Jonathan Haidt and Ravi Iyer break down Australia’s new social media policy in their Substack article on the topic.

The Age Limit Policy for Account Creation:

The policy’s logic is clinically familiar: being logged into an account is what turns “content” into a high-pressure social environment, driven by design features that increase time-on-platform and exposure to risks that can be hard to manage developmentally.

What doesn’t change: under-16s can still access publicly available content that doesn’t require logging in (watch videos, read posts, look things up). The government isn’t trying to cut kids off from information; it’s aiming at the business relationship-terms of service, data extraction, and the addictive mechanics that follow, for example gamified mechanisms like ‘Snap Streaks’.

The systemic piece: parents often feel trapped because if they hold the line alone, their child becomes the only one “not on it”. This policy won’t be perfectly enforced but it is designed to shift the default and reduce that social pressure.

To us, this is a structural intervention marking a shift from asking children and young people to self-regulate within systems engineered to addict them, to asking platforms to redesign those systems themselves.

Therapist takeaways- although this policy may not be adopted where you live, you can still:

I am angry this week. Not a bit irritated, not “concerned” in the polite email sense, properly, bone-deep furious. Abuse of power is everywhere: the obvious kind that shouts, and the quieter kind that smiles as it walks out and shuts the door. It is the same pattern in different outfits: harm dressed as “innovation,” self-interest dressed as “care,” silence dressed as “due process.”

Meta is once again providing a masterclass in how to turn manipulation into a business model. Newly unsealed filings (thank you again Fairpatterns) show they found causal evidence that Facebook use worsened mental health in young people, and then quietly parked the project, deprioritised safety, and carried on serving the same addictive features to teens anyway. Engagement over wellbeing. Dark patterns over duty of care. This isn’t “neutral tech” or “just how platforms work.” It’s an industrial-scale abuse of power, with design choices that keep kids scrolling while the adults in charge hide behind legal statements and PR.

All of this is playing out against a backdrop where gun laws in America continue to treat human life as collateral, where globally- marginalisation and othering have become political sport and seems to be the default setting for everything. And difference continues to be perceived as dangerous.

It has not felt like Christmas. Eating disorder referrals have been in free fall. My head is full; my lounge is not. The tree is still in the loft. It is hard to untangle fairy lights when you’re also holding the knowledge that so much of this harm is preventable, not all of it, but far too much of it.

In my own contexts, I have seen leadership that feels more like self-protection than solidarity. There are moments when, as soon as behaviour is questioned, the response ramps up and the language gets heated, as though scrutiny itself were somehow inappropriate rather than part of ordinary accountability. A lot of clever-sounding language is used in ways that muddy rather than clarify concerns about how power has been exercised, and thus ends up minimising the reality of those who have had to work hard simply to be heard or included in the first place.

So yes, I am raging. At the world. At platforms that know exactly what their design does to young people and still choose profit. At violence and othering and marginalisation. At the way leadership can be used as both shield and weapon.

I’ll keep doing what I can where I am: naming what I see, backing the people with the least protection, keeping up the pressure in the places where power could be used differently, and reserving my admiration for those who use power to open doors.

This week’s spotlight is a conversation I’ll be part of and one I’m genuinely looking forward to.

Reflecting on AI’s Role in Modern Therapy is a live webinar panel happening today, focused on how AI is actually showing up in clinical practice.

I’ll be joining my colleague Vivian Chung Easton, LMFT, CHC, who brings the builder’s perspective as someone who is involved in creating AI tools through prompt design. I’ll be speaking from the clinician side and my thoughts on using AI in practice.

This isn’t a lecture. It’s a behind-the-scenes conversation about what’s emerging, the thinking behind creating the technology, and what clinicians should be thinking critically about right now.

The panel is moderated by Mason Smith (a Therapist Brief reader, therapist-in-training, and community manager at Blueprint.ai), and it’s hosted by Blueprint and Heard.

Quick transparency note: I work with Blueprint.ai in a clinical content and therapist experience role. That perspective informs how I think about these tools, both their potential and their limitations.

Register here.

In the wake of recent mass shootings over the weekend, people will be carrying very different reactions to these events.

This week’s tool is about anticipation, not assumption.

Some people may feel:

As therapists, we don’t predict which reaction will show up. We remember that many reactions are possible and all are valid.

A few clinical practices for this week:

There’s no single “right” response to events like these. The work, as always, is about staying curious, regulated, and human.

A large 2025 study published in Nature offers one of the clearest genetic explanations to date for something therapists see every day: comorbidity is the rule, not the exception, and differential diagnosis is genuinely tricky.

Researchers analyzed genetic data from 1,056,201 cases across 14 psychiatric conditions, spanning childhood-onset and adult disorders (including ADHD, autism, depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, eating disorders, and substance use disorders). Rather than finding neatly separated biological causes of these conditions, they identified five underlying genetic factors that together explained about two-thirds of genetic risk, on average, across these diagnoses.

Those factors cut across traditional diagnostic lines and included:

In other words, many conditions we diagnose and treat as separate entities appear to share substantial underlying genetic vulnerability.

The study also found that different groups of disorders were linked to different brain pathways. Genetic risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder was more tied to genes involved in excitatory neurons, while risk for internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety was more connected to oligodendrocytes, which support neural signaling. Some of these genetic patterns were active as early as fetal brain development, suggesting vulnerability can begin long before symptoms appear.

The researchers also tested a general “p-factor” model, suggesting that many mental health conditions share a common underlying vulnerability alongside more diagnosis-specific risks. Rather than clear biological boundaries, the findings point to overlapping risk that can show up in different ways over time.

I’m headed to Southern California over the holiday break. Like most of our trips, the itinerary is built around what matters most: seeing family and friends and eating delicious food.

Current plans include dumplings at Din Tai Fung, udon and grilled meats (plus vegetables wrapped in bacon) at our favorite izakaya, a wander through Northgate Market’s Mercado González, Christmas Eve with unseemly quantities of lumpia and other Filipino food, plus a HoneyBaked Ham (because in-laws will do what they do), Christmas dinner in Little Tokyo, and, if the stars align, breakfast at Guisados and Kitchen Mouse.

If you’re based in LA (or you’ve got opinions), what am I missing? Any hidden gems or comfort-food detours you’d recommend?

Just hit reply to this email and tell me where to go.

This is a luxury off-the-clock item, gifted to me by my best sister friend and now firmly part of my evening routine.

It looks absolutely ridiculous when you are zipped into it, somewhere between baked potato and budget astronaut, but it is honestly an epic cortisol cleanse.

This week’s responses confirmed our original hypothesis: most of us experience a strange split during the last month of the year, defined by intensity and crisis on one side, and cancellations and unreturned contacts on the other.

Here are the results:

Taken together, the responses point to a month that’s less about one dominant stressor and more about constant context-switching within the same day. Don’t worry, January is just around the corner.

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