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Clinical psychologist, author, and science communicator Jonathan Stea joins us to discuss why there’s such a huge market for pseudoscientific mental-health practices, the truth about diets for mental health, how to recognize misinformation and develop science literacy, and lots more. Behind the paywall, we get into TikTok therapists, what the science really says about supplements for mental health, the origins and harms of the anti-psychiatry movement, true vs. commodified mental health, genuinely evidence-based ways to improve mental health, and how our values relate to our health choices.
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Dr. Jonathan N. Stea is a full-time practicing clinical psychologist and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary. He’s a two-time winner of the University of Calgary’s Award for Excellence in Clinical Supervision and co-editor of the book Investigating Clinical Psychology: Pseudoscience, Fringe Science, and Controversies. Dr. Stea has published extensively, with regular contributions to Scientific American and Psychology Today, among other outlets, and has appeared on numerous mainstream television and radio shows, as well as podcasts. He was the 2022 recipient of the John G. Paterson Award from the Psychologists’ Association of Alberta, an annual award presented for the exceptional contribution to portraying psychological knowledge to the public.
His new book, MIND THE SCIENCE: SAVING YOUR MENTAL HEALTH FROM THE WELLNESS INDUSTRY, aims to educate and embolden those who wish to make informed decisions about their mental health, to improve science and mental health literacy, and to pull back the curtain on the devastating consequences of allowing pseudoscience promoters to target the vulnerable within our society. It’s a must-have for readers of popular science who are curious to understand what mental health really means, or who have been touched by mental illness in some way. It provides readers with a science-backed takedown of pseudoscience, as well as an understanding of its evolution, seduction, and solution. In part, this involves exposing the mental health misinformation that pervades healthcare, pop culture, social media, and the wellness industry. Connect with him on X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Jonathan’s new book, Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry
Jonathan’s Substack: Mind the Science Newsletter
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Jonathan, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so excited to talk with you today.
Jonathan Stea: I'm so excited as well. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking with you about your new book, Mind the Science: Saving your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, which is a great title, and so germane, I think, to this audience and such an important book. But first, before we get into all that, I'd love to have you tell us how you came to do the work you do now, both as a clinical psychologist and as a science communicator.
Jonathan Stea: Where do I start? Let's see. So I suppose I started in graduate school, so I was doing my dissertation work on the nature of cannabis addiction, actually. So I came from an addictions lab, and that was sort of the work that I was doing, was trying to see how people recovered from a cannabis addiction. And what I realized was that there was, in my periphery, kind of advertising for studies, I found that there was a lot of misinformation just around the nature of cannabis addiction, just kind of embedded in our culture.
There's not a lot of people that believed that it even existed in the first place. And then when I would see this clinically with patients who were experiencing it, they felt kind of stigmatized or dismayed by that, and very confused, too, because it would make them kind of question their own sanity and question their own experience. I decided to really just kind of tackle that topic at first, just trying to debunk myths and misinformation around cannabis addiction.
So I did that just by writing blogs, op-eds and articles, and then I got on social media doing a lot of that work, and realized that there was kind of a culture war kind of within cannabis community. But then I realized that misinformation around cannabis just extended well beyond cannabis, well beyond addiction, just to the area of mental health and really just health more generally. And I think that was how I got introduced to the science communication community. And you're part of that as well. And it's just a lot of work, it's a great community. There's a lot of harassment involved. There's a lot of great things involved. There's just so much to it. And so I think that's kind of what led to my path, at least in science communication.
Back to my clinical work. I've been working full time in a hospital setting as a clinician for over a decade in, we call, a concurrent disorders clinic. So that means that patients who come to our clinic experience moderate to severe concurrent addiction and psychiatric disorders. And so I'm doing individual therapy and group therapy and case management. And I work on a really great interdisciplinary team with other psychologists and social workers and psychiatrists and addiction medicine physicians. And I get to supervise students in residence.
Yeah, and I have an appointment as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary. So I get to watch students, sit on masters and dissertation committees and get really nervous about their pioneering work, kind of at the cutting edge of research. So that's a fun thing too. So those are kind of my three hats that I wear.
Christy Harrison: Wow. Yeah, that's a lot. And that makes a lot of sense why you would be sort of interested in helping refute some of that misinformation, given everything you see in your clinic. I'm sure that's incredibly difficult work. And from what you shared in the book too, it sounds like a lot of people coming into your clinic have a lot of misinformation they've absorbed about mental health and wellness in general and ways to treat mental health that are sort of hindering them and keeping them from getting better or coping or using medications that are available to them and things like that.
I'm curious, starting with the 10,000 foot view I guess, there's this huge multibillion dollar market for pseudoscientific mental health practices and you've seen that in such a intimate way with your patients. Why do you think that market exists both from this macro level and then also on the micro level of the people you've worked with? What draws them to this industry?
Jonathan Stea: Yeah, that's such an amazing question because there's so many moving parts to it. I think pseudoscience and wellness aren't going anywhere, unfortunately. I think they've always kind of been with us. It's sort of exacerbated now with social media. There's so many psychological, social, cultural and economic forces at work in its service and so that's why I don't think it's really going anywhere. And that's why what I try to do in my book is to just try to help the person at the individual level be able to protect themselves and defend themselves against this onslaught of misinformation that we're kind of seeing.
A main message is we can't blame anyone for seeking alternatives because that would just be absurd. Because we all know that there's gaps in our knowledge, there's gaps in our treatments, and there's gaps in our healthcare systems. And so even our best evidence based treatments that we have for mental health and just for health more generally don't help many people. That's a really sad and unfortunate reality because there's gaps in our knowledge, and we just wish we had a magic wand where we could really help anyone or everyone.
And so that's a real reason why people do seek alternatives is because they are dissatisfied with mainstream mental health care. And so I get that, especially as a practicing clinical psychologist who's not able to help all of my patients either. So I empathize and I really get it. There's other reasons, too, why people are seduced by alternative medicine or they're seduced by pseudoscience. If we just ask people why, there's research literature on it, they'll say that in some ways, some of the treatments are more congruent with their own philosophical orientations or beliefs. It just feels like it gels with them more.
They'll say that mainstream medicine doesn't treat them as a whole person. They don't get enough time spent with their family physicians. It's only a five minute appointment, or they're waiting a year or longer for specialist appointments. They'll say they want to avoid side effects of medications. All of these are just very understandable and justifiable reasons. And of course, we also have the problem where there's a lot of just access and availability of evidence based treatments can be limited, too. And so all of these kind of factors are just kind of coming together in this perfect storm, so to speak. And it just allows wellness grifters, say, to kind of slither in.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I want to circle back later maybe to talk more about this idea of alternative medicine being in line with people's values, because that's been something that's been on my mind lately, and I'm curious your thoughts on that. Also, I'd love to talk a little bit about some of the specific mental health and wellness offerings out there that are so problematic.
In my work as a dietitian specializing mostly in disordered eating and eating disorders, I see so many wellness influencers out there claiming that we can cure our mental health issues with specific diets and even that people can cure eating disorders with specific diets. And, like, if you just take out the "addictive" foods or you get into a really regimented way of eating that you can prevent or cure eating disorders, which is so problematic and actually really worsens the problem for so many people.
And then there's also this issue of gut health and all the hype around gut health and mental health and the idea that your gut, and by extension, what you eat, is almost entirely responsible for your mental health. Why is that not true, that specific diets can cure or prevent mental health issues? And what do you see the claims being made that you want to refute?
Jonathan Stea: I mean, it's just infuriating, right? I mean, I think you nailed it, especially in the, what we call eating disorders population or people who experience eating disorders. Because, you know as a dietitian, that area is just so rife with misinformation. And I think, in my opinion, the reason that that is the case is because it's such a new, promising area of research. It's so limited right now, and the obscurity of which just lends itself perfectly at the hands of fake experts, so to speak.
Because you see on Instagram reels or you'll see on TikTok that you get all of these outrageous claims that this specific diet or this specific regimen or protocol can help treat any number of, you know, whether it's eating disorders or depression or post traumatic stress disorder. And what we're seeing is just gross oversimplifications and just false promises. And I think that's what it really comes down to. I think we just don't know about that as much. If the research was there, that'd be fantastic, because then we'd be able to incorporate these things into clinical practice guidelines. We'd be able to use them on the front line, and we would all love for that to happen, because going back to the idea that our treatments are limited, but at the end of the day, they're false promises. And so that's what's problematic.
What we're seeing at the end of the day is it's either grifters kind of marketing their claims to, they may have their own kind of reasons for doing that, but they're either making money or maybe they really believe in their products. I think for a lot, just kind of pseudoscience more generally, what I've noticed is that it's really this elevation of anecdotal evidence that is sort of the beating heart of pseudo scientific claims. So they'll say that it worked for one person and therefore we can generalize, and then this diet can now work for all. And I think that's really problematic because, well, that's just sort of research design 101. We know that there comes a lot of perils with anecdotal evidence, and we can't base our treatment recommendations and our clinical practice guidelines on anecdotal evidence. And so I think that drives a lot of this misinformation.
Christy Harrison: It's tricky, right? You talk in the book about the need to listen to people's lived experience and honor that. And I trust what people are saying about themselves. And then also the importance of science and really solid evidence and not just relying on anecdotal evidence. It's interesting to me also as someone who is a clinician and who really cares about people's lived experience and sees some of the limitations and flaws in the conventional healthcare system.
One argument sometimes people make in favor of alternative medicine is like, "Well, this is my lived experience and doctors just don't know and doctors have of dismissed me and made me feel unheard." And this was my experience too, right? I felt like I was not served in the conventional healthcare system 20 years ago when I was first struggling to get diagnosed for all these different conditions that I have and I want to honor people's lived experience. And if they feel like something works for them, it's hard to, especially if someone comes into work with me or something and they're really wedded to something and they say, "This has really helped me, this works for me." Far be it for me to rip that away from them.
And then also I might see it as, just from my perspective, knowing the science and sort of what's out there in wellness culture, see it as a harmful form of misinformation that might be perhaps actually holding someone back from, for example, true eating disorder recovery or maybe in your experience from true mental health or sort of improving mental health and well being. I’m just interested in that piece of it, how you navigate lived experience with your understanding of where we are with the science on certain things like diets or supplements or things like that.
Jonathan Stea: It's such a fascinating topic and a delicate one, and it's really hard to navigate. It's in part why I chose to write the book, because it was a different kind of patient advocacy work than I can do in the role of clinician. As a science communicator and on social media, I'm able to just kind of debunk pseudo scientific claims. I'm not doing that in the, in the therapy room. And so we do have to validate patients' lived experience. We have to respect patient autonomy. We have to co-explore their beliefs and their experiences together because one of the evidence based principles that we know that works, which I think alternative medicine clumsily stumbles upon is cultivating therapeutic relationships so that people can feel seen and validated and heard. That's one thing mainstream medicine can learn from alternative medicine.
I think it's more of a systemic issue. It doesn't speak to the merit or the effectiveness of alternative medicine treatments per se. I think it's the practitioners themselves who get the space to do that. It just so happens they're not necessarily trained to do that. That's kind of the forte of psychologists and mental health professionals, we're trained to kind of do that, cultivating those what we call nonspecific therapeutic factors. So cultivating therapeutic relationships, showing empathy, expressing empathy, fostering motivation, fostering hope, that kind of stuff I think alternative medicine kind of gets right if we want to steal man, that argument.
At the same time, you had Timothy Caulfield as a guest on your podcast. He's a friend of mine, and he's an excellent advocate in this area. And he wrote a paper, and I mention it in the book on this idea called the two hats fallacy. I love it because it's a description of the ethical quagmire that alternative medicine gets itself into, which is that when we're presenting or offering treatments that informed consent, we don't get the option, so to speak, of switching between two hats.
We don't get to wear an evidence based hat and a pseudoscience hat. We only get to wear one hat. It's not the one adorned with pseudoscience, the evidence based hat, because that is what's baked into our codes of ethics and our legal standards of practice for all of our bona fide health professions. And so we need to practice from an evidence based perspective. What that means is that we need to be very transparent and upfront at the informed consent process with respect to the risks and benefits of treatments. And so that means being honest about the science.
And so, as an example, if someone were to ask me, like a patient, if I could offer them energy healing because it's worked for them in the past, I would explore that with them, like why they think it's helpful, I would respect their autonomy to kind of seek that elsewhere. I couldn't ethically offer that because if I did, which I wouldn't do, I'd have to say, based on the science and based on the risks and benefits profile, that energy healing does not work beyond the placebo effect, and that there are other evidence based treatments that are more likely to work for depression or for whatever kind of presentation they're coming with. And so I still don't think it's ethical. But that's kind of the ethical quagmire because, of course, these treatments are offered all the time anyway by all sorts of health professionals. That's a real problem.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And they're offered by people who have legitimate healthcare credentials sometimes, too, which I think makes it so tricky for people in the public who don't really understand kind of what's going on behind the scenes and are just coming in and saying, like, "Okay, what letters does this person have after their name? Is this a credential I can trust?" If it's someone who, like Kelly Brogan, who you talk about in your book, who has an MD or other people like that, it's very hard to discern where they're crossing ethical lines and maybe not offering evidence based care.
Jonathan Stea: Absolutely. And there's a kind of irony to that idea, too, because we want to respect patient autonomy, but we're not respecting patient autonomy if we're not honest and forthright about the science and about the evidence base behind these treatments. Because if we have a, say, wellness grifter or even someone with credentials with an MD behind them saying that energy healing works well, that's offering a false choice. That's not a real choice. That's not actually respecting patient autonomy because we're not being honest about it.
And then I think the other layer of complexity here, though, is that I don't necessarily think these people offering, say, energy healing treatments are lying about it. I think they actually believe it. And that's a real problem because they think they're being honest and they think they're respecting patient autonomy, but they're nothing reading the science or they're dismissing it or they're ignoring it because that's not the case. Because a choice between a scientific treatment or an evidence based treatment and a pseudo scientific treatment is not really a choice if you're not forthright and honest about that. And especially if the clinician can't tell the difference between a pseudoscientific treatment and one that isn't. And if the patient can’t either, that's an illusory choice.
Christy Harrison: I mean, and it is interesting to think about that difference between science and pseudoscience given sort of the wellness culture framing of science. It's so interesting how selective wellness culture can be and wellness practitioners can be about when they want to use the veneer of science to coat their offerings and when they want to just reject science outright. And so you get this sort of interesting mix of like, "Well, science is just funded by big pharma and we can't trust it" or, "Science hasn't caught up with what we know from lived experience and age, wisdom or whatever, and the science will be there in ten or 20 years but it's not there now" or whatever.
And then this desire to sort of take up any science that might possibly support whatever wellness practice the person is offering, like, "Oh, look, this one study in rats or this small study, and ten volunteers who knew what they were getting and had pre existing beliefs about this practice" or whatever "showed some benefit." So critical thinking about science and really science literacy, as you say in the book, and mental health literacy is so important.
Obviously, your book goes into this so much more in depth, and we can't do a whole class on mental health or science literacy here, but what are some key points that you think people should understand or that you would like people to understand about science literacy and mental health literacy and bring into their sort of dealings with any online health and wellness professionals?
Jonathan Stea: Totally. I love that. And if I can just go back to your point, because I just think it's so important, is that you're really identifying one of those pseudo scientific warning signs, which I also think that's part of science literacy, is we want people to know when we're trying to figure out what pseudoscience even is, it's not like single clear criterion that draws the distinction between one or the other. We're really trying to look for this constellation of warning signs so that identifying pseudoscience becomes more of a probabilistic endeavor.
So the more warning signs that we see and that we hear, the more likely we are that we've unearthed something pseudo scientific. And so you mentioned some. I mentioned one sort of elevating anecdotal evidence. You mentioned one, this kind of cherry picking or using studies to focus on confirmation of their beliefs or their claims rather than refutation. So those are important skills. I think that we want people to learn science literacy.
So I'm kind of adopting that idea that we want people to know that part of knowing what science means knowing what pseudoscience is. We need to know what it looks like. And so I think I want to adopt that kind of idea into science literacy, but more properly, it's actually been defined. Again, there's sort of a search literature on it. So it's really about these three components, which is, we want to, as best as we can, kind of just gain information about what we call the scientific consensus. That can be a loaded term, but just basically trying to possess knowledge about scientific concepts and ideas and vocabulary.
It also involves understanding things like scientific practices, so kind of statistics and probability and correlation and causation, that kind of stuff, and then understanding science as a social process. So science is done by humans, for humans. And so people, I think it can be helpful to understand the role of peer review and the nature of funding and conflicts of interest, etcetera. And so I get that this stuff can be daunting because it's daunting for me, too.
And the idea is that to develop science literacy skills doesn't mean becoming an expert in science per se, because that's really an impossible task. Even experts are only experts in a very narrowly, highly specialized domain. It just means developing science literacy just means becoming familiar with how science works, becoming familiar with credible sources and scientific consensus and ideas. It also, I think, at the heart of it really means adopting the intellectual humility that's associated with the scientific spirit. And it's sort of finding this balance between trusting expertise, which in and of itself is hard, and remaining skeptical about any kind of scientific claims.
And I think when we do that, the reason that it's so important is that when we develop science literacy skills, we're more likely to protect ourselves from the kind of grift that we've been talking about. So when you see an Instagram reel that's saying this particular diet or protocol is going to cure your eating disorder, well, if you know just a bit about how science works, and you go to the source and you say, well maybe that was just a case study or it wasn't a randomized control trial. It just kind of gets your spidey senses up. But I think that's important. We want to encourage skepticism over this stuff rather than just kind of buying into it right off the bat.
And similarly, mental health literacy is like science literacy, but kind of as it applies to mental health, it's a bit more like. It also involves knowing how to obtain and maintain positive mental health. It involves knowing when, where, and how to get help and kind of understanding the nature of mental disorders and their treatments.
But again, no one pops out of the womb as science or mental health literate. It's sort of a skill to be practiced over time. And I think when you take a step back, it's really just about again putting your spidey senses up and being skeptical about claims that we see that purport to be able to treat any and all health conditions, including our mental health.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. That is so important, that sort of skepticism about anything that claims to be a panacea, that it can treat all of these mental disorders and issues, it can also improve your health and fix your gut and fix your skin and every bodily system is purported to be connected. That's a big red flag.
Jonathan Stea: Yeah. That's another pseudo scientific red flag. Yeah. Call it the absence of boundary conditions, which means there's no boundaries. It's like the treatment can just treat everything and anything like you said, from Covid-19 to glaucoma to, I don't know, laziness like anything.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, totally. That's so important to know. And I like what you said about intellectual humility as being a part of it, too, because I see so little intellectual humility in wellness grifters or just wellness promoters and influencers and stuff that are holding themselves out as experts, even though they don't have real credentials. And in some cases they do have real credentials, but they've sort of crossed over into this weird pseudoscientific landscape. But there's just such a confidence in how they talk about things.
I've shared here before personally that I have had to really dial back my sort of black and white framing of things and in my earlier days as a science communicator, especially around topics of weight and health, I think I got really fired up and I got really also pulled into the social media algorithm that rewards that kind of black and white messaging and said some things in ways that were less nuanced than the science warranted or than I really believe if I really step back from it. Now five years later, I'm sort of looking at some of that earlier work and trying to nuance it more and say there need to be qualifying words here and there needs to be some more context and nuance to this. It's not just some little meme on social media. There's actually a lot more to it.
And that's a piece of this too, right? Is that the landscape in which so many mental health and wellness people are operating is social media, is this media environment that rewards that sort of controversial hot take, the black and white framing, the lack of nuance so it can be hard sometimes to distinguish between people who are credentialed and really offering good evidence based information, but kind of distilling it down into soundbites for social media and those who are sort of speaking with this unwarranted confidence that something is totally not based in scientific evidence or reality. And it can be complicated and hard to discern that in this media environment where everybody is pushed to be kind of a more strident version of themselves.
Jonathan Stea: I can relate so much to you and just kind of what you said there. It highlights the challenge of science communication in and of itself, because we're up against exactly what you're saying. Kind of these soundbites, these emotion laden, entertaining memes that have a kernel of truth, much like propaganda, and then just blown out of proportion to propagate claims and misinformation very hard because most science communicators are coming from, at least in their training, they're coming from academia at some level where academic writing is very, very different. It's like it's almost the opposite, where we're always putting in tentative words and tentative claims. Everything's tentative. We can't even make a conclusive point. So it's almost the opposite.
And then you get on social media and you just see the, again, you just see the polarizing view of it. And so it's hard to navigate as a science communicator because, number one, we're trained to be tentative. But then if we're always so nuanced and tentative, that's the ultimate goal. At the same time, the reality is that we do want to game the algorithms to some extent so that our messages could be heard. But we need to do it in a way that still honors truth, so to speak. And that is, that's very difficult, in my opinion.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I agree. It's a really hard line to walk, and it's one that I think you fall on either side of it. It can sort of result in getting lost in the algorithm or getting sort of, I think sometimes with science communication, we run the risk of being so strident about "this is bullshit" or whatever. "This is fluff. This is bunk." We end up sort of alienating people who might buy into something and finding a way to be compassionate about and sort of offer compassion towards the people who are engaging in some sort of practice, while also refuting the claims of the people promoting that practice is a really tricky art, I think, to this work.
Jonathan Stea: And it doesn't help when were being harassed and trolled on top of that.
Christy Harrison: Which really makes our nervous systems go on high alert and puts us in that place where black and white thinking probably becomes easier.
Jonathan Stea: I'm being facetious about it and kind of joking, but the reason I highlight that too is because it is part of the landscape. If we look at a friend of mine is Peter Hotez. He was Time's Health 100. He was nominated to be in their magazine and done such amazing work for vaccine development. And he wrote a book called The Rise of Anti-Science where he's really just calling out the anti-vaccine movement. And people have shown up at this guy's house. He's had to take a social media break and for good reason, which he was public about. And he's not the only one.
There was a Nature article that came out that said during Covid-19 there was a big survey of science communicators and it just really showed that harassment and trolling and death threats, it was part of the territory. And I think it's really unfortunate because it chased a lot of voices that we need away and for good reason. You can't blame anyone for that. But it just, I think it's important to know even just for new science communicators that can come with the territory. And I don't think we do a good job, even from a mental health perspective, to try to teach people how to manage and cope with that, even though they shouldn't have to. But the reality is that you want to be walking into it eyes wide open.
Christy Harrison: It's a scary thing. Do you have any advice or recommendations for people who are dealing with that? Both kind of from a mental health perspective and also practically?
Jonathan Stea: Yeah, there's a couple of things. So number one, social support is huge, to kind of recognize you're not alone in it. I know that kind of sounds cliche, but it's not if you actually reach out to people because you'll see that so many other people have gone through it. I've gone through it. Timothy Caulfield's gone through it. So many people go through it. And I think even just asking, if you know someone that's gone through it, just asking them in their DM's or just reaching out on some level I think can really just ease the burden and it can be kind of liberating and then it kind of helps take away the personal aspect to it, which I think, at least from a psychological perspective, can really get people down, because I think that when we weren't designed at all just to be yelled at every day, to receive 100 messages of just disparaging comments towards you and just taking abuse and so our brains aren't good at handling that and for good reason, because normally we would leave any situation where that's happening. It's not good for our mental health.
And for a lot of reasons, it can trigger things like core beliefs that we have about ourselves. It can trigger all sorts of things in us that, that aren't good, and they can be detrimental to mental health. I think a helpful tip for that, though, is to recognize that for a lot of these folks and a lot of the comments that you're receiving, they're not attacking you, they're attacking an idea, and they're also attacking an idea of who they think you are. The vast majority don't even know who you are. They're attacking this social media image, and it's really, when it comes down to it, a form of tribalism.
It's almost like sports teams kind of yelling at each other. They're not, they're not attacking the personal life of the Boston Bruins fan. It's not a personal thing. And I think that when people can find a way just to keep that at the forefront of their mind and depersonalize that experience, it can be a bit more helpful because you realize that it's not really about you at all. It's about kind of them and their headspace. That's what you're experiencing. Unfortunately, it's just the nature of online trolling. There's a whole literature on that, too. And the reasons that people troll and the reasons that people harass. And at the end of the day, it's really not about you.
Christy Harrison: Depersonalizing. I love that analogy, too, to sports teams. Because I think about how sports teams can be sometimes, in some cases violent, like soccer hooligans and stuff, really beating each other up and engaging in really terrible things. And it can seem personal because there's trash talk and people picking on each other for perceived personal things, but it's just projection. It's not like it's actually anything to do with the other team. It's just because they're associated with the other team. It's not anything to do with that person. It's because they're associated with that other team.
And that's the case for online trolling and harassment and bullying, too. That people are picking on a projection of who they think you are, and they might be saying things that feel really personal. I mean, I think a lot of women on the Internet, especially experience this, where people will say things about your looks or about whatever, how you are as a mother. It's just like they pick on things that feel very personal. But actually, it's nothing to do with you. Trash talk is more effective when people can personalize it in some way. And so it's just about that. It's not actually a reflection on who you are.
Jonathan Stea: Exactly. Yeah. It's just feeding into our tribalistic tendencies, just like the sports team or politics. And then, unfortunately, that happens in science because science gets politicized.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And science communication can even have some of that within the ranks. People sort of attacking each other for perceived transgressions or doing things wrong. I mean, certainly in my field of eating disorders, there's been a lot of that, and it's painful and hard to deal with. And, yeah, like you said, it kind of comes with the territory of being in these public spaces where we're just being projected upon all the time.
Jonathan Stea: Yes. And I would say I received my fair share. I mentioned Timothy Caulfield, I mentioned Peter Hotez and you. But I would like to also say, I have a number of female science communicator friends and colleagues, and I think they get it, like you said, kind of ten times worse. It's horrible what they've shared, what they experience, and the nature of it is different. There's so much misogyny coming out. There's so much attacking looks, et cetera.
Strangely, kind of a running theme among my social media platform is that I grew my hair out. And so now I have what they call a man bun. And people are always coming after me for this man bun. I was never objectified and kind of had someone attack my looks until I had this hair thing. And it gave me just a glimmer of insight into maybe what some women feel just having their looks attacked. But it's all just ludicrous.
Christy Harrison: It is. And it's hard to deal with. And I appreciate you being open about that, because it is from a mental health perspective, it makes this work harder. Speaking about Internet and social media stuff, but switching gears a little bit, I'm curious to talk to you about TikTok therapists. There was a recent report in Vox, I don't know if you saw it, that therapists on social media are doing brand deals and merch and direct subscriptions and things like that, and they can make eight or nine times the money they would make seeing clients. There's people quoted in the piece that we're making up to $900,000 a year for some therapists, and clearly this is a lucrative path for therapists.
Then there's the flip side of it, which I think we're all in the sort of science communication field, really aware of, and especially you in the mental health communication field, for clients, for people on the receiving end of this sort of TikTok ified mental health information can be really problematic. I have a lot of friends who are therapists, and I can't tell you how many of them have told me people are now coming to me so sure that they have a specific diagnosis because of TikTok, because they've really identified with, and maybe developed a parasocial relationship with this particular creator who is talking about this particular condition.
And the work of therapy now becomes even more complicated because you have to sort of untangle that identification that people have with a particular diagnosis that might not even actually be true. So I'm curious, from your perspective, what are some of the risks of getting your mental health advice from TikTok or other social media platforms, and if there are any benefits that you see, too, that could perhaps be gotten in other ways?
Jonathan Stea: Yeah, that is a huge issue, social media in general. But TikTok especially.
