Meg Jay

So that's certainly a concern.

When it comes to asking questions about something like, are antidepressants overprescribed for young people?

I don't think that that's necessarily a harmful path to go down.

I think that we should be thinking about antidepressants not as the be-all, end-all when it comes to mental health, but as part of a suite of potential treatments that could be used in combination with everything from

talk therapy to helping people feel less lonely.

So it's a complicated issue.

I don't think that it's always bad to ask questions, but I do think it's good to think about what the potential implications are of suggesting bad effects when there's no evidence to suggest that that would be the case.

Sarah Todd of Stat News.

Avishai Artsy produced today's show.

Jolie Myers edited.

Hadi Mouagdi and Melissa Hirsch checked the facts.

And Patrick Boyd is our only engineer.

I'm Noelle King.

It's Today Explained.

we need to talk about the empathy gap.

So the empathy gap is why we sometimes hate on people on the other end of the political spectrum.

Or it's why maybe we shrug our shoulders at the problems of those who look different or live different or love different than we do.

It's why we almost certainly aren't doing enough to protect our kids and grandkids from climate change.

It can just be difficult sometimes to care about people that we don't know or to do right by people who don't even exist yet.

But what if I told you that that same empathy gap can also get in the way of us doing right by ourselves in our 20s and beyond?