The Dark Side of Wellness EXPOSED: How YOUR Mental Health is Being Exploited

Abhijit: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Rationable Conversations.

Today we have a really interesting deep dive into the world of mental health and the wellness industry, which is always a little bit dubious. So if you want to get into that kind of nonsense busting conversation you've reached the right place. We're gonna be busting open a whole bunch of myths and get the get the wellness industry where it hurts.

So right after the intro, let's get into it.

Abhijit: Hey everyone. Welcome to Rationable conversations. Today we have with us Dr. Jonathan Stea. He is calling from Calgary and he is a clinical psychologist and he has written a book, which I will let him introduce all about. Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us.

Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do and about the book you have recently published?

Jonathan Stea: My absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It was really a kind invitation. My, so I'm a full-time clinical psychologist. I've been doing this for over 10 years, working in a hospital setting where on an interdisciplinary team.

So I work with other psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, addiction medicine physicians, nurses. Occupational therapists, et cetera. And what we do is we're a very specialized clinic in our public health sector. And we treat people who experience what's called concurrent addiction and psychiatric disorder.

So meaning people that have moderate to severe addiction and they have another mental disorder they come to our clinic. And what I do. What my day job looks like is me doing individual therapy with people running groups group therapy doing case management, working with other Bonafide health professions on a person's treatment plan.

I sometimes supervise students and residents to help them. Learn and teach them psychotherapy. So that's been my passion. That's been my work for over 10 years. At the side, I also have an appointment at the, at our local University of Calgary as an adjunct assistant professor. So I do get to dip my toes in some research endeavors and sit on dissertation committees essentially for master's dissertations and doctoral dissertations, and get to see the cutting edge research that our wonderful students and faculty are doing, and i'd say over the last five years or so, I've really taken to science communication. And so that's my kind of third hat and that's where the book comes in.

It's interesting to know that from a perspective of a psychologist, one of our codes of ethics is called, the it's a fourth order principle on the Canadian Code of Ethics, it's called Responsibility to Society, and what that means is that we're ethically obligated to promote and practice evidence-based care.

The converse of that is also helping to teach about what non evidence-based care looks like in helping to essentially debunk misinformation and pseudoscience. So I really took that to heart and I've been doing that for over five years on social media. By writing op-eds and articles and doing news stories and various podcasts like this, trying to help people understand misinformation and pseudoscience so they can protect themselves.

After doing that for about five years or so and finding a wonderful skeptic community online in the science communication on online, people would always, frequently it would email me or my inboxes would be flooded with people asking me questions like, is this article legitimate? Is this guy a quack?

Is this therapy a pseudoscience? And after doing my best to try to help people answer these questions over the five years or so, I just really wanted to compile all that information and localize it into a book. And that's what my book is about, trying to really empower and embolden people to take their mental health, into their own hands and their health more generally by teaching people the language of pseudoscientific grift and the wellness industry so that they know when to spot and identify pseudoscience so that they know what to seek and what to avoid. There's a long-winded way of answering your question.

Abhijit: No, that's absolutely fine. We are we are well winded as it is. Ah, that's just, doesn't

Jonathan Stea: I like that.

Abhijit: But hell, we are on a podcast. We are meant to be a little bit long-winded, aren't we? But either way, that was not long-winded at all. That was right to the point. I, in fact and this is something that I am, I'm very passionate about, especially these days.

Two years ago I was diagnosed with A DHD, and about a decade ago, I was, now, almost a decade ago, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. These days, especially now that I have a science communication platform and I'm making these videos it's become very important for me to be able to communicate the importance of being aware about mental health.

And I think we can't have enough awareness about this because there's a lot of misinformation, as you said, and there are lots of myths that people have just propagated instead of people not it not, it's not about people who have been, purposefully misinforming people to make money off them. Of course, there are those people as well. I'm talking about the, the generational myths and urban legends and weird stories and belief systems around mental health, which have been carried down. Of course, India has got a bunch of them as it is, in fact, it's so deeply ingrained in so many of us, I was wondering if Canada as well has some form of these. Like for example, going to therapy is a form of weakness. If you are depressed, then you should just cheer up. You have such a great life while you're depressed, just watch some comedy, have a chat with a friend or something of that sort. Some of it of course, can help, but only to a certain extent.

These aren't. Permanent therapies or, these aren't ways to actually get better, but are there any of these really deeply ingrained myths about mental health that exist in Canada as well?

Jonathan Stea: Absolutely those kinds of mental health myths that you're talking about, they don't know any borders. It's a global phenomenon, unfortunately, as is wellness grift more generally. And incidentally, the wellness industry has a pretty rich history. These myths date back to at least over a century.

And what you're speaking to is these kinds of moralizing ideas that we find in the wellness industry. So that. If you have depression, say I mentioned in my book there's there's a really big influencer named Andrew Tate. He's popular in the, I think the UK and the us, but he's, yeah.

Really? I won't mince my words. He's a horrible guy. He said some horrible things and I quote him in my book by saying things like, if you have depression, he'll say you're quote unquote lazy, fat, weak, just derogatory, stigmatizing, horrible moralizing language. And what he's doing is he's parroting these old tropes that have been baked into the wellness industry and alternative medicine for a very long time.

If we can trace it back, like I mentioned, over a century where the kinds of attitudes that we see is such that there's an overemphasis on personal responsibility and a de-emphasis or a trivialization of other factors that matter when it comes to mental health and health more generally, such as downplaying the role of genetics, downplaying the role of social factors, and just plain old bad luck when it comes to things like the causes of health conditions and mental health conditions.

Incidentally as well that overemphasis of personal responsibility becomes distorted because personal responsibility does have a component in all treatments for health conditions, but it just needs to be equally distributed among other factors. But when wellness influencers talk about personal responsibility, they tend to overemphasize pseudoscientific approaches like a dietary protocol that doesn't work, or supplements that are useless or just flagrantly, pseudoscientific.

Psychotherapies, like past life regression therapy where they, for example, if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, a past life regression therapist will say, we need, it's based on the reincarnation hypothesis, so they'll say that your trauma in the current life, your based on a trauma that you experienced in a past life. So we need to have you undergo hypnosis to regress you all the way back to the 15th century or whatever it might be, when you were a servant and you experienced some form of trauma. And if you can resolve the trauma in that life, then the trauma in this current life will be resolved. We can laugh at the absurdity of it, and at the same time, I've known patients that have undergone this and there's a huge industry based on this. So that's the kind of stuff I'm hoping to protect people against by arming them with a kind of science literacy and mental health literacy skills to spot this grift.

Abhijit: And I That is fantastic. I'm so glad you're doing that.

The, now you mentioned Andrew Tate I think Jordan Peterson is in that club as well. Not only, and it's weird because he comes from a background of mental health. Like he's a psychiatrist, isn't he? Or is he a psych psychologist? So he's a psych. He's a, he's also a clinical psychologist, I think.

Jonathan Stea: Yes.

Abhijit: Yeah and I heard him say the most atrocious thing about A DHD. Did you hear what he has to say about A DHD by anytime? I didn't hear that. No, he basically minimizes it to the extent where he says that A DHD is basically it. What is, what happens when young boys are not allowed to, to have rough play.

So if so if your boys are not out there fighting in the dirt, then that's what ha and that's, so basically they get A DHD and they're just, they, you screw up their entire lives because of that. But what about the women? What about the boys who don't like playing rough? What about, I'm, yeah, I watched a little bit of WWE when I was a kid, but there's, but there's a, there's a there's an extent to that. I was never a very violent kid. And what do you do about that? I didn't want to climb trees, I didn't want to jump around in those kind of, with those kind of people and like other people climb trees. I'm gonna chill right down here. Thank you very much. I have no urge to break any bones, but it just like the entire concept of, I mean that in itself, that one thing that he said was so revealing to how incredibly archaic his beliefs are about mental health that I, honestly, there's nothing else that one can believe in when he talks about anything really. He is one big walking grift, as far as I'm concerned. It makes absolutely no sense to me. I don't know where he gets these ideas from.

Jonathan Stea: Unfortunately the pervasiveness of that kind of mental health misinformation is huge. And I can give you an example. So there was a recent study done on TikTok videos with the most popular TikTok videos about A DHD. So that's what the study looked like. It wanted to analyze the content of these popular videos about A DHD the ones that had videos that had advice giving or kind of information and what the researchers found, perhaps unsurprisingly was that about 50% of those videos were misleading. And what blows my mind about that though is that these videos were viewed millions of times and shared a hundred hundreds of thousands of times. Worse than that, I was very grateful to be invited onto a research team by a public health researcher named Marco Zenon.

And we essentially did a similar study where we replicated the methodology from that A DHD TikTok video study. So we took a sample of TikTok videos, the most popular ones on TikTok from a certain timeframes, it was October, 2021. We looked at the most popular videos that had a hashtag mental health attached to it.

So the top 1000 mental health related TikTok videos. And we analyzed the content of those videos and what we found was a similar rate, we found about 33% or one third of those videos offered advice or information or misleading, but those videos were viewed over a billion times. Oh, a billion. So we can't even, like that's a absurdly big number.

And so that's how wide this misinformation spread can go and that stuff, that information becomes baked into our popular culture, our social media, even our healthcare institutions. And what's really problematic about that is be is this idea called the Illusory Truth Effect, which is essentially that our brains aren't very good at differentiating familiarity from the truth.

So the more times that we see and hear misinformation, the more likely we are to believe it. That's just how our brains evolved, unfortunately. Yeah, and that's why debunking and science communication is so important that we can help challenge these myths.

Abhijit: Fantastic. I what are some of the real nasty ones that are out there?

What are the, your, what are the things that you are personally really peeved about? Gimme a couple of your top three or something of the worst ones.

Jonathan Stea: The, I'd say the worst ones for me, at least in the realm of mental health. I'll preface this also, lemme take a step back. So again, wellness Grift knows no, no borders.

That also applies to health disciplines because when I initially wrote the book, I thought that I'd be doing a deep dive into mental health related misinformation and pseudoscience, which I did. And there, there are some specific niche areas, but when I got there, I was quite surprised that almost all of the grift extends beyond mental health to cancer, to AIDS, to just general health, to glaucoma, like literally anything.

And that's because that's a hallmark of pseudoscience. Pseudoscience tends to pitch itself as a panacea or a cure all for all conditions. So the supplements that a grifter is trying to sell you, doesn't just help you with depression. It can also help you with COVID-19 and your, your cat's anxiety and whatever it might be, literally anything.

But within the specific area of mental health. What really drives me bonkers is essentially the Anti psychiatry movement. And I'll tell people what that means in a moment because those, the Anti Psychiatry movement is the source where we get a lot of these mental health myths.

So the Anti psychiatry movement dates back to at least the 1960s or so. And at that time it was a reaction to psychiatry's various missteps. And they were, they had a right to be angry because the discipline of psychiatry was over pathologizing minority groups. It was, there was this perceived arbitrariness of diagnosis.

There is, there was inhumane treatment of patients. And so the Anti psychiatry movement was a reaction to that. And it was pioneered by people like Thomas Sas RD Lang, who coined the term Anti Psychiatry in 1967. Michelle Fuko was one of its intellectual pillars. And so what these guys did was they had a right to be angry.

And the good news is that their, the Anti psychiatry movement at that time worked. It helped psychiatry get its act together and become a more humane discipline and a more scientific discipline. It closed many of those insane asylums as they were called. It moved psychiatric care to the community and into hospitals and the focus on the nature or the science of psychopathology was much more scientific. It focused on something called a bio-psychosocial model. It looks at the biological contributions as well as the psychological and social contributions. So by about the 1980s or so, the Anti psychiatry greatly diminished, but it didn't die though. It just transformed and lost its way. And nowadays we see. Remnants of the Antip psychiatry movement. It's alive and well, and it exists as a disorganized entity, largely on social media and in other non-peer reviewed sources like books and blogs and websites like in Madden America, which are dedicated to flaming psychiatry in a way that really dodges scientific critique.

We see guys like Andrew Tate parroting some of its tropes. Again, the people are lazy if they have depression. Guys like Elon Musk are parroting Anti psychiatry tropes when he takes two social media and posts that s SSRIs, which are antidepressant medications or more harmful than helpful and he'll, he's also attacked a DHD medications as well. And what these guys are doing. I'm not saying that they're necessarily active players in the antip psychiatry movement, but they are parroting the tropes that derive from the Antip psychiatry movement and. I think it's gotten even worse than that because we're now even seeing it take a political stage, particularly in the US with Robert F. Kennedy Jr's, MAHA Movement. We've seen SSRIs, again, misinformation about them become baked into our political institutions and their influencing policy. So when a mass shooting happens, say, what gets blamed is not guns, but SSRIs. And so I think back to your initial question, what are some of the more egregious examples of myths that I've seen?

Again they tend to derive from the Anti psychiatry movement and the two biggest ones that I've seen is just flat out mental illness denial. People will actively deny that mental illness exists. They'll say schizophrenia doesn't exist, depression doesn't exist. A DHD doesn't exist, et cetera. Then the other big one that we see is that all psychiatric medications are more harmful than helpful on average.

And the science just doesn't bear any of this out. They're just old, tired, easily debunked tropes that just don't die. And now they've really taken hold because of, of political power.

Abhijit: It's ridiculous. Like the, what's happening in the US is probably the most horrific thing one can possibly imagine.

It's reflected a lot in the, in in India as well. So when the Narendra Modi came onto power he has he's, anyways, he's propagated some rather strange science pseudoscientific ideas. Like the first plastic surgery was done for the elephant headed God Ganesh. Because, that is the first example of plastic surgery in the universe and therefore we pioneered it.

And that is of course, that, that has been. Has been going all over the place, but he also has popularized, in fact, no, he's not just popularized, he's added a tremendous amount of funding to a ministry called AYUSH, which is basically, it's an what do you call it, an abbreviation? Not really. Yes.

What do you call those things? Abbreviation. We didn't make it anyway. Nevermind. Acronym. Acronym. Acronym. That's the one, right? So it's an acronym of all the different pseudoscientific. Medication like remedies, like Unani, Ayurveda, yoga homeopathy, naturopathy, they've missed out on naturopathy in the name, but nevermind it, they still promote that stuff and they've actually increased a huge amount of funding into it.

So now they get to have a say in everything that happens. So when COVID came out, they started promoting different unani medications and homeopathic medications. And even Ayurvedic medications as preventatives for COVID. Not saying that we're insecure, it's just a supplement that will probably save you for it.

And it was just blatantly all over the place. So I understand what's happening in the US is similar, but it's even more horrific because this. Supposedly the person who is in charge of human health, human and health services health and human services, sorry. Has actually got absolutely zero idea about what he's talking about and it's absolutely horrific.

And hopefully this is not something that is going to spread across the rest of the world. But I do have a bad feeling about this even then.

Jonathan Stea: I am too worried about the US influence on, on.

In terms of spreading misinformation and pseudoscience. Yeah. Very

Abhijit: influential com country, everything's a drama in there.

Jonathan Stea: Oh, and putting RFK junior. As the head of US public health is like putting a flat earther as the head of NASA oh God. That's how egregious and bad it is.

Speaking about India, like when I was writing my book, this is before RFK Junior gained power, although I did write about him a bit in my book, but but yeah I was surprised to learn about how pseudoscience is baked into Indian institutions as well. 'Cause I did learn about Ayurveda and homeopathy in the context of the Indian system and I interviewed.

An Indian science communicator named Syriac Abby Phillips oh yeah. A liver doctor.

Abhijit: Yeah. It's awesome. I've interviewed him on my channel as well.

Jonathan Stea: He's fantastic. Yeah, he told me about, about how Ayurveda would treat various mental health conditions like bipolar disorder in just a flagrantly pseudoscientific way.

And one thing that I just more generally just by watching, the liver docs crusade against pseudoscience has been obviously inspiring to watch, but also, I guess tragic or heartbreaking, I don't know what the word is, but it's terrible that it gets targeted so much by various people that have a lot to lose in the Indian system.

And I don't think that's necessarily unique to India. Other science communicators get a ton of harassment and threats as one's platform grows, and I think that's a huge problem just in science communication more generally.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. In fact the of course, first of all, Dr. Phillips has got a very harsh tone about him, which I think is very necessary, especially considering the kind of pseudoscience that exists right now in, in the Indian in the Indian system. In the Indian culture when it comes to I with you're not allowed to talk about it, and if you're nice about it.

I try to be nice about it and as forgiving as possible, but sometimes you just gotta take a stick to it. And I think he does that extremely well. I had a fantastic interview with him a while back. And it's on my channel. I'll link in the bio, but it's but he's a fantastic person to talk to.

But what about the the Western, the wellness industry, what kind of things does it really promote? Like I've seen some stuff on Instagram. TikTok is banned in India, by the way, so maybe that's a good thing. I dunno, Instagram is just as popular though. But I've seen people who have gotten into a very, one of these spiritual awakening people who are really filled with the woo, and they're talking about sun gazing and grounding and stuff like that, especially like walking around barefoot on the ground, which seem to be, somehow supposed to help you. Get, I dunno, lose your anxiety, be, be less anxious maybe. But what kind of tropes are the have you heard about when it comes to these sorts of things and that you have written about?

Actually,

Jonathan Stea: yeah. The, one of the first, some people regard back up, there's a guy named Bernard McFadden who is some considered the. The Western World's first celebrity health influencer. He had a book called or a magazine line called Physical Culture in 1899, and he was known to strut around New York City barefoot so his souls could absorb the earth's energy and he'd sleep on the floor so that his, it could align with, he could align with the Earth's magnetic rhythm.

Again, just quackery. So these ideas are very old. The modern Instagram influencer is just inheriting these ideas and inheriting these tropes and parroting them without any awareness whatsoever. Yeah, they're very old. Sun gazing. The wellness industry is, there's a lot of buzzwords around the wellness industry, detoxing toxins.

You'll hear things like suntan lotion is harmful because of the, to toxins, so just expose yourself to the sun, stare at it with your eyes. Glasses are there's been influencers that say glasses are. Are unhelpful just absolute absurdities everywhere. And what I really learned in the book was that it's hard to debunk particular kinds of pseudoscientific treatments because, I dunno if it's in India, but there's a game here called a Whack-a-Mole.

It's like a carnival game and it pops up. And so you hit it and then the new one pops up. And that's like pseudoscience. So you can debunk one approach and then another one just pops up. And so for that reason, I really found it helpful to. Help people understand and address the underlying pseudoscientific features.

And so I've given a list in the book, say, of nine pseudoscientific warning signs or nine red flags that kind of apply broadly and that when we see and hear these warning. Signs, then we are more likely to have unearthed something that's pseudoscientific. So for example, I can talk about two or three of those warning signs.

Yeah, please do so one is the use of anecdotal evidence to support one's claims. And so what that means is if you go onto an Instagram page or an alternative medicine website. And you, it's a Grifters website. You'll see just testimonials everywhere. Yeah. This person says this treatment works, therefore it works well.

That's anecdotal evidence when we were, and we're very susceptible to anecdotal evidence because it preys upon one of the most powerful, logical fallacies that we have. It's a mouthful. It's called the post hawk ergo Proctor Hawk fallacy. Yeah. Which basically means just because something happened first that, and it then caused an event to later happen.

Yeah. But we know just because we shower every morning. And the sunrises doesn't mean the shower causes the sun rise. So that's the same idea, is that, anecdotal evidence, just we know that it confers very low quality evidence. We need higher scientific studies and higher quality evidence to support one's claims, like randomized controlled trials.

Pseudoscientific promoters will just splatter testimonials or anecdotal evidence everywhere. So that's just one warning sign. Another warning sign is using sy sounding language to, to sell someone's. Products or services?

Abhijit: Can I hear quantum? Quantum?

Jonathan Stea: That's my favorite and most hated one. Maybe a quantum paradox, right?

Yeah. I love it. And I hate it because that's the one, and I give an example of in the book there, there's a chiropractor who promotes, quantum neurological reset therapy to treat someone's trauma and then he'll just go on using quantum related language. And yeah, my friend and colleague Timothy Caulfield calls that idea Scienceploitation, which is a mix of science and exploitation using science and sound.

That's amazing. Science language. Yeah, exactly. So that's another one. I think the. Of those nine warning signs, the one that I think really is the most powerful one that separates the wheat from the chaff is something called claims divorced from the broader scientific literature. So what I mean by that is when someone is making a claim or a hypothesis that is just completely divorced, there's no mountains of scientific evidence to support it.

So for example, we can use homeopathy. Homeopathy, obviously purports the idea that, and a remedy becomes more effective as its active ingredient becomes diluted out of existence. Yeah, because water somehow remembers the properties of that active ingredient, which is just absurd because that claim is divorced from fundamental principles in pharmacology and even the laws of physics. So when you get people making those kinds of claims, it's just, that's a huge warning sign. The same with energy healing, where you have someone saying, like a reiki practitioner who can manipulate and balance your human energy fields around you, but we don't have human energy fields. The, there's no they're not anatomical structures. It violates. Principles in biology. Those claims are huge kind of pseudoscientific warning signs, obviously. And they don't just apply to health conditions in general. There, there are Instagram influencers in alternative medicine clinics who will use homeopathy and reiki to treat depression or post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety or A DHD or whatever it is.

And it's important that people know what these warning signs are because it's not only financial exploitation, it's emotional exploitation. And pseudoscience is not an innocent game because when people are, first of all, they can be directly harmed by some of these products, like supplements or whatever the pseudoscientific treatment is.

But it can also indirectly harm people by taking hard earned time and money and resources away from people. And when there are, when they're seeking. Pseudoscientific treatments, their mental health and health symptoms could be getting worse because they should be seeking evidence-based. Approaches and care.

Abhijit: Absolutely. Like one of the most horrible things I heard is, the Church of Scientology is, I think infamous when it comes to, it, it's the laughing stock of most of the religious world. Even the most devoutly religious of other religions would look at Scientology and say, ah, that's, those guys are crazy.

But the problem is that their central, like they use that whatever meter that they have that they're supposed to, tap onto your fingers or something of that sort E-meter. Yeah, either e-meter and using that meter. They're trying to tell you about how, what your energies and your, you basically trying to diagnose your mental health in certain aspects, and they suck you in and they pull you in by spreading, by propagating these ideas that.

Not only are your mental health problems, not what you have been told, but the entire world of psychiatry and psycho psychotherapy is an absolute farce that this is, this entire thing is one big conspiracy theory and that they are the authorities on actually helping people get better when it comes to mental health. I think even I'm, I can remember one of those interviews with Tom Cruise where he says that we are the authorities on psychotherapy, we are the authorities on mental health, and there have been people, and so they have, they're taking massive doses of different vitamin supplements. They're going through these extremely strenuous culty kind of rituals. And there have been people who have committed suicide because their symptoms haven't been resolved. They have not gotten any better, they've probably got worse. And of course, because of the kind of hold that they have on you, and they disconnect you from your loved ones because of their cult-like structure, you don't have any other. Support system to help you, rebound from bad episodes or to help you regain some sense of social bonding that could actually, you know, even in that you could benefit from. And it's absolutely horrific how these people are doing it. And I think I would probably call them a mental health cult kind of thing to kind that.

To put it softly, mildly, it's actually really dangerous. And then you have people like Goop, not people like Goop, but Gwyneth Paltrow who has been promoting things like Goop, where she's selling all sorts of random products that are supposed to make you feel a lot better about whatever else is happening in your life.

And it just, it is, as you said, taking people away, not only away from the treatment, but further into their disorders, which can definitely, which can be fatal. It's very really, it's very really dangerous for people. This isn't a laughing matter or, something that can, that MythBusters can sweep under the rug or something of that sort.

But I think that is one of the most important things that we need to fight in our world today is. Of course it's regular health as well so much of the wellness industry is about the regular health of people, but fighting the pseudoscience behind mental health is just as important.

It's just, it's astounding to the extent what that people go to fool their followers, basically. I can't really pinpoint. We have of course, Sadhguru and we have a lot of gurus in our in our country who instead of asking people to go and seek proper mental health therapy, which obviously they won't, they just tell them to go to a temple and do certain rituals and everything is going to be fine, and people keep doing that and getting worse and worse.

And they, it's just, it's awful. I'm, we are trying to do our level best to inform people, but how do you think the regular, everyday, or somebody who's watching this podcast, how, other than these three red flags that you've pointed out, what should they do as a positive thing to help themselves understand their mental health better understand whether they're actually going through something real, whether they have a certain problem, whether it's passing or whether it's a chronic thing, and what kind of help should they seek. Ideally, what do you think?

Jonathan Stea: I agree wholeheartedly with everything that you're saying.

And that's the, the major crux of my book is trying to make the case that alternative medicine and the wellness industry is making us sicker. It's, it's really it's an illusory kind of name. I'll answer that, but let me just touch on two things you mentioned, 'cause I want to go there for a moment.

You talked about Scientology. And that is one spoke on the wheel of this Antipsychiatry movement I've been talking about. You can see them on social media. There's a lot of, there's front, there's a front group called the CCHR, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, and they're a front group for the Scientology.

You go to their social media page and it's just all antipsychiatry propaganda. And in my book, I, I talk a bit about that. I talk about the Tom Cruise interview, and I actually went to one of the CCH R'S museums on holidays. I dragged my wife to one of the museums that they have, which I paid for in the end because it, you go outside and it's just these big red this big red label or attraction and it's called Psychiatry: An industry of Death. And then you walk in there and you just walk through this museum and it's just terrifying because the people, there's terrified faces that are lighting up all around you. And it's, there's a lot of Holocaust imagery and just pills on display, like pill bottles and how dangerous psychiatry is.

We only lasted 10 minutes 'cause it also smelled really bad. And then, like I mentioned, we were on holidays and my wife said, we need to get the hell outta there. So we did. But I got a photo when I put that photo in the book. So Scientology does play a role in the anti psychiatry movement. You mentioned goop as well.

Goop also recycles these old ideas and treatments. So for example, Gwyneth Paltrow was advertising on the Goop website coffee enemas for depression. Oh, so coffee enema is sticking coffee up someone's bum for depression.

Abhijit: I mean, I love coffee, but not that

Jonathan Stea: coffee is a friend, not an enema.

My friend Ryan. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. My friend Ryan Marino says that he's a toxicologist, but yeah, and coffee enemas aren't new either. They come from something called the Gerson Therapy, which was developed by a physician, Max Gerson in the 1930s for the treatment of degenerative diseases like cancer, and it's supposed to work through liver and intestinal detoxification. But the reality is that there is no medical theory or scientific body of evidence that coffee enemas or Gerson therapy works. And in fact, coffee enemas can be quite dangerous and result in burns and inflammation and even bacteria, in the bloodstream.

So not good. And goop is, is advertising this on their website and endorsed by holistic psychiatrist, Kelly Brogan who also just fell off the deep end and starts to promote wellness grift. So anyways, these ideas are not new, and then you ask what do people do about it? I wish I had the complete answer to that.

My role or my goal for the book was to approach it from the role of a clinical psychologist and a full-time clinician at the individual level. So I wanted to help people learn about the language of Pseudoscientific grift, the language of alternative medicine, and try to encourage people to improve or increase their science, literacy, and mental health literacy skills and adopt a kind of intellectual humility that's associated with the scientific spirit. And also try to tune into and upset the biases that filter the way in which we see the world. And that's the general approach that I try to make the case in the book. When it comes to, how do people know when they should seek bonafide help, it's to, the short answer is to try to seek it from bonafide sources. So these are real mental health professionals, and this is not a guarantee. The role of a regulatory body is to try to weed out grifters from non- grifters. So, on average, bodies like the American Psychological Association or the Canadian Psychological Association should have they're a body of experts and they should have helpful resources, fact sheets, referral programs.

I'm not sure about the system in India, but you want to be seeking bonafide clinical psychologists, social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, physicians that can offer a comprehensive psychological assessment. And you wanna spot red flags too. I devote the entire chapter nine of my book to answering the question that you've just had, which is questions that people can take with them to question their providers to size them up to see if they're in short a grifter or not.

Abhijit: Wonderful. And do you have is your book in audiobook form as well?

Jonathan Stea: Yes.

Abhijit: Wonderful. I will definitely give it a read because it's very hard for me to actually read anymore these days. I just listen to audio books these days, most of the time. But, and I will put a link in the bio for Jonathan's book.

It's a, I'm sure it's fantastic. And I'm really sorry I haven't read it yet, but I It is, it's okay. Literally it is the next book I'm going to read. I did ghostwrite a book. A couple of years ago, which I don't wanna put in a little shameless plug, but which I'll also link in the bio, but basically it was, I to understand and bring awareness to people about the mental health of adolescents in particular. So I've gone through first of all, the problems in India, especially where we have thousands of people to one psychiatrist. We don't have anywhere close to the actual number of psychiatrists we need for a population our size.

And we also don't have enough psychotherapists, which is it's an equivalent thing. And the people who are there, a lot of them, we don't know what their actual qualifications are and how good they might be. So the practice that I usually follow is I ask people whether they are seeing a therapist, whether they're seeing a psychiatrist, how their experience has been, and, if they're happy with that experience, I go there and just in, and I haven't mentioned this in the book or anything, I'm just mentioning that in my own personal experience, what I try to do is even with the psychiatrist who is helping me quite well and I'm on a good regimen of medicines and I've got a good therapist, every year or so, I go to another psychiatrist who is, who comes recommended. I give them a full lowdown of my, in my medical history and my mental health. And I ask them for their opinion on whether I'm on the right track, I'm on the right medication, I'm on the right therapeutic regimen, and so that I can, I get to verify every single step of the way and make sure that these doctors are actually employed in reputable hospitals and not in the Ayurvedic department.

Right on the homeopathic one for that matter, because hospitals would add that stuff.

Jonathan Stea: You, you make such a strong point too because again, the mind book tries to address it at the individual level. I don't have the answers at the social or policy level. And that's what's concerning because when people don't have access to evidence-based care, access and availability, that opens the door for pseudoscience promoters to slither in and kinda open for business.

Abhijit: Exactly. And I've heard that there are spiritual therapists as well. And that concerns me because I have I that that makes me wonder what the hell, what kinda stuff do you talk about? My aura was feeling a little down yesterday, like it turned from purple to a little bit brown. I dunno, I don't wanna make fun of it because I don't know enough about it, but at the same time, I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised if something like that actually popped up.

I don't, sometimes fact is far stranger than fiction. And I and also in, in the book that I wrote, I, it was, it has about 10 stories of teenagers going through, different aspects of different mental health conditions. So even if there's depression, can contain a quite a wide range of symptoms and effects.

So there could be just simple depression, there could be depression with self-harm. So we've tackled self-harm in a different story. We've tackled somebody who is discovering that they are trans. We've, we are discussing general anxiety disorder and A DHD, and so we've tried to cover as much of the breadth of mental health as possible.

And at the end of the day, though, I, one thing which I discovered, which is, which I think is fantastic, is one of the most important aspects of mental health, which I think is more accessible than anyone actually thinks is actually having a social support structure.

To have friends and family that you can count on, that you can talk to about these things, and actually, and people who you can rely on, who won't judge you for what you're saying, who won't guide you down the wrong path, but be there to understand you and accept you as you are. I think that is one of the most important things that we can have without necessarily having a huge sprawling mental health system, which I think is very important as well. But for a country that doesn't have one, I think having that social connection is extremely important. Of course, some people won't be able to have one of those, but I don't really know what to offer those people, but. As long as it's

Jonathan Stea: probably be more psychotherapy.

Like you you're speaking to a hallmark of mental health and it's hard when people don't have it. And we have to try to help people find ways to build that social network.

Abhijit: So it is possible then, yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I think that actually wraps things up quite nicely. Thank you so much for joining me, doctor.

It has been an absolute pleasure and a real eye-opening conversation. I'm definitely gonna listen to your book, everybody who's listening please buy his book, go to the link in the description and educate yourself more about what the what mental health really is and what the wellness people are trying to make of it.

And don't let them do it for Christ's sake. For Christ's sake, please. Oh, ironic for an atheist channel.

Jonathan Stea: A lot of fun and super important topic. So thanks so much for having me.

Abhijit: It is an absolute pleasure, jonathan, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everybody for joining us. If you really like this conversation, please give it a like, subscribe to the channel if you want to see more of this kinda stuff.

And until next time, be Rationable.