Can you pull someone out of the self-help rabbit hole?

You won’t easily talk someone out of a religious and/or self-help cult because the leaders innoculate new members against reason. To do so, they use the following:

• false expertise — former military, former entrepreneurs who found success only when they sold their “secret to success”, degrees in social science used to demonstrate knowledge of hard sciences, or leadership roles in seemingly legit churches because our society forces us to recognize most churches as legit,
• pseudo-science — a lack of general understanding about what makes something scientific, leaving people open to nonsense claims that quantum physics proves you can shoot energy out into the multiverse with your mind to get what you want (no, it doesn’t, and no, Einstein never said that),
• exclusivity — we’re sharing our secret with (paid) members only, and
• isolation — your friends and family don’t want you to be happy or successful — they’re jealous or ignorant.

One of my old friends got caught up in one of these groups, and now it’s increasing their anxiety and running them ragged. Their enforcer/reinforcer remains by their side frequently, so when anyone says that none of it is true or recommends a medical or psychiatric opinion, that voice of reason is ignored and subject to stone walls and smug remarks. The enforcer throws around their ancient engineering degree, which apparently didn’t work out for them, and their expected psychology degree. They also recite false or cherry-picked Einstein quotes. My friend thinks this is helping them, with no evidence of this help other than some positive feedback from the enforcer.

This person got involved with this group online. There are scant safeguards and warnings about pseudo-science and pseudo-psychology online. The FTC warns about specific business coaching scams but has no expanded warning about self-help or positivity coaching scams. I looked into psychology professional ethics because many self-help gurus, if credentialed at all, are psychologists. I checked the APA psychology ethics code and didn’t find much beyond general requirements for not doing harm, not engaging in conflicts of interest, and honesty. However, David J. Tobin, Ph.D., Director, Community Counseling at Gannon University, wrote a brief online article that applies these general principles to using self-help books in therapy, called bibliotherapy which has been common practice in the industry for decades. Tobin cautioned psychologists about referring clients to self-help books making claims “based on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical investigation.”

Articles referencing a 1978 unpublished APA paper mention proposed guidelines, but the APA ultimately fancied the idea of self-help, celebrated the profession’s participation, and nixed serious professional regulation. And what did subsequent commentators have to say? You win the prize if you guessed — failures are the user’s fault.

Another psychologist, Gerald Rosen, wrote about self-help and psychology in the 1990s, and he proposed guidelines for marketing claims made by authors and publishers with no ethical duties. Earlier, Rosen authored a couple of self-help books but had a change of heart when he wrote several articles against the practice that you can read at APA PsycNet for a small fee each. One article is available online as a pdf: Self-Help or Hype? chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://www.appstate.edu/~bromanfulksj/Rosen%20-%20Self-help%20or%20hype.pdf.

Basically, Rosen cautions against bibliotherapy because of the lack of a professional diagnosis, lack of patient monitoring for correct and consistent application, self-blaming for lack of success, unwarranted anger towards others perceived as impeding success, lack of author credentials and experience, lack of clinical research on the recommended treatments and lack of research on how the materials are used and to the extent there is available research it’s not taken seriously, influence by commercial considerations over professional standards.

Remember, Rosen wrote this before Oprah introduced Americans to her long line of dubious self-help gurus and before these people could increase audience and audience fixation using the Internet, YouTube, and other social media. However, in his 1993 article, he notes that proponents of manifesting theories, then known as mind power, used audio tapes to increase their influence over people. Too few psychologists took up Rosen’s work, and it’s hard to find anything from the profession online to stem the tide of self-help pseudo-science.

Rosen made an interesting point about self-care in general in his Self-Help or Hype? article. He noted that since the 1970s, the vision for medicine, in general, has been corporate-controlled self-care, including employee assistance programs, self-help groups, and do-it-yourself therapies. We’ve seen how well that has worked out. Our current corporate for-profit vision of health care encourages people to get involved with the seemingly cheaper but vastly profitable self-help industry to their detriment.

An aside: I’ve seen medical self-help in action when I’ve taken medical tests and was left to self-interpret results on physician group websites or be charged extra and scorned for asking for a telephone or other follow-up consultation. When I was younger, the doctor would call with the results, including interpretation, without prompting. This still happens but only in network television dramas. I’ve mentioned in prior posts that I diagnosed both my parents’ cancers long before their doctors either figured it out or communicated it to them. I do not recommend myself as a diagnostician, but sometimes these doctors wait so long that common sense and Internet searches are required. I might have fallen into a self-help group to help them. There are a lot of fake cancer treatments and cures out there. But I’m too oriented to professional regulation and stubborn to believe without proof.

I hope people seeking self-help get some real medical and mental health care, but many prefer the gurus, and I understand because it’s tough and expensive to get real mental health care, even with mental health parity requirements under the Affordable Care Act, ACA, and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, MHPAEA. The National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI, has highlighted the remaining disparities between physical and mental health coverage. State plans, Medicare, and VA plans may still limit mental health coverage, and the laws don’t require reimbursement rates at the same level.

I’ve known people covered by employer plans who avoided seeking mental health assistance, particularly under employee-assistance programs or EAP plans, for fear of disclosure to the employer — even though they are supposed to be confidential — people don’t trust them. There is some cause for mistrust. An employer can subpoena your EAP records and demand attendance records. In-house EAP counseling is sketchy and dependent on the ethics of the in-house team, and EAPs are not confidential when the employer makes the referral.

So, how do you talk someone down when they’ve been conned or forced into self-help groups and programs that aren’t helping them or harming them? I’m not sure you can, particularly when no caring family is involved. Medical and psychiatric advice are expensive and hard to come by. Many therapists embrace the self-help industry themselves and direct patients to it or fear disparaging it and cutting off a potential income stream or peer popularity. You may treat the situation like trying to persuade someone to leave a cult, and there’s an entire profession around that complex issue. In its early days, cult deprogramming sometimes involved kidnapping, which I wouldn’t want to get involved in or recommend. These days it’s far easier to find a cult leader than a deprogrammer, and experts recommend exit counseling involving people who were cult members but got out, therapists, lawyers, friends, and family to gently persuade the person back to reality.

I found an article in Psychology Today that lists some steps to help guide someone out of a cult. They recommend being aware of the mind control techniques used by cults, building trust, asking questions, staying positive, trying to connect the person to their old life in some way, share thoughts without being judgmental. When they’ve been anxious over group demands, I have asked my friend, “how is this helping you?” But they don’t seem to get it yet.

Once out of the group or the guru’s control, the person will still have the problems that caused them to get in, to begin with, and there’s little help in the capitalist system for that (see above).

To help vulnerable people avoid cults and counter the plethora of false self-help systems, realizing the mainstream media never messes with capitalism, I’d like to see more qualified YouTubers and social media influencers take on the self-help industry. A few already do, including Georgie Taylor or munecat, maybe not entirely qualified but funny, talented, and accurate, Dave Farina, a science teacher with a chemistry background, and James Jani, who once fell into the self-help rabbit hole himself. I have not but would like to see quantum physicists take on the misuse of their science. I’ve made some inquiries to professors and researchers that have gone unanswered, leaving me to wonder if the caché of explaining life and/or “reality” is part of what helps them get their funding for expensive particle experiments because they all know that applications to everyday life are tenuous at best.

What do you think?