating it or causing it in certain instances by overly stimulating at age and appropriate stages of development for some infants.

Yeah. But Dr. Kay, parents are told by their schools that, you know, traditional book learning doesn't work anymore. We need to use more technology in the classroom. Are parents being lied to? I think the school administrators are being lied to. And then I think we're drinking that Kool-Aid. I speak at a lot of education conferences, a lot of national education conferences. And my question to administrators is, show me the one study, show me one singular study that screens in a classroom or some kind of screen learning is beneficial. And there's not one study that shows a tablet for a first grader or third grader leads to better pedagogical outcomes in eighth grade or high school. There's not one study.

And when you ask the superintendent to justify the investment in technology, they stutter and they stammer and they say something like, well, Apple says it's great for the kids. Well, of course Apple says it's great for the kids. I wrote an op-ed for Time magazine in 2016 called, I think it was called the digital hoaxer. But basically, education tech, at that point, at that time, pre-COVID was a $60 billion a year industry. and there's a big financial agenda to get our kids. And essentially our schools have become our digital drug dealers. They're the gateway drug for a lot of our kids. A lot of parents are trying to be tech cautious,

and then they get undermined by perhaps well-intentioned but misinformed school districts that think, well, if District A is giving a Chromebook to an eighth-grader, well, we'll give it in sixth grade and fifth grade and fourth-grade. And there's this race to give kids screen. time earlier and younger and earlier and younger when the research clearly shows age and appropriate technology is harmful. And all we have to do is look at Finland. Finland has the best educational outcomes every year. They're in the top one, two or three of the best performing countries. And their minister of education said no individualized devices for our kids. They do have

at the high school level, they have smart boards, they have some technology in the classroom, but they don't have the rocket in the pocket. They don't have the distracting phone or iPad because it's a distraction. And so it doesn't lead to better educational outcomes. And it increases the possibility of clinical disorders like depression and anxiety. We can get into that whole part of why does a kid in front of a screen get more depressed than other kids. What is it about screen time? That creates depression.

We can get into that as well. Yeah, yeah. Go for it. it. Well, so before COVID, we had in 2019, we had the worst psychiatric metrics for young people that we've ever had in recorded history. We had the worst rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicidality, overdose, ADHD. Everything was spiking. And the interesting part of it was Alex that this was at a period of time that we were increasing the pharmaceutical solution. So we had increased antidepression medication by 300% over the last 20 years. So we were throwing a lot of meds at the problem, and yet

depression kept spiking. And so the narrative that myself and some other colleagues believe is the one of the, well, the two main causes of depression that's not, if it's not organic, is lifestyle So being sedentary is as a driver of depression. So we know that screen time makes people a lot more sedentary. Like just sitting around. I hate to say it, obese kids who play e-sports and don't go outside and play anymore are going to be much more sedentary. So they're sitting around kid.

It's going to be much more likely because they're not raising their serotonal levels. They're not oxygenating their brain. So they're more likely to be depressed. Plus the other main driver of health is connection, genuine connection, face-to-face friendships and connection. And so, and there was a guy called Dr. Erlardi who did all this global depression research. And he had found that the healthiest cultures were indigenous. The Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, tribes in South American, Africa. He studied depression for 20 years. And it was these primitive cultures who were pre-industrial had really hard lives. These were

not cultures that like had an easy life. They struggle for daily day to their survival. But they had zero, I mean, not low rates of depression. They had zero rates of depression. And Dr. Lardi was really fascinated by this. And he found that the four immunizing factors were, they were much more physically active. They were much more cohesive as a community, so much more close connections and relationships. They were outdoors and in nature more. And they had higher omega-3 diets. If you look at what the digital age has done to us as a culture, adults and kids, especially kids, sedentary and cohesive. So now we're this sedentary screen-based, non-face-to-face interacting species,

and that's not the way that we were evolutionarily hardwired. Yeah. Where our social species and technology gave us the false promise of connectivity, but what it did was it isolated us more because it doesn't give us connectivity in the face-to-face format that we needed. And that's why. And then COVID was just a nuclear bomb and all of that with quarantines and increased screen time. And we saw that.

COVID was a perfect beta test to show, okay, let's see what happens to society when we double the screen time. And what we saw during COVID, screen time doubled and depression tripled. Yep. So what is the educational industrial complex? And what do screens have to do with that in our kids? Yeah. Well, as I said before, there's a financial. agenda. There are certain folks that are called

entrepreneurs, people that are trying to capitalize on what they see as the new, really robust and potentially gold-laden market. And Rupert Murdoch was one of those folks. Rupert Murdoch has never been confused with someone who was concerned about the education of young people, but he saw

an opportunity. So people like Rupert Murdoch created a company a billion dollar investment called Amplified that tried to get every kid in America a tablet, you know, a chicken in every pot and a tablet in every classroom. And, you know, so they were called education disruptors. And really the research shows that there's no better, all the education research shows that the best educational experiences is the Socratic Circle, an educated person at the front

of the class that engages in the question and answering back and forth circle dynamic rather than screen-based learning where you're answering a bunch of questions and then going on to the next module, which is not the most effective way to learn. There was a book by two teachers that came out recently called Screen Schooled, and I've been on a couple of panels with them,

great guys, and they talked about the Googlification of the classroom. And the Googlification of the classroom is a dynamic where it kind of works in the elementary levels. Google is great. to look up stuff, right? It's a great search engine to find out facts. But facts isn't education nor wisdom. And when you just are Google dependent,

you don't get what they called the rich tapestry, the context of the facts. So a teacher helps connect the dots for you. So, you know, the war of 1812 is a fact. But what caused it? What were the historical antecedents? What were some of the, what was the flavor of the war of 1812?

isn't as readily spewed out by Google. And so what they found was that as kids aged up, and they got into middle school and high school, they became less able to process and infer information and less able to critically think because they were able to recall data, but not an analysis of that data. If you're caught up on my daily show Popolitics, then you'll remember a week or so ago,

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moinkbox.com slash spillover. That's M-O-I-N-K-box.com slash spillover. Wow. Okay, and you talked about, too, in the book, that there was a Project Veritas video that really exposed the educational industrial complex. What was that video? Because my, because cute servatives,

who I call people that listen to the spillover, cute servatives love Project Veritas, so they'll be interested in this. Yeah, so when it happened before Common Core, standardized textbooks had to be done state by state. And this is part of the gold brush of entrepreneurs. It was very tedious for the three major textbook companies to create a textbook for each of the 48 to 50 states at that point

because every state had different standards. And so the Common Core created a national standard for almost all 50 states except for two or three. And so now this is viewed as a wonderful opportunity to create one sort of digital platform that could have been really ideal for for recurring revenue, for sales to school districts. It was a money opportunity. And Project Veritas spoke to high level people in the publishing, in the book publishing world.

And essentially, when they were asked about what's best for kids, kind of laughed at that idea and said, this is all about money, you know, lipstick on the pig. And we're just going to kind of keep cranking out the next iteration of product. And it's all about the product and selling the product. It has nothing to do that this is the executive speaking. They could care less about kids' educational outcomes. They cared about sales and selling the product, which, you know, should it, I guess we've all suspected that in a similar way that we all kind of thought that big tech had an agenda. But then, you know, a documentary like the social dilemma pulls back the curtain and shows.

is here's some defectors from big tech telling us that we've been addicted not by accident, but by design. Yes. And that there's really smart people that are creating algorithms to habituate us to their platforms. And I just finished writing. I've been working for the last year and a half on the follow up to Glow Kids. There's a book called Digital Madness that's coming out in September. And now, yeah.

So when I wrote Glow Kids, the heavy lifting back then was to even create awareness or an understand it, we're convinced people that, yes, you can become addicted to your devices. And now the larger narrative is, what is it done to our species, this love affair that we have with technology? And so why are we seeing this polarization in our politics? Why are we seeing a real spike in not just, excuse me, not just things like depression, but in my treatment program in Austin, we're seeing a big spike in personality disorders, borderline personality disorder. Dr. Kay, what could you say to the spike in personality disorders? It almost seems trendy on TikTok. Every single time I scroll on TikTok, somebody else is saying, oh, I have multiple personalities.

They're talking about their altars and all this. It's like, okay, this seems like an explosion of personality disorders all of a sudden. That's what the new book is about. Essentially. now social media has become a digital social contagion. So COVID was a viral contagion. It's spread by viral means. Now we have psychiatric digital contagions. And so because we're a social species and because we get influenced and shaped by our social world, now most of us, especially the younger folks, inhabit a digital social environment. And what you mentioned is exactly so TikTok Tourette's I don't know, have you, do you see about TikTok Tourette's? So we're seeing these really popular social media platforms spreading psychiatric disorders.

So TikTok Tourette's dissociative disorder, multiple personality, what we used to call so DID. So what you're seeing is you have a handful of really successful influencers who are now being watched. The Tourette's three influencers had over five billion views and all of the, a sudden in the last year and a half, you've had adolescent females, hundreds of which were coming down with Tourette's disorder. And their pediatricians were scratching their heads because, first of all, Tourette's disorder tends to be predominantly male, not female. And second of all, it usually happens in early childhood. And it tends to be the dominant form of tick tends to be facial tics, not gesticulating arm gestures. And so what they found was that these hundreds of young women that were

coming down with Tourette's disorders and adolescents, they were all following these Tourette's influencers. Oh, my gosh. And then the one was British, and so she had a British accent. So some of her followers started cursing and having Tourette's tics, verbal ticks with a British accent. Get out of here. So, so, yes. And by the way, I studied the influencers, the Tourette's influencers videos.

They didn't even have Tourette's syndrome. This was performative. Oh, my gosh. Because let's face it, who gets the coin of the realm on social media is what? Followers. And what gets the most followers is the most over-the-top behavior. So now we have a performance Olympics of the most outrageous behavior. So now whether it's psychiatric disorders like, so now you have dissociative people as an example.

Real authentic multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative disorder, It used to be on average three or four alter identities, you know, Sybil and three phases of being kids who had been sexually abused in childhood who couldn't handle that reality would develop an alter identity. It's a process reality. They didn't have dozens and over 100 altars. So now you're having these popular DID, and they're called systems, with over 100 identities, and they're the whole LGBTIQI spectrum. So you'll have a host body.

They're called hosts now. A host system will have a 40-year-old black lesbian female, a 20-year-old white male, a 35-year-old bisexual Asian. And so they embody. And to me, so their followers now are beginning to also demonstrate signs of dissociative disorder. But, doctor, the people that are saying they have all these altars that are, you know, I've got a black female and LGBTQ and whatever. those people that are experiencing those altars, are they themselves actually white?

Typically? Typically. See, that's what's interesting to me. And I have talked about this a lot. One of my favorite guests that we've had on the spillover was Abigail Shrier, who I'm sure you're familiar with. And she talks about the social contagion in regards to young females and the transgender movement.

And I'm like, okay, all these kids are being told you want to be anything besides white, straight and white. the worst thing that you could be. And so I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're getting on TikTok, they're seeing these people with lots of followers that have things like Tourette's or whatever, or they're like, oh, I could have multiple personalities. And even though I'm white, what if all of my other personalities are people of color or some sort of minority group? Then, therefore, I can somehow be marginalized and be cool. That's right. So now we've made in our effort to support marginalized identities. We've not just been supportive, but we've idealized these identities. And I think

now we've made them, I think you're, you hit the nail exactly on the head. And that's what I say in one of my chapters. I do mention the trans moment as well. The prevalence of the trans of young people who identifies trans has spiked so significantly that defies the normal way of things. And I'm convinced it's because exactly the dynamic that you've said is going on. So being trans and And really sort of, you know, kids, let's face it, we all go through some general adolescent confusion. Most of us go through some level of kind of feeling out who we are in our identities when we're in high school. That tends to be the age of exploration with your sexuality and with everything else. But now, as you've said, there is this amplification of voices.

And they're, like you said, the coin of the realm is performative. It's who gets the most, makes the most noise. So a lot of really popular trans, social influencers who get hundreds of millions of views, dissociative influencers who get hundreds of millions of views, you can't help but not be shaped by some of those. So if you're, and it may be conscious and it may be subconscious. So the young person may not be saying, oh, okay, I'm going to be like X on the screen, but they're being shaped on a subtle and subconscious level as well as oftentimes maybe a conscious level.

So we've made it cool. We've made it the norm. We've normalized it in the way that it's the ideal, in the way that we've also, I hate to say it, but we've marginalized what used to be the mainstream. And so we've demonized that so much to the point of this. I think a lot of self-hate going on and sort of looking for alternate ways of being. The other thing that I think social media has done is we, all understand now there is no more nuance and conversation between people with different

opinions or different sides of the aisle, both politically and socially. I was a university professor for 10 years, and it used to be a wonderful thing to debate somebody who had a different perspective than you did, right? That's how we learned and we grew. We debated each other. We had conversations. What I think has happened, and I write about this in the new book, Digital Madness, is if you understand. how media shapes our brains and the structure of our brains to process information, well, think about what algorithm-fueled social media is. It's polarity-driven because we know that engagement is fueled by emotional reactivity. So, you know, if you lean left, you're going to

get an amplification or an extremification of left content. And if you lean right, you're going to get the same thing on the right side. You're not going to get moderate content. You're not going to get a thoughtful critical analysis, you're going to get the loudest extreme voices on either side of the equation. What I'm hypothesizing that's done is that it's shaped the brains of young people who are developing into binary polarity buckets that they could only see things in black and white, that they can only see things, they don't see the gray. And if you look at the main symptom of borderline personality disorder is black and white thinking. Holy cow.

So it's called dichotomous thinking. You can't do nuanced thinking. So there's huge spike that we have in my clinics where everyone's got borderline personality disorder now. So what I'm writing in my book is I think because real borderline personality disorder is, A, very dangerous, very hard to treat and they have very high suicide rates. It is a real thing, but we're seeing numbers now. But I don't think it's the real article, just like I don't think it's real. transgenderism and just like I don't think it's real dissociative disorder. I think so I'm calling it

pseudo-bPD, which is social media shape because what we've seen is when we unplug these people from social media for six weeks, their borderline symptoms go away where a real borderline person doesn't get cured after six weeks of being unplugged. So we're seeing pseudo-dissociative disorder, pseudo-transgenderism, pseudo-bPD that are social media shape. But the problem is, is it's such a third rail. I know that I'm going to be called transphobic for even speculating that, just like Dr. Whitman at Brown, who did the study about rapid onset gender dysphoria, got called, you know, transphobic, because she pointed out, the fact that, hey, these adolescents and females who all

of a sudden this huge number, which defied prior statistical analysis, are now identifying as biologically born females are now identifying as males, and this transition tends to come after an increase in their social media consumption, is there something going on with the social media consumption and how it's impacting or shaping the development and the identity formation of these young people? And I have to say absolutely. So now we've come five years ago, I'm writing a book about video games can be addicting and all that stuff. Now how is it shaping the fabric of our identity of our society, of our young people, and how is it driving our mental health epidemic? Because a lot of those young people now, we're a huge spike in suicidality overdose. Because if

you're not, first of all, if you're not comfortable in your own skin and you're confused about your identity, you're much more likely to hurt yourself. But second of all, we're creating such a fragility culture. We're not teaching character development, critical thinking, those life skills, which I talk about in my latest book, I talk about the antidote to the modern is the ancient. And I'm a big, I've studied ancient philosophy and Socrates played on the classics that being able to critically think

as an antidote to some of this new fluid subjectivity that can be so overwhelming to people. But what's happening is we're creating such a fragility of young people. So I've been helicopter parent did by parents who haven't allowed me to scrape my knee or get a speed bump and have to get up and work through things. I haven't developed a sense of resilience. Now I've been bombarded by shaping messaging from social media. Now I graduate from university or from college and I've got to go into the workplace

and now I can't handle life on life's terms so that I'm going to be more depressed, reactive, suicidal. I've seen more 20-year-olds in an existential crisis or midlife crisis than I'd ever seen in the 30 years that I've been working as a psychologist. We have young people who are just so empty and fragile and despondent. And it's obvious to me what's going into that equation. And many people are afraid to speak about it because it's not politically or professionally. beneficial to call certain things what they may be looking like. Well, Dr. Kay, we are so just freaking proud to know you and know that there are people like you out there who are willing to do some critical thinking and, you know, go into these

kind of controversial subject matters and call things out that a lot of other doctors now are being scared to talk about. I know that some parents are going to be thinking, okay, doctor, I hear your concerns. You know, I limit my kids screen time to one hour a day. It's just one hour. I can't take away all their screen time and then be the only kid at school who's not on screens. You know, my kids are, I really watch them. They're not going to become addicted. Is that good enough? It's all relative. I don't think there's a magic number. I always, this is the number one question I could ask is how much screen time should I limit my kid to? And it's not an hour, two hours, or three hours or 30 minutes. It really depends because all kids are different.

So some kids are going to be much more impacted and much more dysregulated or much more adversely impacted in less time than others. So what you really should be looking for as a parent is what seems to be the sweet spot for your child. You know, if your child seems to get really reactive, really disregulated after 30 minutes of screen time, maybe 30 minutes is the limit. If it's an hour, if it's an hour and a half, what we should be doing is having conversations with that. our children explaining the digital landscape, we should be shown our kids the documentary, the social dilemma. What I find really young people react to is they don't like being manipulated. So they don't like parents telling them what to do, but they certainly don't like big tech manipulating them. And so when a 14-year-old or a 16-year-old watches the social dilemma,

and they get told, so what you thought was free choice, you're just being used. You're just, being manipulated, you're just a consumer to them. In fact, they're just data mining your information. That's when I've seen young people that I've worked with being like, what? I don't want to be just that. I want to own my own autonomy back. And so I have 15-year-old identical twin boys, by the way, so I'm in the fight as well as a parent. And I try to be as tech cautious, but we live in the world. So we're not going to be Amish. I mean, we could be, right, but we're not going to be homage um so so i have as many conversations with them as i can you know they just got phones they're ninth graders in school i got them a gab phone which isn't Wi-Fi compatible it's so they can text

it looks like a smartphone they can text they can um listen to music but it they're not going to be gaming on it and they're not going to be going down other digital portals that my wife and i frankly aren't comfortable with and they understand why you know both i keep both of my boys busy in sports, music, and academics. And we travel a lot, you know. And so if we can keep our kids filled with good things, hopefully, then they're less thirsty for some of the bad things. What are some of the telltale signs that a child is struggling with tech addiction and

it's like danger zone? A parent needs to get involved right away. And then what are those crucial steps if a parent suspects that they have a glow kid? as you would say. Yeah, I mean, so in that continuum, so you might have kids that you're seeing our, so the first things to look at is, are the academics beginning to suffer, sleep deprivation, are they staying up late? So do they seem sleep dysregulated?

Are there academic suffering? Other shifts or changes in their personality or their moods, which, by the way, this reflects substance addiction as well. These are similar. So that's typically what we begin to look for. One of the other main telltale signs is they stop engaging in the other things they used to be engaged in. So if that child used to play a musical instrument or be involved in a club or a team or some other activity, and all of a sudden they quit all those things and now they're just involved more.

You know, changes in, I will say changes in personality and identity. I think right now kids, I'm very adamantly against, again, age and appropriate exposure to kids to topics that they're too impressionable for, everything from, like we've said, transgender ideas. And I'm from New York City. I was raised in a very open part of New York City where it was really progressive and quite honestly see the downsides of age and appropriate exposure to children. And you cannot tell a six-year-old he can, he or she can choose a gender. These concepts are beyond their understanding. We never used to do anything like that. And that doesn't make anybody transphobic or anything else.

It just makes people understand child development. But I think so being careful and moderating things like that. If the extreme ends of this spectrum is when you start having violent or really disres, regulated episodes with screen time or, you know, I've worked with a lot of families where they were afraid of the children. The children started getting really physically aggressive. That tends to be the tipping point for treatment for a lot of folks is now I can't physically remove my child from their screen time or from their gaming platform. They've assaulted me. They've punched holes in the wall. They've, they've stolen my credit card.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I've seen a lot of physical aggression that can happen. And so that's, you know, if it's gone that far, your child needs treatment at that point. It's sort of beyond the, let's have a conversation once a month. Now we have to get some level of professional treatment. And there's limited options. Not a lot of therapists know how to work with this issue, but there are treatment programs. Very few, but that also treat this issue when it's crossed over into a more significant level. And that was the number one thing.

When I wrote low kids, I had literally thousands of emails from families. that said we went to our local therapist, we tried to get some help for our child, and we were either gaslighted. They said that we were the problem or they didn't understand this issue. And thank you for giving us a voice to understand that, you know, there are some kids, not, I won't say all or most, but a good percentage of kids were getting really affected. And nobody was listening to the parents who were saying,

this isn't my child anymore. The book is called Glow Kids by Dr. Nicholas Carderis. And the new book comes out in September. Remind us what that one's called again. Digital Madness. And it's same publisher of St. Martin's Press. And it's coming out September 13th available on Amazon for advance order now. But it's, it really looks at everything we just talked about with the new landscape of TikTok and social media really driving some of the, well, the subtitle is how social media is driving our mental health crisis.

Fascinating. I cannot wait. I will be pre-ordering that. Thank you so much, Dr. Kay, for coming on the spillover. Thank you for having me on as a guest. Thank you. Keep on doing the great work that you're doing. As soon as this interview was over, I went and pre-ordered Dr. Kradaris's new book that comes out in September. It's digital madness, how social media is driving our mental health crisis and how to restore our sanity. Any episode where I feel like I got a little brain workout is an episode that really makes the favorite list for me. All that talk, you know, that we did about the educational industrial, complex, how screens are literally stunting child's brain development and contributing to ADHD

problems was excellent. If you have a child that's a glow kid, it is not too late to change course. And if you aren't a parent yet like me, I hope this episode was just as valuable and fascinating for you. There is a lot of heart and soul that goes into each episode of The Spillover and Finding Guests. The one thing every week I need from you is to please leave a five-star review. Tell your friends to subscribe to this show. Next week is an absolutely wild. wild episode and interview. And as soon as I recorded it, I said, oh, this is my new favorite episode. The Spillover is back next Thursday at 9 p.m. Pacific, midnight Eastern on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to Poplittics on YouTube so that you can watch the interviews too.

I'm Alex Clark, and this is The Spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.