Dear men: Do you remember what it was like being 13 years old? How difficult that time of life was? How awkward you felt? How uncomfortable it was interacting with girls? And how things naturally improved as you grew up and matured? And how that happened without feminist therapists forcing you to get in touch with your feelings and share them in front of your peers, including girls?

Now, imagine a group of female feminist “scientists” coming into your school and forcing you to join a group of your peers, including boys and girls, to learn emotion management skills for 8 weeks. These “skills” include mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Each group is run by 1-2 psychologists and/or their students, almost all of whom are women. You are meant to learn these “skills” and practice them at home in between group meetings. Each meeting involves learning skills, discussing them, practicing them, with the expectation of practicing them at home in between meetings to better manage your emotions.

Your 13-year-old self is in this group. What would the experience be like for you?

Well, we now know the answer from a study of over 1000 kids in years 8 and 9. Original study here (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796723001560), user-friendly journalist summary here (https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/10/universal-dbt-in-schools-increases-anxiety-depression-family-conflict/).

The intervention made students worse. Compared to usual school, the intervention made the kids more anxious, depressed, and worsened their relationships with their parents.

This was especially true for boys. Compared to girls, boys rated the content less interesting and had worse outcomes in terms of total difficulties, depression, quality of life, emotion dysregulation, and relationship quality with both parents - especially their fathers.

Writes the journalist: “Outcomes after DBT were worse for boys, challenging the notion that boys (stereotypically less emotionally aware) need to receive therapy to become more emotionally skilled. Instead, after the intervention, boys had worse outcomes than girls in every measure except anxiety (which got worse for both boys and girls equally).”

In light of their findings, the all-female feminist scientists concluded: “Further research is needed to determine how to improve engagement and feasibility of delivery of DBT-based interventions universally in this context.” Not that they should leave kids alone, especially boys, but that we need more research to justify continuing what we've been doing even though it makes kids worse.

Men: understand there is a worldwide initiative, already advanced at this point, to incorporate this content into the standard school experience of all children. And the “experts” in charge of the initiative are predominantly feminist women who have no idea what boys are like or need, and worse, clearly couldn't care less.

What would an intervention intended to improve the “mental health” of boys look like if created by experts who actually understand males? And who is left out there to create and study it?