EXCERPT:
PINSKY: “You know, look, we’ve got 60% of adolescent females saying they feel persistently sad or hopeless, 30% seriously considering suicide, and there’s no doubt the screens are as bad as tobacco. We should be thinking about screens the way we think about tobacco. But you brought out in your comment there, in the introduction, the impact of lockdowns, which has been profound. There’s been a hockey stick in terms of serious mental health symptomatology and it was highly protectable. We destroyed 8-15-year-olds. Imagine you are 9 years old and you’re told, ‘Shelter in place, hide under your bed. And if you come out, you go outside, you see your friends, you’re going to kill your parents and your grandparents.’ It’s unbelievable that we could have done that to an entire generation, and it will take quite a while for them to respond, to come out of this, and I hope they are angry when they do because we did this to them and it was highly, highly predictable.”