Kids these days

Warning: this post is NSFW. This link takes you to an interview with an anonymous psychotherapist who is contributing to the Gawker site. There’s some gross stuff on there — hence the NSFW warning — but this is the part I found interesting for my readership. The therapist says he finds what follows to be a more shocking part of his work than the time he treated a sociopathic rapist, and the instance in which a patient confessed to bestial longings:

I treat many teenagers and, as a father myself, I can’t help but be appalled at the way these kids talk to their parents—and to most authority, for that matter. They have this idea that their life is not a success if it doesn’t live up to some absurd pop cultural standard. Teens today are over-sexualized and starting at a younger age and, in my opinion, the cultural obsession with substance use is out of control. I’ve seen Oxycontin and Percocet destroy so many lives with such rapidity. It is mind-boggling. And kids don’t see that it f**ked up 20 of their friends’ lives, so chances are it will grab a hold of them. I had a patient who was a football star who is now serving time for armed robbery. These drugs transcend cultural, gender, and socio-economic constructs. For the sensitive types, I want to make it clear that there are exceptions to every rule—many of them, perhaps—but it’s the enormity of this one that I always find shocking.