How ‘therapy speak’ has created a generation of girls who think they are broken, sick and crazy: I’ve been a psychiatrist for 20 years, helping young women. This is the alarming way my patients have changed

Hazel sits in my office for our first appointment. The 16-year-old adjusts her red glasses, her brown eyes looking intently at me.

Then she starts to talk: about her ‘anxiety and depression’, her ‘emotional dysregulation’, the ‘trauma’ from growing up with parents who are ‘codependent’, the stress she feels having to ‘mask’ just to get through the day.

Sometimes she feels so frustrated with her family she feels she’s going to have a ‘full-on panic attack’ at the dinner table, she tells me.

Then there’s Violet, a 17-year-old with a messy blonde ponytail. ‘I guess I should tell you about my OCD,’ she

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