Konstantin Kisin

So instead of being forgetful, you have ADHD.

Instead of being shy, you have autism.

We're also losing the language for just character and good traits.

So instead of being selfless, you're now a people pleaser who needs help with that.

You can't be a hard worker.

You have to be like a traumatized, insecure overachiever.

You can't be a hopeless romantic.

You have to be anxiously attached.

And so you have all these young people growing up and anything that's too human about them, like a habit or an eccentricity or a flaw has to be inspected and figured out and then becomes a problem to be solved.

So you have young women.

I mean, I talk about these TikToks in the book.

So these TikTok influencers really don't help where they do videos like five signs you have autism.

And the sign is like, you're chatty or you're like, can't sit still for ADHD.

So one medication company called Cerebral that in America will send you medication to your door, they had an ad that said, being spacey, forgetful and chatty is a sign that you might need ADHD medication.

And so you have young people consuming this all the time and then pathologizing every personality trait they have until nobody's normal.

The assumption now is like... Something's wrong.

Yeah, and the earlier you address it, the better.

But this goes back to the other problem, is that we...

we lower the expectations for parents in many ways and raise the expectations of experts and professionals.

And so parents feel stressed out, but a lot of the stress is finding the right experts to understand their child.