Jaco van Zyl
Psychotherapist and clinical commentator
Jaco van Zyl brings a clinician's precision to questions most therapists avoid. On Beyond Gender he argues that when culture stops asking young people to meet reality — and starts bending reality to meet them instead — it removes the very resistance that builds a stable self, leaving adolescents less equipped for life, not more.
Jaco van Zyl is a psychotherapist whose clinical practice has placed him squarely at the fault line between adolescent mental health and the cultural assumptions now shaping it. His work engages with what happens when the therapeutic frame shifts from helping young people navigate the world as it is toward validating however they feel the world should be — a drift he regards as neither neutral nor harmless.
In the Beyond Gender episode What Happens When a Generation Grows Up Without Reality (episode 13, May 2025), van Zyl joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman for one of the series' most diagnostically precise conversations. Drawing on his clinical experience, he traced a direct line from the collapse of duty-based expectations — in families, schools, and institutions — to the rise of 'my truth' thinking, and pressed the question that sits underneath much of the podcast's project: what do adolescents actually lose when the adults around them refuse to hold the line on reality? The answer, van Zyl suggested, is not merely resilience in the abstract but the developmental friction through which a coherent self is formed at all.
His perspective is shaped by years in the consulting room with young people who have grown up inside exactly this cultural shift — affirmed at every turn, challenged at none — and who arrive in therapy without the resources that only difficulty can build. The conversation placed that clinical observation inside a broader argument about what adults owe the young people they claim to support.
Van Zyl's appearance on Beyond Gender is a compelling example of what the podcast does best: taking a clinician seriously, on their own terms, and following the argument wherever it leads.
