What Happens When a Generation Grows Up Without Reality – Jaco van Zyl (#13)
15 May 2025
With Jaco van Zyl
Global
Psychotherapist Jaco van Zyl argues that Western culture's turn from duty and shared reality towards personal feeling and instant gratification is stunting psychological development in the young. His analysis maps closely onto the Cass Review's finding that uncritical affirmation — in clinics, schools and homes — has displaced the careful, exploratory therapeutic work that gender-distressed adolescents actually need. The episode asks what it costs a generation to grow up in a culture that treats inner experience as self-evidently true.
Psychotherapist Jaco van Zyl brings a clinical framework to questions that have been at the centre of UK policy debate for several years. His core argument is that Western culture has undergone a profound shift: away from frameworks built on shared duty, deferred gratification and the negotiation of external reality, and towards a model that places personal feeling at the apex of authority. For those tracking what went wrong in adolescent gender medicine, that shift is not merely a cultural curiosity — it is a direct contributing condition. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, described a clinical environment in which a young person's stated identity had routinely been affirmed without sufficient exploration of the psychological processes beneath. Dr Hilary Cass found that many patients at the Gender Identity Development Service carried complex co-occurring difficulties that were not being adequately investigated. Van Zyl's argument about a culture that mistakes subjective experience for objective truth speaks precisely to that finding: when feelings are treated as beyond question, the space for careful, exploratory therapy disappears. The episode examines the concept of "my truth" in some depth — the idea that individual inner experience carries the same, or greater, authority than shared, verifiable reality. Evidence-based psychological practice rests on the opposite assumption: that feelings and identity need to be explored, tested and contextualised rather than simply validated. The Cass Review's call for a return to thorough assessment, watchful waiting and psychotherapeutic support is only coherent if one accepts that a young person's distress is a starting point for inquiry, not a conclusion to be rubber-stamped. Van Zyl also interrogates the influence of permissive parenting philosophies that, in their more extreme expressions, discourage parents from holding firm boundaries or allowing children to experience manageable frustration. The clinical concern is that shielding children from difficulty produces adults less capable of tolerating the contradictions and disappointments that development necessarily involves. The rapid rise in adolescent mental health difficulties across the UK in the years before and during the expansion of gender services is part of the backdrop against which this conversation takes place. From the standpoint of UK evidence and policy, these arguments connect to concerns that have surfaced repeatedly in parliamentary committees, NHS England's revised service specifications and the independent reviews that preceded the closure of the Tavistock's GIDS. Multiple inquiries have pointed to a therapeutic culture in which boundary-setting — by clinicians, schools and parents alike — became associated with harm rather than care. Van Zyl's psychotherapeutic perspective offers a coherent account of the cultural conditions that allowed that inversion to take hold, and of what a healthier framework for supporting young people might look like.
