The Highwire with Del Bigtree - AMERICA’S KIDS IN CRISIS

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Psychiatrist and author Dr. Stefani Reinhold joins Del for a sobering discussion on how psychiatry’s drug-first model is failing America’s kids. From SSRIs to gender blockers, she explains how medicating away confusion masks deeper issues and may be fueling today’s youth mental health crisis. A must-watch conversation for every parent.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Last week, we touched on a topic that was affecting all of our lives. It's something that we all shake our heads. Sometimes we even get tears in our eyes when we think about it. But there's one part of it that seems to be a pattern that is just very strange when we see these stories. Well, take a look and see if you've seen this yourself. The shooter, Robin Westman, formerly Robert Westman, who legally changed his name in 2020 to be identified as female. The shooter identified as Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old female who identifies as transgender. Another shooting that killed five people at a Colorado nightclub.

22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich. The defense says Aldrich identifies as non-binary. The Denver shooter was trans. The Aberdeen shooter was trans. The Nashville shooter was trans. The Georgia shooter was trans. The Philadelphia shooter was trans. The Evaldi shooter was trans. The Colorado shooter was trans. And now the Minnesota shooter was trans. When it comes to these shooters, there's clearly an issue with radical trans ideology that we are seeing in the United States. There is something in the water

with the untouchable nature of the trans identity and what appears to be a kind of underlying mental instability that tends to disproportionately give rise to these school shootings. I think we need some changes of policies because when this sort of thing happens, we need to know what psychiatric drugs, if any, was the person on.

and which medical professionals was this person consulting? We need to know these things. Obviously, in the world that we live in today, this is one of those third rail topics. I want to be clear. I'm not here to disparage any group of people that's out there, but I am going to ask the questions that are troubling my heart, and I think they're troubling yours. At the heart of this is when we looked it up, the headlines say that roughly 3% of the teenage population in high school are identifying as trans, yet they're making up an incredibly disproportionate number of those

that are committing school shootings. Now, I'm not putting this on trans people, but I wanted to ask some questions in an area I really do not understand, and to help me with that is psychiatrist, Dr. Stephanie Reinhold. Thank you for coming in today. Yeah, good to see you, Del. Yeah. I assume that you're going to be good at handling the sensitivity of this topic. But here's where I want to start.

On the high wire, we've had some D-transitioners on that are struggling, feeling like they were misled by psychiatry. When we do shows like that, lots of people write in that have a similar complaint that my child is questioning their identity or questioning their sexuality. And I cannot find any sort of holistic approach. Every psychiatrist I go to is telling me, no, they're in the wrong body. they need to immediately start gender blocking drugs. Isn't it possible they're just confused?

Isn't it possible another way to work through this? And they cannot find anyone in psychiatry that will take an approach is maybe the child has other issues and they're just putting it here. And so my question to you is why is that the case in psychiatry? What are psychiatrists being told? What is the protocol, if you will, in handling children who are having identity? questions? I think that is the question and it is a very loaded, complicated, delicate thing because gender dysphoria is a very real problem. It's a very real experience of suffering that I want to give voice to that there are a small but very vulnerable

population of people that do indeed suffer from it. You know, I think there are so many factors that can play into what that actually looks like in a person. And you're right, there's not a lot of people taking a holistic stance on this at all. I think frankly, because I think professional organizations are pressured to make statements very quickly to lead a large percentage, you know, they're professional that they're trying to give guidance to. And I think, honestly, I think they're not taking a lot of time to make some of these consensus statements and they don't actually have a lot of data.

You know, we don't really have great research studies. We, you know, there's some information just from reviews or, you know, metro analysis or meta-analysis. It's just not, it's not really conclusive. So then no one knows. And then there's constant fear. I think for professionals in particular, we're afraid to speak out. You know, we're afraid to take a different kind of approach because we're afraid to go against,

you know, some guidance from a professional or organization that's telling us you have to do gender affirming care and that's the only way to do it and once someone says this, you know, then we must go through this pathway. And it's interesting because I don't actually think that same pressure is coming from parents and family members. I think they themselves equally are confused and really want what's best for their kids. It's a very scary moment to have a child that saying I don't feel like, you know, I'm the person that I'm seeing the mirror or whatever the case. I can't imagine. Thank God I haven't gone through something like that, but I am aware. Are you, you know, over the years in your practice, have you seen an increase in this issue? I think, I mean, I personally have seen an increase, and I think the data shows that there is more and more people. I mean, I think the percentage, even by what you just said, it used to only be one percent. It used to less than one percent.

Right. You know, and honestly, gender dysphoria has been real since the dawn of time. I mean, It was talked about in medieval literature. You know, so this is not a new problem. I think what is new is how much media attention is coming to this problem. And, you know, that is kind of where I perk my ears up and I kind of want to ask questions like, why are we giving so much attention to this now? It's interesting because along those same lines, you know, we used to be able to talk openly about there are certain conditions, one being eating disorders, another being suicide.

that gets worse the more we talk about it. Right, the public it gets. Correct. And so, and I am seeing, I think that transgender, gender dysphoria is becoming one of those issues that the more we talk about it, now there's more adolescents, teens, young adults, coming forward with struggles in this area. And I, but again, we can't say that out loud, you know, we can't say the quiet part out loud that maybe this is like some of these other mental health diagnoses that,

equally have a contagion effect to them. That's also very unpopular to say out loud, though. I had a friend that his teenage daughter was having issues and eating disorder, and so he was recommended, I think probably by the school counselor

to put her in some sort of group counseling thing. He thought it was a great idea. He says, while she's there, she starts hearing about other kids that are cutting themselves and then ends up taking on that disorder. He's like, great, that was really helpful. you know, and now I've got two issues and one really seems horrific.

And it's just, it's sort of what you, like once you put that thought in their head, whatever that dysfunction is, it can be placed in so many different ways. And you said something interesting. And it's where I think that Robert Kennedy Jr. finds himself right now in dealing with many of the issues he's looking at, including, you know, drugs, SSRIs, gender affirming care, is you're saying there's not a lot of studies here. There's not a lot of information here. We're really looking for answers. But it's amazing to me when there's not a lot of science, how good pharma is at stepping up and saying, here's the answer, here's what it is, and everyone seems to go along with it.

And so my question really is because it came up last week in SSRIs and things like that and gender affirming care. I saw some studies, some people are pointed studies, that gender affirming care doesn't look like it causes suicide ideation or things like that. I don't know if that's the case, but what I want to ask you is, you know, as a psychiatrist, there seems to be a one-size-fits-all that's happening, which is let's immediately get you on track to, you know, gender-blocking drugs. My question is, are SSRIs a part of that immediate recommendation? Is trans this issue when it comes to you or, you know, identity issues? Is it seen as sort of, sort of like enveloped in depression and must be handled that way? Or are they separated? That is one of the questions I had if I'm watching the news this week. You know, I don't have data to support this, but from what I normally see is there's

predating mental health struggles. So, you know, the gender dysphoria often comes on, or at least it's illuminated later in a patient journey. So oftentimes by the time they're even getting to the point of a puberty blocker or you know, something like that for their treatment plan, they've already had some level of suffering from even just general anxiety, depression, maybe potentially even bipolar or other more serious mental health diagnoses. So oftentimes they probably are on psychotropic medications, maybe potentially long before even that conversation enters the picture.

So you're saying rarely is the first issue you have is you have an identity question. It's usually coming, you know, with other things that we're letting into it. My experience with it. I don't think there's great studies to prove that one way or another, and you may ask a different professional. They may see something different. But I often see, because so many of these patients, I mean, over 90% of them have a comorbid mental health diagnosis. And that often predates the desire to actually transition. And so, you know, when we hear these stories of psychiatrists that immediately start, you know, hormone therapies,

Are there any studies since the odds sounds like pretty good that you're going to be mixing SSRIs and hormone, you know, injections or whatever? Are there studies that show any pharmacokinetic issues there? Not that I know of. I mean, there's frankly, there's not a lot of studies talking about multiple medications, period, not just multiple psychiatric medications, but there are not a lot of studies on polypharmacist. essentially. And so we kind of end up with this mentality where we have to look at, you know, we look at the drug-drug interactions between different things, which we have really good tools and information for that, just from a physiologic standpoint. But again, what's going on inside an individual human body in their individual genetics and how they are metabolizing something,

we don't know. We honestly don't for lots of things. So you may be talking about a patient that maybe they're on an SSRI and they're on a mood stabilizer. And now we're talking about puberty blockers. That's multiple medications that can all affect. It can affect bone density. It can affect your neurological system, obviously. It can affect your other hormones. I mean, SSRIs also affect your hormone system. So by themselves. And now we're talking about additional heavy-hitting medications. I mean, and I do think a lot of these conversations have just been rushed. And I really want to give the benefit of the doubt that I think this population suffers so greatly that the powers that be, the agencies, they just want to give some guidance so that doctors have a clue how to take care of these patients. And yet we're not really doing a great job of now following up.

Is this helpful? Is this actually even serving their mental health needs? And, you know, now it's so taboo to even have these kind of conversations. that we can be more open and just discussing some of these very real honest questions. I think we could get to the bottom of a lot of the problems in the world today if we would get back to being allowed to talk about them. I'm getting really tired of just being forced into very narrow hallway of words and ideas that you can share, things that you can question.

We have real issues now. And, you know, I think we're tired of watching results, but we can't ask how did we get here. You know, there was a couple of things from the manifesto that were written by this latest shooter that I think, you know, are chilling in on this topic. These were just headlines because I think some of it's written in Russian and English, but Minneapolis school shooter, Robert Westman, confessed he was tired of being trans. I wish I never brainwashed myself. I mean, that's an incredible statement. And I hear that from the people that we've had on the show discussing this, that, you know, I was depressed, I had issues, maybe I was upset with my parents.

This seemed like I could find a group of people. Then I'm online and they're telling me this is where I'm at. And they just slowly work themselves into as this, you know, very unfortunate individual is saying they brainwashed themselves. Is that a term? Is that a concept? Is that something you have to think about? As a therapist, can someone, you know, brainwash themselves?

I mean, I think if an entire body of people around you are telling you one thing, you know, and again, I really want to believe this is in the child's best interest, you know, parents, family members, loved ones, their doctors. But it's more than that. They're going online to other adults that are transgender or not or have some sort of agenda that are grooming them into this position and pushing hatred. And do we have that video? Did we prepare that video?

I want to play this video. This is something that was online that I found very disturbing. Angry. Go out by a gun. It's okay to be angry. Get on my face now. If you try to stop me from going into a woman's bathroom, excuse me, it's ma'am.

Be the last mistake you ever make. It is ma'am. Find that anger. Just for those people. Hey! Harness it to do good in the world. This anger... ...and we can just make a fucking batch and say that some of us well!

Anger is probably my primary source of motivation. You want to call me, sir again? The thing is, you don't have to leave. You all know. For everything that I do. Cut that out now, or you'll go home in an ambulance. It was a call to action or call to harms. It's scar!

I'm sorry, man. It's a scar! Don't be afraid to show your anger. Not a very, not a very helpful, I think, guidance for someone that's questioning what they're going through. Yeah, it's not. You know. This isn't new for the mental health community, though. I mean, we see this with eating disorders, you know.

And I wonder, you know, there's some cultural and there's researchers that know way more about this. but they're sort of the mental health diagnosis of the day, if you will. You know, it was psychosis back in the 50s, 60s. You know, there was articles and advertisements about antipsychotics for the stay-at-home mom. You know, then it turned into eating disorders come 70s, 80s, where we were looking at magazines of these like rail-thin women and finding these unrealistic beauty standards. And now you see really in the last pretty 10 to 20 years,

we've seen this escalated rise in gender dysphoria. And there is a glamorization of this from culture, yes. And I think social media probably exacerbates it where, adolescence is hard. I mean, your changing body, just in a healthy changing body, is very complicated for anybody to live through. And so when you're feeling any sort of distress or anxiety or you go through trauma, you know,

you are seeking some solace somehow. And I'm not saying this is everybody that is dealing. with gender dysphoria. But I think some individuals, and we've seen it with detransitioners that speak out, most of them share the same story that, you know, I was just suffering, period. And this is the community that sort of let me in. And then you get so far into it. And then it becomes taboo to ever leave. Because you feel like now this tribe that is welcomed you in, you're leaving the whole tribe. And that's your whole community support, your whole mental health support system. So now you have to live kind of by all of their construct. So they often,

attack when you talked to them like how could you let us down you know we were here for you so there's a huge guilt trip yes uh that's put in there and pressure um there was another headline about another statement from this manifesto a Minneapolis gunman robin westman blaine master crown mom warning him not to change gender and then discouraged people from letting their kids transition obviously just a very very um confused individual um but then you add in SSRIs. Are SSRIs a solution to this level of confusion? Because we looked it up. Robert Kennedy Jr. made headlines last week saying, look, I am looking into this. We are looking to see if behind these school shootings, you know, is this, you know, incredible rise in the use of

SSRIs in our children, amongst other things. I wouldn't, I would probably say you should look at ADD medications, attention medications. I mean, these kids are drugged. They're not sober, But what he's saying is this black box warnings. I wanted to look it up, and we did. We looked up the top drugs just for people out there. Prozac, it has a warning label. It talks about suicidals. Here it is.

Increased risk of suicidal thinking behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults taking antidepressants, monitor for worsening and emergence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Well, that's great. I thought the whole point of this product was to avoid that. And then we'll just sort of list through them. Lexa Pro, same thing. It gets into suicidal thoughts, increased risk of suicidal thinking behavior. We can go on to the next one, Zoloft.

So they're warning you. And so what I didn't see, and I was expecting, is I thought I was going to see suicidal thoughts and homicidal thoughts, which I feel like I've seen someone on label. It wasn't in any of these. Do those sort of live in the same place in a person? If you were suicidal, are you more likely to be homicidal or not care about your fellow man? Is that, you know, do we know how those things interact? Those? I think we see sometimes the reverse.

You'll see individuals that have homicidal thinking, almost all of them at some point in the recent past had suicidal thinking. I want to be clear. Mental health diagnoses do not naturally lead to violence in the vast majority of individuals with the mental health diagnosis. So that said, I mean, these are very troubled souls. I mean, they have lots of suffering. And I think what's unclear is even how much counseling, how much people are even screening for suicidal thinking. You know, if you're not even really seeing a psychiatrist, you're going to, maybe an

endocrinologist, maybe you're getting all your treatment through a primary care doctor, an adolescent clinic. I don't even know how much on an ongoing basis they're actually even screaming for mental health symptoms. But I mean, when you look at school shooters, I mean, over now, you know, there's a lot of 90% of them had mental health diagnoses and even more of them actually, the vast majority of them actually were connected to some level of mental health treatment. Right.

So the issue is not that these people are not being identified as someone who's suffering. The issue is probably that we need complete reform in our health care system because obviously even getting mental health treatment, whether it is through drugs or not drugs, because maybe the drugs are making you worse, but we don't have data for that either to not. know or it's just the treatment is significantly failing these people. Yeah, I mean, I think that, and that's the argument the drug makers make, right? They were suicidal when they started taking the drug. How can you blame our product for something that we knew was their issue anyway?

But I would assume if we're seeing warning labels, that means there were some form of placebo-based trials where they saw a heightened risk, I'm certain of it, a heightened risk of increased suicidality and things like that. And I see that. Do you see in kids, they get overactivated, they get overstimulated. Even if it's not full-blown suicidal thinking, you still see sometimes that their symptoms get worse. Now, that said, I also see that sometimes they're life-changing for people. But we also don't have great tools.

Is this because of their genetics? Is it because of other confounding variables? Is it just because of a simple thing like a sleep cycle or their environment? We don't really know because we're not testing some of these things. either. Yeah, I think that's what I think we're all hoping that, you know, Kennedy will get happening inside of NIH CDC. Can we start doing more thorough testing?

And by the way, I think these pharmaceutical industries, you know, owe some money into that, you know, too, because they're making fortunes, fortunes off these products. They obviously do pretty well in courtrooms when they fight back because they can afford, you know, these incredible cases that are affecting far too many. lives. But I think the big question too is then, you know, when we look at other countries where there must be depression, there must be issues where they're not as drugged as we are, we take more drugs than any nation in the world prescribed. And we are having this school shooting epidemic. And by the way, you know, look, I think guns should be on the table. I'm not saying

we should select, I mean, I want it all on the table. I'm not going to choose sides, but there are nations with plenty of guns and they you know almost every household are not having the school shooting issue and so I want I'm gonna ask you really you know I feel like I grew up with discipline I grew up with discipline in my house you know God forbid I even got spanked I know that that's like you want to talk about the third rail I don't spank my kids my wife will never have it but I feel like I'm missing a tool that worked really well for me as a kid like I knew when I was out of line and and had to overcome that adversity. My parents represented, you know, resistance to me just getting my own

way on everything. And it just feels like our society is just going softer and softer and just support your child. Don't give them any placement. They've got to find themselves. Well, then how are they going to deal with a world that isn't going to kiss their ass? Great question. It's a good question. I mean, I do feel like at some point, you know, it's interesting looking at historical context, right? I mean, we have these baby boomers where they had, you know, arguably very strict childhoods, you know, some of them even kind of their parents living through the Great Depression era. And so, you know, very strict discipline. And now a few generations later, now we're living with, yes, very permissive parenting, very affirming parenting, where we affirm emotions,

We, anything that they say, yes, you can do it. I believe in you. And so much of that is lovely and beautiful and awesome. And I think we are raising very confident, capable individuals who do have strengths and talents. But we're also raising very anxious children. And that is proven in research. We're raising children that are very anxious. They need almost lots of coddling because they're now almost addicted to the affirmation and the validation

from the world around them. And so, you know, you see it within the mental health care system at large now that you have providers that are just affirming of your suffering without also helping them give tools and boundaries to, you know, what does that look like? Like, you know, yes, you're suffering. Well, how can we get you out of this? You know, sometimes there's also a mindset piece, but coming full circle. I mean, it's speaking to the holistic part of it. It's not just medication. It's not just diet.

It's not just environment. There's a mindset piece. There's a boundary space. There's your own lived experience. You know, what was your childhood like? Yeah. All those things relate. You know, when, you know, as we sort of wrap this up,

I think people, we, you know, our kids are hanging around other kids now that are, their parents are just affirming all sorts of crazy stuff, frankly. That's how I see it. It's my opinion, not yours. I'm not going to put you on that. But, you know, I've had my kid come home and say, I was just at a can and they had a furry there, some kid that thinks he's an animal, and his parents think have him going to the bathroom

in the litter box. How am I supposed to talk to my kid about that? I mean, I want my kid to be accepting. For me, it was simple. We just dealt with racism. Like, everyone's a child of God, you know, but we sort of shared ideas of how we live in this world. My kids are talking to kids that, you know,

don't want to use the bathroom that they're designed to use. you know, or might not even think they're in this species and want a litter box. I mean, I mean, I can't hide them from that world. It's out there. I mean, we've been a homeschool. You're still at, you know, a church camp. It came up. You're like, what?

So how do you prepare your child? What is it we tell our children about acceptance but not taking it on themselves? I think you first have to help your, child have their own strong identity and really enforcing your own personal boundaries. I mean, we are all entitled to have our own values, our own philosophies, our own beliefs systems within a family that you choose to impart on your children. And I think, you know, you joke all we had to deal with was racism and you know, don't talk about politics and religion and we'll be fine going forward in life.

But I think you can kind of view it like that because for a lot of these people, it is a very fixed belief system. And so you're not going to change their mind. You're not going to change their parents' mind. You know, I think for our own children, our own families, we have to do our own soul searching as the parents to decide what is it that I do really believe on this issue and how do I want to communicate that to my child. And that, I think, level of firm confidence is actually really healthy. That's actually, you know, parenting styles that actually are more firm with like strong levels of boundaries, strong levels of discipline. However, that looks to your family and your values. But I think that that is actually what kids need. You know, there's been several,

several research studies and books that show that more permissive parenting actually creates more mental health struggles for children. So I think the worst thing we can do for our kids is to not have strong opinions about things. Okay. So because not just thinking that they're going to figure it all out, we need to give them guardrails. That's actually healthy parenting where we show them, hey, this is what it's like to have a strong opinion.

And for people watching your show, I mean, probably people have lost friendships over their strong opinions. But what a wonderful thing to model for your kids, actually, that you're so confident in something that, you know, this matter so. much to me. I'm going to model this for my kids that it's okay to lose friends on certain topics that really you value. Fantastic. I want to thank you for coming in today and helping us through. So as I know there's no concrete answers. I know we need more science. Hopefully we have

someone now that's not going to be afraid to look at everything and put it all on the table. I think that's what we're doing here. But I want to thank you for your guidance today. Thanks, Del. Thank you. Good talking.