221: The Dangers of Dr Google (w/Dr Jonathan Stea)
In one survey, 82% of young people aged 18-25 searched the internet for mental health advice. Another survey of university students found that 44% report using the internet to learn about sadness, anxiety, or confusion. Regardless of what mental health experts advise, people of all age groups are turning to the internet and social media for help.
What are the potential risks and rewards of using these platforms to try to communicate credible mental health science? And what happens when you’re endlessly trolled for being a “Big Pharma shill,” even when you don’t have prescriptive powers and only offer talk therapy in your clinical practice?
Clinical psychologist Jonathan Stea joins us to discuss these difficult questions. His new book, Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, is a field guide that responds to some of the intense challenges earnest seekers face when trying to navigate waters filled with supplements-slinging sharks who believe they can diagnose mental health conditions with zero training.
Show Notes
AI-generated video of Trump on ayahuasca
Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
These kinds of tropes, for example, that antidepressants or psychiatric medications in general are harmful more than helpful, these get repeated and they affect decision-making and I think that's very dangerous.
We see guys like Elon Musk tweeting that to hundreds of millions of followers.
He'll say something like SSRIs, which are antidepressants, are more harmful than helpful or that Other particular kinds of medications are harmful.
Well number one, it's just terribly misinformed.
These guys frankly don't know what they're talking about.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersections of
conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
extremism.
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I'm Julian Walker.
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In Spirituality 221, the dangers of Dr. Google with Jonathan Stea.
The dangers of Dr. Google with Jonathan Stea.
In one survey, 82% of young people aged 18 to 25 searched the internet for mental health advice.
Another survey of university students found that 44% report using the internet to learn about sadness,
anxiety, or confusion.
Regardless of what mental health experts advise, people of all age groups are turning to the internet and social media for help.
What are the potential risks and rewards of using these platforms to try to communicate credible mental health science?
And what happens when you're endlessly trolled for being a big pharma shill, even when you don't have prescriptive powers and only offer talk therapy in your clinical practice?
Clinical psychologist Jonathan Stead joins us to discuss these difficult questions.
His new book, Mind the Science, Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, is a field guide that responds to some of the intense challenges earnest seekers face when trying to navigate waters filled
with supplement slinging sharks who believe they can diagnose mental health conditions with
zero training.
This week in conspirituality. This past week for one golden moment that lingered for a little while
young Gus Walls son of democrat vp pick Tim Walls won the internet.
It was beautiful, and an interesting development in our discourse around the use of terms like weird by his father when describing MAGA politicians.
As most listeners will no doubt be aware, there was a widely discussed viral moment at last week's DNC during Walz's VP nomination acceptance speech.
As has now become the norm, Walz mentioned the emotionally grueling fertility treatment journey of his family and why his now 23-year-old daughter, born via IVF, came to be called Hope.
Right after this, Walls faced his wife and kids in the audience from the podium and said, Gus, Hope, and Gwen, you are my entire world and I love you.
At which point, all three of those family members were welling up with tears and the 23,000 or so capacity crowd in the arena was roaring.
What we all saw next was the 17-year-old Gus.
Overcome with pride and love, standing up, crying, applauding, pointing, and saying, that's my dad.
Now, to anyone with an ounce of human empathy, this was a very touching father-son moment, which was only amplified once the family joined walls on stage and Gus further expressed himself, hugging his dad intensely, raising his arms as he held hands with his family to cheer exuberantly with the crowd.
Likewise, to anyone with an ounce of psychosocial intelligence, it was clear that Gus is a little different.
It turned out that in an August 7th interview with People Magazine, the Walls family had already shared details about his anxiety disorder, his ADHD, and having a non-verbal learning disorder.
In short, he's neurodivergent.
I know you're going to go into some of the responses we saw from the right on this, but I'm going to preempt it by just giving a big fuck you to all those people because it was an absolutely beautiful and touching moment.
The right consistently talks about family values, how they're the party of the family.
And here we have an example of the love being shared between a father and a son and a daughter and a father.
And for them to go on to say the things you're about to highlight is just absolutely disgusting.
Yeah, well, here's why I said Gus won the internet in that moment.
Right-wing trolls wasted no time trying to shame him.
Always reliable Ann Coulter, always compassionate too, seized the opportunity to tweet the photo of him crying and pointing with the caption, talk about weird.
She was not alone.
Conservative radio talk show host and failed New Jersey political candidate Mike Crispy Tweeted, Tim Wall's stupid crying son isn't the flex the left thinks it is.
You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male.
Congrats.
Does Barron Trump cry?
Nope.
Does he love his father?
Of course.
That's the type of values I want leading the country.
A couple weeks ago, I posted about some slug from New Jersey.
Crispy happens to be from my hometown, too, as it works out.
It doesn't surprise me that that's where he represents, to be honest.
But he posted something about, like, Italians for Christopher Columbus.
Yeah, so that was him.
So real upstanding character here.
Now commenting from an account on X or Twitter that suddenly has disappeared.
Libertarian clean energy entrepreneur, Sean Collins tweeted, Tim Walls is 60.
His son is 17.
That means he had him at 43.
That's spoiled semen.
So yeah, do you drink 47 year old dairy milk?
So he 43, 47, whatever.
He's trying to demonstrate his superior math skills because he was obviously born from semen that came from a 20 year old.
This led to some people pointing out that actually Donald Trump was 60 years old when Barron was born.
I absolutely love it when people are trying to troll like that and they fuck up basic details.
It is just chef's kiss.
Not that they'll ever care because it's not about that, but the irony of that is always just so stark.
Jay Weber, another conservative radio host, called Gus a blubbering bitch boy, saying if the walls represent today's American man, this country is screwed.
Now, there was more, but I'm not going to just read Endless tweets in this hateful vein.
We get the idea.
Oh, why not?
I don't have anything to do today.
This is fun.
Well, the important thing is here's what happened.
In the case of Ann Coulter and Jay Weber, the tweets were removed by them and they apologized once Gus's neurodivergence was pointed out and they were shamed for their hateful comments.
Weber's deletion and apology was actually preceded by being pulled off the air by the iHeart Network.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that these pundits still see openly emotional expressions of love and family pride during a hugely significant moment as something to mock in the general population of real men, right?
Yeah, and I gotta say, Weber coming out with his apology, I did read it as sincere, at least the words, but of course this was when
he was going to be pulled off the air.
But just scroll his Twitter feed, go back the last five tweets, and they're all equally disgusting.
So he got called out for one, but this is who he is and we shouldn't lose sight of that,
and especially someone like Ann Coulter, who is just attention seeking, period.
So an apology from her, that's actually not surprising because she does do that when she
So sorry about that.
What else do I have to say?
audience, but it doesn't mean anything because she's just going to do it again.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
It's like she walks through the door of her hate speech and then she's like, oh, okay,
now I'm I have attention on me.
So sorry about that.
What else do I have to say?
Now the thing about this, some people pointed out that and culture had previously posted
the video of Kyle Rittenhouse sobbing on the witness stand.
I mean, he just had a really big breakdown up there.
Talk about blubbering and understandably.
And she said, I want him for my president in response to that moment.
But here's the thing, Derek, I don't think anyone was actually confused about the difference
here between calling JD.
Vance and Donald Trump's creepy obsession with intruding on women's rights and life choices and doctor's visits weird and this kind of bullying.
And it's perfect that Ann Coulter was like, talk about weird.
Oh, OK.
Here's a direct comparison.
This wasn't some moment of reckoning for Democrats in which Tim Walz's accurate and plain-spoken evaluation came back to bite his and our asses.
Rather, the attempt to justify cruelty and punching down was appropriately shamed as weird.
And those with the most social capital to lose realized very quickly, I have to apologize.
I have to delete this post because I look really bad right now, or I have to like remove my account from social media, which says to me that in these wildly polarized times in which different political camps often can't even agree on the facts, let alone interpretations or values, We actually have a quite broad cultural and moral consensus on the difference between the two ways in which this word or this way of looking at people's behavior is being described.
There was a huge wave of support for Gus online, and even some criticism from far-right propagandists.
And I'm going to give you one flower, Matt Walsh, because he replied to Mike Crispy's tweet saying, attacking a kid for loving his dad is the dumbest move I've seen by right-wingers on this site.
It's been amazing watching not only Matt, fuck Matt Walsh, but like seeing him do this because it actually does line up with what he says he believes in.
So to his one flower, I'll give him a petal.
But even watching like Ben Shapiro come out recently with the whole Demure thing and defending like when someone is perceived to be from the left, even though the Demure thing was sort of like satire itself.
But when it was perceived to be from the left, they actually For some reason in the last few weeks, their cognitive dissonance is actually kind of self-correcting in some ways where they're like, wait, if I say I'm going to be about these things, I have to actually be about them.
And it is kind of fascinating to watch.
And it's something where overall, I don't mind if that trend continues.
And I'll say that from the left as well, like when you see those moments of like, huh, That's actually I kind of agree with and it gets into the broader discussion I think we've had for four years is at what point
I get kind of tired of having a caveat when I'm talking about someone who I appreciate what they're saying, even if I don't appreciate their entire catalog of thoughts.
But I find myself, when I do, people will jump in automatically reflexively saying, but they did this.
And I'm like, yeah, we're fucking humans.
And I'm not going to go positively quoting Alex Jones ever for anything.
Matt Walsh is a pretty disgusting human being for some of what he's done, but give him a flower once in a while.
Good for you for actually coming forward and aligning with the values that you espouse.
Yeah, it shows something.
Now, what's more, this culture war theater highlighted something I think is very important and resulted in a slew of news stories and interviews with advocacy groups and families.
With neurodivergent kids and even with some of those kids themselves, all expressing how meaningful it was for them to see Gus Walls on TV being himself, loving his dad and being loved as he is.
So, you know, the, the concern, I think the legitimate concern that some of us had of like, Oh, are we getting into weird territory?
Are we getting into, um, uh, problematic territory here by calling people weird and creepy?
What if this ends up being weaponized in some way?
Well, at least in this instance, it turned out, I think, quite well all around.
I'll just end by saying that in the People Magazine article published a couple weeks before the convention, Tim and Gwen Walls described their son Gus's neurodiversity as being not a hindrance, but his superpower.
I'll agree.
I have a family member who is young, and he has been diagnosed, and when I've spent time with him, he definitely has some of the trademarks of autism, for sure.
And yet, you know, he lives in a house with many family members, and even at a young age, he fixes all of their computer equipment.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
And amazing.
I mean, he excels at school and he is an amazing human.
And I think one thing that's coming out of all of this, and we've been moving in this direction for some time and I hope to continue, is that people who are on the spectrum, that the general population can adjust to their triggers and honor them and work with them.
And then also recognize all they have to contribute to society.
And, you know, I've known this reading about this topic for a while, but seeing it in real time with a family member just adds that much more.
And when I saw Gus, when I saw that moment, it reminded me very much of being with my family member.
And it was very touching and personal to me as well.
Yeah.
And we have a bit of a cultural consensus that it's pretty creepy and weird to make
fun of someone like that, which is great.
Last Friday, a few people sent me an AI-generated video of Donald Trump doing ayahuasca.
And the timing was pretty ironic, given that we had just published our AI episode last week, and I had mentioned that I believe we're three to four years away from a fully-generated Hollywood blockbuster hitting the market.
And off the top, this two-minute video, purely from a technical sense, was quite well done.
But I had a visceral reaction, which I'll explain in a moment.
So here's the basic summation.
Lex Friedman recently told Elon Musk about his first ayahuasca experience.
He went to South America to do it.
And at one point in that interview, he says, the thing that makes humans amazing was their glowing throughout the universe.
It made me feel that whatever makes humans amazing is there throughout the universe.
I looked for the demons.
There were no demons.
So that was Lex.
I'm not going to criticize his experience because that's personal, and he said he had an amazing time, and you know what?
Good for him.
But this sort of religious thinking, this ideology behind it, that humans are endowed with some special essence that exists throughout space and time, is exactly the sort of ego-driven mandate some humans award themselves in order to go out and commit atrocities.
And I'm not putting that on Lex, to be clear.
I don't agree with a lot of what he does, but as a person, I have no issues with him.
So no atrocities on Lex.
But we're talking about Trump here, and he will continue to commit atrocities if he's put back in office.
And so on Friday, I wrote a substack based on an idea that was explored in the video, that a person can be completely transformed through one ayahuasca trip.
I've been in this space for a long time, and I've seen a number of people who believe this.
A few hours after I published Substack, I got a DM from someone named Ari Kushner and he's a longtime listener of this podcast who I've chatted with before about a few different topics.
And it turns out that he made the video in part as satire for the very reasons I was criticizing the video in my article.
So that was really interesting and it got me to thinking about my own perception.
of not just AI, but about content in general.
It got me thinking about my own biases and what I went into watching the video with,
and we will talk about that.
But first, I wanted to give Ari a chance to explain why he made the video.
So I asked him to drop a voicemail in Instagram where we've communicated, and here's what
he said.
I've been experimenting with AI for about a year and a half, really wanting to use the
tools in a positive way, in an interesting way artistically.
and I've gotten really good really fast.
I'm an editor by training, storyteller, I own a production company.
So the thing that made it happen was that, you know, Elon Musk released this crazy Grok AI, uncensored, like nobody would give you Trump puking or things like that.
So I thought, I thought, oh, this is a chance to actually visualize Ayahuasca trip and have Trump reckon with a lot of that stuff that he's probably never dealt with.
Now, look, I know malignant narcissists, that's like its own thing.
So I actually don't know that he would be able to or what the thing is.
But I agree with you that Ayahuasca alone wouldn't heal Trump.
And I was going originally much more for the he would just end up running some kind of, you know, cult in Ibiza or just partying in Ibiza, you know.
But The images that came back with the beard and the looks had that kind of earnest quality, and I liked that about it.
And so it surprised me.
And even though the voiceover never changed, the images, every time it would feel like, oh, you know, very earnest.
And so I thought, oh, this is interesting.
It's going to be more open-ended than I thought.
But you know, I sent it to Healing From Healing to release it.
And you can see the comments there.
You know, it's a similar audience, I would think, to you are very aware and very critical versus the comments on Ali and Jason Silva's, which were the other people I really I shared it with.
I made them collaborators because, you know, I don't have any I don't have an audience.
I don't have a big following.
So I thought, you know, this could catch on.
And it did.
But on that side, you see a lot more of the pro-psychedelic thing.
And then the video got edited.
I think it got cut at 90 seconds.
So then that version is missing the last 15-16 seconds, which are kind of key.
And I want you to know that I am very disillusioned with the psychedelic movement.
Like you said in the piece, it can do some help and it can open people up.
And it seems like it can also turn into Bliss Express spiritual materialism.
And I see, I think, more of the pitfalls than the good these days.
So that's important for you to know as far as where it was coming from.
If I have a particular bent, it's that I believe firmly that art has a power to change minds, to change consciousness, to change the world, to bring about better futures, to show us new things, and that's what I was trying to do here.
And in a way, I think art can heal.
I feel like you respond to that with music as well.
Thank you, Ari, for sharing.
Again, I think you did a great job on a creative level and I'm going to link to it in the show notes so that everyone can make their own assessment.
It'll be directly on Ari's feed.
Before I kind of unpack my own feelings on the art commentary, Julian, you were actually the first person to share with me, and you shared it from Jason Silva's feed.
So we are in that, I guess, latter category.
What did you think of the video and of Ari's thoughts on his video?
You know, when I first saw the video, it triggered a lot of responses that are not new for me, which is basically that within the spiritual subculture that is drawn to psychedelics There is a very powerful kind of central mythology, which says that there are altered state kind of enlightenment experiences that can radically transform everything about who you are.
And even more than that, they can give you a glimpse of a kind of absolute truth.
That then translates across every domain, right?
So they can, they can heal your psychological trauma.
They can help make you more confident about your creativity.
They can have you be embracing and self-accepting of your, of your vulnerability or like, like really stepping into yourself as a, as a divine, you know, human expression.
And of course it can also show you the truth about politics and, you know, on and on that there's, there's some transcendent tapping into, Higher truth that will then affect everything about your life.
And you know, we've had many decades, I think of good research and analysis and, you know, psychological theorizing around this whole topic and in the domain, I guess you would say of transpersonal psychology and then also the, the intersection with, um, with more science-based research into, into what psychedelics do and, We know now that that's not really the case, right?
That psychedelics can be a powerful tool if used in the right ways and in conjunction with a range of different things that might include therapy and they might include, you know, philosophical discourse.
They might include you studying and learning more about various things.
They can open you up in ways that are the beginning of a journey, not the end point of that journey.
So when I saw it, I was just like, oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing that Lex Friedman would resonate with, because that's how the that's how it all starts, that Trump says, Lex told me to go do Ayahuasca, right?
Or it's exactly the kind of thing that Jason Silva, I really like Jason Silva, and I followed him for a long time.
But I feel he's leaned more and more in this kind of new age, big enlightenment experience, kind of kind of realm that sometimes lacks critical thinking, and sometimes it's a doorway into spiritual bypass.
So I had all of those kinds of ideas with regard to Ari.
Yeah, great.
He's an artist.
He's skilled.
Thanks for being open.
Thanks for sharing where you're coming from, Ari.
I do find it interesting that in the creative process, the way the AI delivered certain kinds of images shaped how The work of art ended up being, right?
So you already see one of what I think might be the pitfalls about AI, which is that you start off with a vision and an idea, and then based on how compelling the images and the angles are that the AI gives back to you, you might end up finding that you're telling a different story or you have a different message than you start off with, whether you're conscious of that or not.
So all of that, I think, is really tricky.
You land basically where I do, specifically when Ari says that I saw he was earnest and that was very interesting to me.
I can imagine, as a creative, taking a new direction at that point, which appears what happened.
This is where the whole question of the role of art in politics and the art in reality kind of collide, because when I saw it, it was that exact transformation of knowing that Trump probably has never been earnest in his life.
And seeing him as this Alan Watts figure, and there was satire, and I did pick up on it the very first time because at the end of the journey, Trump says, I've become the greatest shaman.
I don't know.
That's what people tell me.
I did catch that, to be clear.
There was no resolution to that because the images remained earnest.
There was no kind of reveal at the end where you see the old Trump come back.
And I think that's what was confusing to me.
And a few moments ago, we were talking about You know, how do we respond to different figures?
I'm going to respond differently to an Alex Jones who I think is a terrible human being who has caused irreparable harm to people and that he's probably not going to pay and doing everything that he can not to pay the Sandy Hook parents.
And Matt Walsh, who I think is a troll and I don't like, but I can see us existing on different sides of a spectrum that is broad, whereas Alex Jones is so far on one side that it is inhuman to me.
And Trump exists in that space, especially at this moment.
Because we know, we've been covering for a year, what he's going to do to America and to minorities and to women and to most of society, because non-privileged people, if he gets back into office.
And so when you read the comments on Healing for Healing, as he said, or on Jason Silver, the different places, You do see different reactions, but you do see people taking A, the idea that Ayahuasca is completely transformative in one trip, seriously.
And you see MAGA people coming out and appreciating the earnestness of Trump, and that is where I guess you could say the art fails me because it does not reflect reality in any meaningful way.
If that were possible, I could be a little bit more open to it.
But I think it's just a matter of, honestly, biases, perception, but also timing.
To me, that is why it doesn't work on the way that perhaps it was intended.
Because I don't see any path for Trump becoming that person or having those revelations.
If that has that sort of influence on the creator, it's definitely going to on some of the audience.
And to have that image of this person as possibly being empathic when we know he is not, and doesn't even have the capabilities of being so, is dangerous.
Yeah, I appreciate Ari saying, you know, if he's a malignant narcissist, we know that this is probably not really possible in the world that we live in.
I mean, there's two other things I want to say.
The people who are under the sway of Trump's so-called charismatic appeal, I know it exists, I don't see it, but people who are under the sway of that, they already idealize him.
They already think that he's a trickster who pretends to be a buffoon and an asshole, but really is chosen by God because he's so brilliant and so attuned, so based with regard to what is really going to save America.
People who are more in our conspirituality kind of demographic that we've covered for the last four years, I think have been susceptible to a new age version of that.
And I think that that new age version lives adjacent to this idea that no one is really bad.
And that anyone, anyone can be sort of healed and transformed and you can reveal like their divinity.
And so this is what we see with Trump in the in that video, which is that he becomes this guy who's like, oh, yeah, I had to work through all the pain and I had to let go of all of the illusions.
And I came to this place where I just wanted to be of service.
And it's like, yeah, that's the narrative.
And then the other piece that, you know, really It resonated with me so strongly about was like, you know, Aubrey Marcus saying he did some kind of psychedelic, whatever it was, he did some kind of ceremony in which he was in an altered state and realized that RFK was like, there was like some whole quantum physics, time travel, healing the timeline that the assassinations are now coming full circle.
Him and Eisenstein were going off on that.
I'm really curious to see how they respond now to RFK throwing his lot in with Trump and endorsing him.
Because yeah, that's like the whole thing that you can, that there is a spiritual revelation that will tell you how to proceed in terms of your political decision making and where you put your power.
That's really dangerous.
Well, we know Aubrey Marcus is off the grid.
We've mentioned it previously, but he has gone dark.
He said he's going through a rough time and he won't be engaging on social media for a while, which, you know, some people have speculated it's about RFK.
We don't know whether or not that's true, but I'll say for someone who is all in to suddenly go dark and not own responsibility for their candidate, it's pretty shitty.
And we know Eisenstein has returned to social media over the last week, and he's only posting Like old blog posts and spiritual musings and people in the comments are saying, Hey, what's going on?
What do you think?
And he's not engaging, which is also pretty shitty considering you're making $21,000 a month as an advisor on this campaign and you were all behind it.
And now all of a sudden to grow, to go dark like that without taking responsibility for what you said.
I don't know.
It's not surprising, but it's always disappointing.
He is also one of my favorite follows on social media.
He has long been since we started this podcast.
In fact, he's one of the first health professionals I connected with early on in this podcast project.
And when he announced that his first book was coming out, which is called Mind the Science, Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, I knew I had to have him on the podcast.
Now, the book will officially be published on September 3rd by Random House Canada.
And in the US and elsewhere, you can buy it via Oxford University Press, which I link to in the show notes.
One of the biggest criticisms we see in the conspirituality space is that we must be shills because we think that vaccines work, even though I know I've long been really critical of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry and how for-profit healthcare works in America.
I think the same applies to psychiatric medications.
I see it often in the conspiritualist space, all the way up to the level of RFK Jr.
blaming mass shootings on antidepressants or on ADHD medications and such.
You once told me when we were talking via email that medications are one tool that you have in a broad toolkit, so I'd love to start A little more big picture here and then we'll get more into your fantastic book.
What do you feel when you see someone like RFK or any of these influencers say, oh, people don't need psychiatric medication?
It drives me bonkers.
It really bothers me because it has such downstream effects.
It's pervasive.
That kind of misinformation is pervasive in our society.
It's through social media, it's through popular culture and then it trickles down to our healthcare systems where I will have patients presented to clinic repeating or parroting these kinds of anti-psychiatry tropes and that's really what they are.
A trope is sort of a repeated theme or idea and these kinds of tropes, for example, that anti-depressants or psychiatric medications in general are Harmful more than helpful these get repeated and and they affect decision-making and I think that's very dangerous We see guys like Elon Musk tweeting that to hundreds of millions of followers.
He'll say something like SSRIs which are antidepressants are more harmful than helpful or that other particular kinds of medications are harmful Well number one, it's just terribly misinformed that these guys frankly don't know what they're talking about and when you go to for example Like for example, me, I work in mainstream mental health
care. I've been doing it for over 10 years.
So my day job is to work in a what's called a concurrent disorders outpatient clinic. So it
just means that people come to our clinic when they have concurrent addiction and mental disorders.
And so I get, I'm a psychologist, a clinical psychologist, and I get to work on an
interdisciplinary team with other psychologists and psychiatrists and addiction medicine
physicians and social workers and nurses and occupational therapists.
And what we do on a day to day basis is We help people through what's called a biopsychosocial lens or the biopsychosocial model.
So we look to help people using biological interventions, which is kind of your medications, but then also your psychosocial interventions, which is psychotherapy and trying to connect people to a wider community.
And so as a clinical psychologist, when someone calls me a shill, I laugh at that because I don't have prescriptive authority.
I can't prescribe medications.
So what I do every day is do psychotherapy and talk therapy.
And yes, I will sit with patients and do a consult with a psychiatrist if we think a medication is helpful.
But like you said, that's one tool in our toolbox and lots of factors need to come into play when we're deciding on how to help people with their treatment plan, including the patient.
They're obviously involved and steering how they want to proceed.
One aspect of influencer culture that we've identified as really compelling is the fact that they present with such certainty.
And one reason I've always appreciated actual experts is that they have a little more humility.
So in your book, you write, the current position of psychiatry is that antidepressant medications work, but that we are in the very early stages of understanding why they work and for whom.
How do you present this sort of information when you're up against people who just, like Elon Musk, who say, oh, these don't work, and then people take him for his word?
It's incredibly difficult.
It's an uphill battle, like you said, and we see that on social media.
It's almost like the algorithms are, well, we know this, they are primed, or they're set up to reward information that is oversimplified, emotion-laden, As you're saying and in many ways that's the complete opposite of what happens in academia or in peer-reviewed scientific papers where researchers are careful to use tentative language and a lot of nuance and they want to elucidate the complexity involved.
That's really tough and that's also what's important to do in the level of patient care too when we're providing informed consent on the risks and the benefits of treatments.
Absolutely forthright about that.
And so when a patient will hear nuances or read about nuances in the literature or in primary care or the healthcare system at large, that is a stark contrast to what you'll see on your Instagram reels or like you said with Elon Musk.
And I think in some ways we're disadvantaged because that certainty That is presented by health influencers is what appeals to our biases.
It's what it's what makes people in part fall for misinformation.
And I think that's very dangerous.
And so I guess to remedy that is kind of what I'm trying to do, what you're trying to do, what a lot of science communicators are trying to do, which is to say that's not how science works.
That's not how health care works.
Health care and science itself is super complex, especially in the area of mental health and chronic diseases, kind of more More broadly.
And there's so much we don't know about the nature of psychopathology and mental illness.
There's so much we don't know about how to improve our treatments.
And that's not a bad thing because science is constantly evolving.
But that's not what we get in the wellness industry.
They'll say that they know what they're talking about.
Mainstream mental health care doesn't.
We have the solution.
They don't.
And that is incredibly dangerous because it plays upon people's biases.
It plays upon poor science literacy skills and poor mental health literacy skills, unfortunately.
And with the influencers, their incentives to make a living are often tied with them going on to social media to talk
about these things.
But what you identified earlier is something I come across often with actual medical professionals, which is you have
a full-time job.
When I talk to someone like Danielle Bilardo in cardiology or Jen Gunter in OBGYN, these are people who are in clinics or hospital systems full-time and then You have to go do science communication later on, which is, from my understanding, for everyone I talk to, really challenging.
It's a time suck, but you decided to do it.
What made you want to battle misinformation online when you already have a pretty full day?
Thank you for that.
Well, number one, I'd say that it's sort of baked into our codes of ethics, at least for clinical psychologists in Canada.
One of the principles in our ethical codes is what's called responsibility to society.
And what that means is we need to be promoting and practicing evidence-based care and evidence-based practice.
In part, what that involves is debunking the opposite, which is debunking mental health
misinformation and pseudoscience.
So it's part of our codes of ethics.
On a more personal level, it started with me during my graduate study days because my
dissertation work and my research work, I came from an addictions lab and I was studying
the nature of cannabis addiction.
There's a whole subculture on cannabis addiction and the myths around that.
So I noticed even during my practicum placement that a lot of patients working in an addiction
clinic would have a lot of misconceived notions about the nature of cannabis addiction and
they hear it in popular culture too.
We would see people, we would see the minority, the substantial minority of people who do happen to develop a cannabis addiction.
The vast majority of people who Use cannabis won't, but there's a minority, a substantial minority that will.
We happen to see them in our clinic.
And so it was very hurtful for these people to hear things like, well, it's not a drug.
It's just natural.
You can't get addicted to it.
And so they didn't understand that.
And so that's sort of what motivated me at first to kind of write op-eds and articles trying to make clear what the cannabis addiction is versus say an opioid addiction or an alcohol addiction.
Then I got on social media.
And to be quite honest, I started to see that the misinformation space was so much incredibly larger than cannabis addiction.
It extended to addiction misinformation, mental health misinformation, and just health misinformation more broadly.
One of the biggest challenges I find is the question of intention.
Because you're always wondering or we're always wondering when we come across these anti-vax figures or people just spreading any sort of misinformation, do they really believe it?
Or do they start off kind of skeptical and get indoctrinated as they go?
Do they just see this as an opportunity to make money?
I think there's a broad range.
I think all those categories are filled by different people.
You write that a lot of people are more influenced by poor science literacy than moral
bankruptcy.
And I really appreciated that line.
How in this environment do you find effective science literacy gets taught or communicated?
I don't think we do a good job of that.
We know from large U.S.
surveys that the general public that poor science literacy is a problem.
Not many people know what probability is.
They often confuse concepts around the nature of causation and correlation versus causation, how to identify experiments and what that means.
And so I think we do need to do Much better job at teaching science literacy right from the ground up from elementary school through through the high school I think that's a big part of it.
We also know though that you know in the Misinformation literature that it's not poor science literacy skills is a huge component for why people may fall for misinformation But it's not the whole story.
It's not just an information deficit model we know that so many things also contribute to why people fall for misinformation and so there's a You know, there's personality proclivities.
There's reliance on certain thinking styles like an intuitive thinking style versus an analytical thinking style deriving from Daniel Kahneman's work.
You know, there's propensities toward conspiracy mentality or, you know, other personality traits like openness to experience.
There's other variables like a lack of intellectual humility.
What we're starting to kind of reveal here is a very complex interacting model for why people fall for misinformation.
It's not so straightforward.
It's not so black and white.
I think that's the picture that the underlying psychology is painting.
It's very complex.
There's a lot of interaction and it's hard to know exactly who will fall for it, but we know that all of these variables matter and I think we need to attend to them when we're trying to battle misinformation.
I have my own anecdote in this realm because I suffered from pretty severe anxiety disorder for a long time.
I had hundreds of panic attacks to put me in the hospital.
And there was a period where it was to the point of crippling.
And my general practitioner put me on a benzodiazepine.
Even then, I was wary of not wanting to get hooked on something or dependent on something.
But it was very helpful for me for about six months and then I was able to wean myself off.
During that time, I got pulled into Robert Whitaker's work.
I interviewed him.
I found him a very nice person to talk to, but I also recognize that Madden America has become pretty anti-psychiatry, which I think is unfortunate because it comes into that nuance.
I think they pull way too far on the over-medicalization, which can be a problem, but it also isn't a black or white issue.
In that space, And this is kind of similar to the influencer question we've been discussing.
One issue I see often is that influencers or non-experts like to diagnose either themselves or other people.
And I'm wondering if you can address why that can be a problem.
The problem with things like Mad in America and sort of the anti-psychiatry movement, it's like any piece of propaganda.
Like it'll take a kernel of truth and just hype it up to the point of, absurdity to the point that it becomes a cartoon and no
longer valid. So yes, you know, things like benzodiazepines are overdiagnosed and you know, they're not
maybe not the best thing to do for an anxiety disorder or panic disorder. You know, we at our
clinic, we spend a lot of time tapering people off of benzodiazepines and trying to figure out
other kinds of treatment.
And yeah, over-medicalization can be a problem.
The thing that the anti-psychiatry movement does though is it's a pseudo-scientific assault on public health because it will be launching its opinions and pitching its propaganda in places that allow it to thrive in a way that dodges scientific critique.
It's not happening in the mainstream top-tier tier medical journals for the most part, it's happening on
websites dedicated to flaming psychiatry or it's happening on social media and on blogs
and on forums and then amplified by influencers and amplified by guys again like Elon Musk
or Andrew Tait and so I think that's incredibly dangerous.
Back to your question, you said what's the harm of self-diagnosis or trying to diagnose
others?
It's like it would be in any kind of health discipline.
To diagnose a mental disorder, first of all, requires a license.
And that's because a license requires a modicum of training and standards.
And so in order to get a license, people need to have an educational background.
They need to have a clinical background.
They need to essentially know what they're doing so that they can pass the relevant tests so that they're legally allowed to diagnose.
People who don't do that, they're playing Dr. Google.
That's a very risky thing and it essentially boils down to non-experts not knowing what they don't know.
In the book, you write about how you deal with patients in terms of, for example, if someone comes to you and saying, I love homeopathy.
You don't automatically do what I would probably do, which is start to talk about why homeopathy cannot possibly work.
You write that your whole practice is a co-exploration, right?
You're not giving advice, but you're working through things with them rather than trying to dictate, which I love, and that is in that environment.
Online, What you do more effectively than most any other person who combats misinformation, I found, is you will simply screenshot what people say to you and use some sarcasm sometimes or share some credible information.
How do you balance those?
What is your method?
I mean, you don't have to talk too much about your clinical practice because I know that's with the patients.
How do you work with that very caring, empathetic figure that you must be in that environment as compared to suddenly going online and going into the trenches there and dealing with people who are just, I mean, pretty nasty to you?
I really appreciate you saying that because it's a very delicate dance and it's a hard balance to do.
One of the reasons that was a motivator for writing my book was that I'm not able to debunk mental health misinformation and pseudoscience so forthrightly.
And so kind of bluntly, in the context of clinical practice, that's not what we do.
My number one priority is to cultivate a therapeutic relationship and to kind of meet the patient where they're at.
And you know, the clinical space is not where you do that.
I'm wearing a different hat.
And so writing the book was, and science communication more generally, was an opportunity to put a different hat on and to help People with their mental health, so to speak, but more distally, you know, more at large in a way that kind of armed them with these mental health literacy skills, science literacy skills, teaching them the language of pseudoscientific grift and wellness grift.
Like you, it's a very difficult thing.
We don't have a map.
I don't know.
We don't necessarily have a guide of how to do it.
Other than I'm trying to be as professional as I can.
At the same time, the social media space is a very interesting hybrid of personal and professional lives, and we're learning more about how to navigate that.
But it's difficult, and it's going to come down to individual personalities.
Yeah, like you, you know, a lot of science communicators and me take a ton of trolling and a ton of harassment.
And I mean a ton.
I probably get, on average, 100 abusive messages a day across social media platforms.
Yeah, and I wish I was exaggerating that number.
Like, it's literally that much.
Learning how to cope with that is an important part, an important component of science communication skills.
What's helpful for science communicators, I think, is not taking this stuff personally.
Usually when people are attacking us, they're attacking an idealized idea or image of who they think we are.
And so I think just having that in mind can really help.
And then just using it as an educational opportunity to provide some good information.
One of the ironies I feel is that I understand, I already identified my issues with America's for-profit healthcare system.
You're in Canada, and even Matthew, my co-host, is in Canada.
And a lot of the American grievances around how fucked up our system is, which it is in some ways, and also really good in other ways, to be clear.
You're just operating in a different system.
There are up to 500,000 people in America who claim medical bankruptcy every single year.
I don't even think that's possible in Canada, unless maybe there's some private practices that I'm not aware of that people fall into.
So when people come at you with that argument of it's all about cost, how do you respond to that sort of argument when you live in a completely different system?
Again, it's tricky and I agree like the U.S.
system, I don't know as much about it but yeah, I think it's far more dire than the Canadian system.
That said, you know, the Canadian healthcare system still does have its problems.
I think that we do have one of the best healthcare systems in the world because we have, you know, my patients who come to our publicly funded healthcare system do get it for free and that's fantastic and we have an army of really skilled mental health professionals say who get to see them. At the same time,
there's large wait lists for clinics. Even in primary care, people get five to ten
minutes with the family physician.
You know, there still are these gaps in our healthcare systems. And I get that and I think
that that is the signal to improve these symptoms. I don't have the answers how to do that at
the social or systemic level. I don't want to feign expertise outside of my domain as
a clinical psychologist.
So, in part, I wrote the book to try to help people at the individual level to try to protect themselves from all the grift that they're hearing.
That's also, as you know, one of the reasons why people will turn to alternative medicine and kind of the wellness industry is because we do have these gaps in our healthcare systems and gaps in our knowledge with, say, with respect to the nature of mental illness.
With such gaps, it allows wellness grifters or pseudoscientific promoters to slither in and kind of open up for business.
One of my favorite lines in your book, and I would love for you to unpack this a little bit, teaching science as belief is in essence to teach pseudoscience.
Yes, because it speaks to the idea that science is a constantly iterative process.
You may see on social media when we talk about the idea of a scientific consensus, this really confuses people because they interpret that to believe that That we're the ones who are now falling prey, you know, we're teaching sciences, scientism or teaching science as a religion and that's just not the case.
Scientific consensus is not just believing the consensus of some random scientists or researchers.
Scientific consensus is the It's the result of a huge mountain body of scientific studies that all agree with and support each other.
For example, all of biology is supporting evolution, right?
Or we know that vaccines work and that they're safe because of all of these various scientific studies that agree with and support each other.
That doesn't mean that we're Believing and praising in vaccines, the spirit of the scientific method is to always be open-minded and to be open to the idea that you can have disconfirming evidence.
It needs to happen repeatedly and in a replicable way.
And so that's sort of what we mean versus the pseudo-scientific I guess orientation would be to teach belief it kind of back to what you said where Elon Musk is parroting certain ideas or or health influencers or Instagram influencers are saying that their treatments work and and they're really coming at it from from a place of belief.
Before we started recording, we talked a little bit about the challenges and pleasures of writing a book.
One thing I appreciate is you have this landscape before you where you have to either take different buckets of information that you've researched and studied for so long or go out and do new research to try to tell a complete story.
What did you learn about your own maybe mindset or discipline putting it all together in one place like this?
I'm not going to lie, it was super challenging.
It was super rewarding too.
I think the biggest learning curve for me, and I think most scientists or researchers who were in academia, is writing for, at least it was my goal for this book, was to write for a large general audience.
So you want it to be palatable or accessible or interesting and entertaining.
to a large audience so that they'll pick it up and then start to learn the messaging that you
want to convey. In order to do that you can't speak like an academic because it's too dry and boring
and so what you have to do is learn and this was a huge learning curve for me learn how to weave
story with science. I hope I did that.
that in a way that people will find enjoyable that still conveys the messages that I wanted
to convey, which is to really help people learn about mental health misinformation and
pseudoscience and protect themselves from it.
I think you did.
It's a fantastic book and you lay out a very compelling narrative.
I especially appreciate, as I flagged earlier, the humility in it of, again, just recognizing that as much as we've learned in medicine, I mean, I'm a fan of someone like Roy Porter's work, who's a medical historian.
And if you read through the millennia of how we've got here in terms of our understanding of biology and neuroscience, you realize that we've made a lot of advancements.
That's really important.
As a cancer survivor, I might not be here 10 years after cancer, 150 years ago.
But today, that will probably never bother me again.
And I was able to get past it relatively easily.
That's amazing.
And I think sometimes we're just short-sighted because we think everything should be fixed right away.
And that's just not how life or biology works, unfortunately.
We've talked about some of the challenges of trying to get across good information online.
How do you feel though, four years into the pandemic, and we've met a lot of new people in these spaces.
I know through my podcast, I know you've been on other podcasts, and there's this network of people who are trying to do this work.
Do you have any hopes for the future of science communication?
I try to remain optimistic.
It's the, I guess, the optimistic side of me.
And to be frank, I don't think things are going well right now, especially with the, you know, with the kind of aftermath or what we're seeing nowadays with COVID-19.
I think that just the constant revisionism that we've seen, the constant amplification of fringe experts and anti-vaccine movements, anti-psychiatry movements, wellness influencers, I think Again, it's a very uphill battle and that sucks to be honest because this really it's harmful It can affect people's health decisions.
It can affect people's lives and livelihood and it's dangerous And so I think the message though is rather than retreat from it.
I think we do need an army, so to speak, of science communicators that are more organized
and willing to go into the trenches, so to speak.
I get why people won't do it, and that's fair enough.
As we've talked about, there's a lot of trolling and harassment
that can come with the territory.
People can be chased off social media.
It can be very discombobulating to have that happen to people.
Science communication itself should be a subdiscipline, say, of various health disciplines
where we kind of teach people how to cope with harassment, how to teach science communication
in a more formalized way, and to have a stronger network
where we can go to those trenches and sort of fight misinformation
where it's kind of breeding.
Bye.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
We'll see you on Saturday for a brief, right here on the main feed next Thursday, or of course over on Patreon for
our Monday bonus episodes.
Thanks for watching.
Hi, are you on your way?
Yeah, or you know what?
It's a bit of a crisis here, because there's no train.
