The Checklist: Sniffing Out Mental Health And Self-Help Bull**it

Lowdown of the Substack Live with Drew Linsalata + some references

On Thursday, I sat down with

Drew Linsalata

to talk about how to become more savvy about sniffing out BS in the mental health space. We came up with a 9 points list of things to look out for, a BS checklist of sorts.

I also hope our conversation modelled a little bit of friction and how to disagree. Knowing how to do that is an important part of keeping an intellectual space thriving and dynamic with new ideas (I found out that Drew has a thing for the lizard brain 🦎🤷🏻‍♀️).

We mainly bashed bad practices of content creators and thought leaders who promote new ideas in self-help and psychotherapy sphere, although scientists do not go completely unscathed either.

Drew promised to invite me for a rematch as a guest on his Substack, and I can already say that on that occasion we shall reveal MagicToe™, the ultimate anxiety neuroscience-backed hack that we have been working on in secret.

At the end of this post, you will find a selection of references that pertain to the topic, as well as the papers to which we have referred in our conversation.

Stay tuned for MagicToe™, and here goes the checklist:

The Checklist (Becoming Mental-Health and Self-Help BS Savvy Checklist):

1. Look out for oversimplification: Reducing a complex human trait or behaviour to one single thing ( X is all down to [the autonomic states activation] [left/right hemisphere] [breathing in this or that way] [safety] [attachment] etc).

2. Look out for rigidity: claims stating that it is the ONLY way to change something or work through a mental health issue.

3. Look out for the content that starts with “I am a neuroscientist and …”: the fact that someone uses the appeal to authority to support whatever they are saying is a logical fallacy. Also, the fact that someone has studied neuroscience in the past does not grant them expert authority on everything related to neuroscience or to human nature.

4. Guru figures: Figures towards whom we tend to suspend our critical sense and disbelief and whom we assume to possess a deeper wisdom about everything or anything.

5. If you plan to reflect and adopt a claim or a statement think whether that same statement would sound as profound if you heard it from your friend of i a grocery store: Who is saying something has an effect on how we perceive it.

6. Look out for overconfidence: when someone is peddling BS, they are likely to sound overly confident in their statements and less likely to exercise epistemic humility by using phrases such as “we are not sure” or “we do not know”. Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be cautious about the general claims they make.

7. Be careful of different influencers agreeing on things and patting each other on the back: that does not mean that what they say automatically gains even more credibility. Some alternative motives might be involved.

8. Just because we know how it works doesn’t mean that we know how to work it: we might understand how something works in the brain but this does not necessarily have a therapeutic value

9. Science overreach: results from bona fide scientific studies can sometimes be overstretched and overgeneralised by scientists themselves. They might overstep the boundaries of their expertise and, through hubris or naivety, make claims that extend beyond what the scientific results really demonstrate.

References

• Pseudo-profound bullshit study Note that this study is still being peer-reviewed

• Putting the “mental” back in “mental disorders”: a perspective from research on fear and anxiety : I talked about this paper in the context of neuroscence not being the be-all and end-all of neither psychotherapy nor human experience

• Exploring the effects of prosocial and self-kindness interventions on mental health outcomes. : one example of science overreach I used - how one study from social neuroscience with a specific and limited experimental design can be used to over-extrapolate into general conclusions about mental health and complex human behaviours

• Telling Good Science From Bad a good post by a leading brain geneticist

• Why outdated theories persist : my post about Zombie theories in psychotherapy