The author of The Defining Decade explains why the twenties are the most challenging time of life and reveals essential skills for handling the uncertainties surrounding work, love, friendship, mental health, and more during that decade and beyond.

Seventy-five percent of all mental health disorders emerge by the age of twenty-five, and twentysomethings are more likely to face depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than any other age group. The pandemic has intensified this crisis, but it was underway well before 2020, in large part because young people and the professionals who treat them have rushed to prescribe pills, rather than helping them develop essential life skills for dealing with the uncertainties that abound in our twenties.

Medication is sometimes, but not always, the best medicine. For twenty-five years, Meg Jay has worked as a clinical psychologist who specializes in twentysomethings, and here she argues that most of them don’t have disorders that must be treated: they have problems that can be solved. It is time to upend the medicalization of young adult life or else we risk hobbling—even sickening—an entire generation.

In The Twentysomething Treatment, Jay teaches us how to acquire essential skills such as:
-How to be social when social media functions as an evolutionary trap.
-How to befriend someone and why this is more crucial for survival than ever.
-How to love someone even though they may break your heart.
-How to make sex more fulfilling than you thought was possible.
-How to move, literally, toward happiness and health.
-How to face, rather than avoid, bad feelings so they won’t haunt you.
-How to cook your way into confidence and connection.
-How to change a bad habit.
-How to decide when so much is undecided.
-And how to choose purpose at work and in love.

Along the way, Jay shares dozens of rich, revealing stories of students and clients who are learning to embrace uncertainty and live full lives. The Twentysomething Treatment is essential reading for anyone who wants to find out how mental health gets better when we get better at life.

Meg Jay, PhD, is a Clinical Psychologist, and an associate professor of human development at the University of Virginia, who specializes in adult development and in twentysomethings in particular. She earned a doctorate in clinical psychology, and in gender studies, from the University of California, Berkeley. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and on NPR and BBC. Her TED talk “Why 30 Is Not the New 20” is among the most watched of all time.