I may be misreading, but it sounds like you’re offering this to people that work together? I have trouble seeing how someone, particularly a vulnerable individual, can freely consent given the combination of group dynamics and their livelihood being involved.
I find it concerning you list experience providing psychotherapy in clinical practice on your CV. These terms are strongly associated with someone who has specific training, a license, and is answerable to an ethics board. It may give a mistaken impression to someone who is considering working with you.
I can believe you're well-intentioned, but we don't need comments like this on HN. The guidelines [1] address this style of commenting in different ways:
Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I know it feels important to protect vulnerable people from being harmed by frauds, and related concerns. But we can safely assume that HN readers are reasonably competent and discerning adults, who can make up their own mind about these things.
I agree my reply would be improved if reframed to be less cross-examining, particularly given I was responding to two different comments at once. That said, the substance I raised is around services that were shared, and something a business owner in the mental health field can be fairly expected to receive feedback on.
I have benefited from psychedelics. I have also spent a lot of time with many survivors of severe domestic abuse / IPV / coercive control. Inducing psychedelic states in a workplace context in general would give me pause, but particularly so since it is likely to involve this population. The lifetime prevalence for US women is about 25%[1], and 10% for men[2], so this is a live issue in a workplace of any size.
I disagree that it's reasonable to expect readers to fully assess these service offerings. Issues around informed consent when doing psychological/spiritual work are complex and benefit from many perspectives. This is one of the reasons mental health is a regulated industry, with strict rules around client relationships, and ongoing ethics classes required to maintain licensure. If this were a piece of software impacting human health and I saw such potential technical issues, I would raise those as well.
I don’t believe this person is a fraud, and did not intend to give the impression I did. They are navigating a difficult and undeveloped regulatory landscape. There may be some social nuance I am missing, and I'm hoping this context improves the discussion.
Thanks for the reply. I completely agree this topic in which caution and rigour is necessary and I appreciate you expanding on your thoughts about that.
My main concern was the cross-examining style of your original comment and it seems like you accept that the comment could have been better in that regard. Many thanks.
I have nothing but respect for the work of moderating HN, I have no doubt it’s incredibly difficult. I also wonder if you’d be getting downvoted if more people realised who you are (as a non-mod who occasionally cites the rules and tries to be respectful while doing so, I know it isn’t a popular stance).
All that said, I too disagree with this point:
> But we can safely assume that HN readers are reasonably competent and discerning adults, who can make up their own mind about these things.
On the contrary, we can safely assume HN readers include teens and younger.
I simply opened the HN search, did not change any defaults, and searched “I am” then 14 and 12. I didn’t even click through the second page of each. Those posts are old (they were ordered by popularity by default) but the point stands.
Even regarding adults I must disagree. Bad actors often actively try to hide their actions, so finding and reporting what could be harmful is useful and a service to the community. We all have our blind spots and are gullible in certain areas, or may just be having a lazy day and not doing due diligence. The HN community is in no way immune to human faults and biases.
I’m just one data point but I didn’t find your parent post disrespectful or unreasonably negative, and their questions were valid. It didn’t feel like a post deserving of rebuff.
The commenter has replied and accepted that their comment could have been better with respect to the accusatory, cross-examination style, which was the main concern I had.
Regarding the age of HN users: yes I know it's not the case that 100% of participants are mature adults; when I make a comment like that I have to ask myself "do I really need to couch this with the concession that this is not a 100% watertight assumption?" Evidently yes :)
I think it's important to defend against hostile comments towards people sharing unconventional healing techniques on HN. People who share these concepts can be vulnerable to attack from people who feel very emboldened by their faith in mainstream approaches and allegiance to orthodoxy. I know it can be exasperating, trying to be heard when faced with attacks like that, no matter how well-intentioned, well-researched and conscientious you are. We don't want HN to be a place that allows hostile treatment towards marginal voices to go un-defended, because it's usually the case that transformative ideas start out as fringe ideas, and risk being lost altogether unless someone makes the effort to advocate for them, often at great personal cost.
1. BioMythic Breathwork is traditionally done in a group setting. We have done it both with teams as well as individual people. Some people don’t feel comfortable in a group setting, which is also fine — no pressure from us to participate.
2. I can understand that re confusing terms and will have my team update that - this is a newer CV that was compiled for a talk I’m giving with Paul Stamets and Rick Doblin and am happy for the feedback. I ran an underground clinic specifically because you couldn’t be licensed at that time.
I don’t say or intend to imply I’m licensed by anyone.
In fact, my personal healing came from well outside the mainstream which I found to be counter productive to the growth I was looking for.
I regularly consult and work with licensed folks, MDs, etc. either advising or who would refer people to me to support outside of what they could provide.
I no longer run the clinic and now advise, coach or help folks integrate experiences.
Also note to mods, this feels like a valid question — I wish people would question practitioners and approaches more in any healing field.
I recall reading every primary research paper I could find over a period of 90 days and then questioning my psychiatrist on their approaches and sort of getting no real answers.
The majority of our work has been a group of individuals who have opted in.
In the case of teams, some founders have asked if we could offer this during Covid or during the war starting in Ukraine and offered it as an interesting free activity. Not everyone came and the vibe felt fine.
But I can also see your concern about that and it’s valid. We have had a couple people that initially came and said they weren’t comfortable and it was totally fine for them to leave. It’s also been outside of work time so people choose to come on their own time.
The article you reference paints a distorted picture. The survey it’s reporting on is specifically limited to properties purchased to be flipped, not the entire market. It also lumps BlackRock with family owned LLCs. Quoting the original article:
“When combining closings between both larger, private equity and smaller, independent operations, investors accounted for 44% of the purchases of flips during the third quarter, the data reveals.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/big-investors-purchasing-mor...
I found the original submission worthwhile because it moves beyond these sorts of discussions. I didn't view it as focusing on zoning, but on highlighting how our local democratic structures themselves contribute to these issues. It has implications that go beyond just housing.
You could do a lot of good therapy around your boundaries of disclosing vulnerable information with a stranger. A good therapist, and the right therapist for you, would support you in not disclosing more than you’re comfortable with.
The cargo cult science part was and is a big concern of mine as well. In practice it hasn’t been much of an issue. Yoga or music is another analogy for this — the theory isn’t nearly as important as the experience, and a lot of this eventually comes down to something more like practice and intuition rather than theoretical models.
I used to have the same opinion and found my model has shifted quite a bit. There are a surprising lack of high quality studies on a lot of this. However, there’s really good data on a couple points: Therapy is likely to create significant, lasting improvements compared to placebo, and the more significant factor is therapeutic relationship, not modality.
There’s a lot of evidence for CBT because it’s a modality that is relatively easy to study, and so it’s studied a lot. It’s very structured and designed to produce results quickly. This doesn’t mean it’s superior in general.
Chronic psychological disorders are strongly correlated with early attachment issues and adverse childhood experiences. There are many ways to address this, but I would view a successful long term therapy as reprogramming a nervous system rather than talking to a friend or building new habits. In my experience, even many therapists fail to understand this distinction. Like hiring any skilled professional, finding the right match can be a time consuming process.
This study was immediately critiqued for distorted results due to the way the researchers interpreted the data.
"We used three different approaches to recode their data. Using Shaw and Porter's approach, we replicated their 70%. Using alternative approaches that distinguish between false beliefs and memories, we found 26-30% of subjects met the criteria for false memories. Moreover, we showed that laypeople’s understanding of remembering better aligns with the alternative coding approaches than with Shaw and Porter’s."
Not quite as bad as expected. This means that a bit more than half of those with false beliefs probably wouldn't testify to the absolute truth of their belief in court.
This is covered in the actual studies, which are quite readable if you're curious. The metric of concern is suicide attempts, and the rate is about the same between placebo and control groups. Long term followup data will be informative, particularly as they attempt to scale up the treatment.
Depressive effects aren't typically the greatest concern with this population. The risk to manage is traumatic material and sensations coming on more strongly afterward and overwhelming the person's capacity to regulate. This is one of the reasons the trauma informed psychotherapy aspect of the treatment is important.
DID in particular is sampled at about 1%. I’ve included an excerpt from the previous link that states this. That paper seems to align with clinical perspective, as it’s the same number that McLean Hospital uses in their public communication. McLean is a psychiatric teaching hospital as part of Harvard Medical. It is one of the few organizations in the country that specializes in treating severe trauma disorders.
“Random samples of the general population in Canada and Turkey (female sample, 50% of whom were illiterate) found a life-time prevalence of DD of 12.2% and 18.3% respectively. A general population study in New York State found a 1-year prevalence of 9.1% for the DD.2,32,39 In Canada and New York, prevalence of DID was 1.3% and 1.5% of the population. In Turkey, the lifetime prevalence of DID was 1.1%”
I sometimes wonder if my own PTSD is actually PTSD or if it doesn't count because I'm not a veteran or woman and it happened online.
It wasn't abuse; it was just an extremely stressful social and emotional situation that led to the loss of someone who was probably one of my closest friends, although I no longer remember who.
My understanding is this kind of memory manipulation appears in many studies and is fairly uncontroversial. Where this gets problematic is in the natural tendency to extrapolate this to other kinds of memory discussions, particularly around those of childhood trauma.
There’s also interesting research being done using brain scans to better understand the dissociative processes that are involved in trauma related memory.
Either way, these kinds of studies can distract from the underlying statistics, which indicate that if someone you know tells you they suspect they were abused as a child, there’s a fairly good probability they’re right. The CDC cites 1 in 4 girls in the United States as being sexually abused, for example.
I find it concerning you list experience providing psychotherapy in clinical practice on your CV. These terms are strongly associated with someone who has specific training, a license, and is answerable to an ethics board. It may give a mistaken impression to someone who is considering working with you.