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Hey, buddy. Welcome to the podcast. Appreciate you all being here. And do check it all out at DrRoo.com. Everything is there. Don't forget the Rumble channel as well. Today, we're welcoming Dr. Andrew Hartz, founder and president of Open Therapy Institute. OpenTherapyInstitute.org. And I think you sent me something in social media and I was like, well, I'm intrigued. Tell me more about this. Yeah. Was it the chart with like overlooked issues on it?
The whole idea that we're – here's the thought bubble over my head when I thought about the Open Therapy Institute. I thought, oh, my God, taking care of brains. And souls and spirits are extremely, it's an extremely complicated, extremely difficult process where we have to like, be sure everyone's getting their needs met this way? I mean, it was so shocking to me that this has to be said that you need an open therapy institute. So tell me more about it.
Well, I mean, the level of extreme political bias that's emerged over the past decade in the field is just totally shocking. And I can give you a couple examples. I mean, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Institute. published an article that whiteness is an incurable parasitic condition that white people acquire at birth. The president of the APA, American Psychological Association, Division of Psychoanalysis, said every therapy should center Palestinian liberation.
um the the kind of work I mean I it's it's it's totally unhinged stuff but she was elected by the members and held her position till the end of her term uh I I know there's a Both the Soviets and the Nazis have sorts of positions. Levkov, was that the guy's name in the Russian leadership?
We've seen through those prisms and, oh, that went so well. That really helped things. That made things better for people. Well, it's actually getting into the therapy room. I mean, in Chicago, you know, the Free Pest published this article that. But therapists made a list that if you're a Zionist therapist, they were not going to refer, you know, Zionist therapists, they weren't going to refer any patients to you under any circumstances. There's a. Another example, there's an inpatient.
psychiatric facility in new york and they say on their website to this day as far as i'm aware that they're one of their goals is to queer the therapeutic space by breaking down the gender binary and centering queerness and these these are p these are patients who've had a psychotic break and they're in need of attention. And there's these totally non-evidence-based political agendas that are coming into the therapy room. It's one thing to be, I don't want to.
suggests that non-attention to these important issues for some people is the right the right way to approach this but that to to adulterate the process where you are focused on that as a primary issue any different than if it were eye color or hair color or something. It just doesn't make sense. I mean, to be attuned and empathic to what the patient is experiencing.
And to have had maybe some personal experience, cultural experience, cultural sensitivity, language, understanding, all those things, good. Yes, bring them to the room, for sure. You have them override the process. I can't even get my head around it. Yeah, and they're very rigid.
preordained scripts that come into how the therapy sessions are often run where you know if you're in this category you're a victim if you're in this category you're an oppressor and every therapy will start with you know I'm a white male therapist and you're this patient and how do you feel about that? You know, and it's detracting from the ability to have a human relationship with someone that's focused on helping them.
Speaking of which, the addiction field has been, oh my God, so overrun by idiots. And I have talked to recently some young people that have made it off the streets and successfully into recovery from their opiate addiction. And this one guy told me that every, you know, there's a multi-billion dollar outreach program in Los Angeles where they give them the drugs and the needles and, you know, and also they can steal for whatever they need, you know, and there's...
Anyway, it's a ridiculous infrastructure. But he said that every helping person that he interacted with towards the end of his time there, which was now three or four years ago. on the street said patted him on the back and said well you know once once we get communism in here you won't have this problem it's you're you're a victim of capitalism i'm sorry but this will go away as soon as we get some socialism communism in place Right. That was it. That was their position.
Brain disorder called opiate. Life-threatening, complicated brain disorder. I mean, for people that aren't in the mental health field, I think that they just have no idea how radicalized it's gotten. Going on quite this insanely. That's why when you alerted me, I was like, oh, no, not enough. You know, the COVID put my, you know, the medicine part on alert what was going on there. We learned how crazy that was.
But I don't think people have yet been alerted to what's going on in mental health per se. So go ahead. Well, a lot of people, a lot of graduate students reach out to the Open Therapy Institute. They can't get through their training program. You know, people are dropping out or not going into the field because the training programs in particular, they're so bombarded with ideology that they can't even get through it if they're not on board. So it's a big risk.
And so tell me about where the Open Therapy Institute came from and what you're doing and why this might be an antidote, if not some sort of, what's the word I'm looking for, a bromide for what's ailing us. Well, I initially started just by writing about some of the extreme bias that was happening and writing articles. And then I would get contacted by patients. They were in other.
fields, other areas. Maybe they were graduate students or they could be lawyers or work for a finance institution. And they were describing similar things that they were experiencing in their workplaces. You know, aggressive trainings, false accusations. bias, you know, the same types of political politicization. And I kind of started to realize there are a lot of people dealing with a lot of these related issues where they struggle to find support and they might be self-censoring.
They might be attacked for their views or they get canceled. And so we started kind of trying to look at... What are some of these issues that the field just isn't addressing because of political bias that people might be experiencing more? And we started mapping them out, you know, men's issues, masculinity issues. A lot of conservatives are very mistrustful. Therapy that might have a left-leaning bias. A lot of religious patients.
and just kind of mapping out these issues so we wanted to highlight issues that the field isn't addressing because of bias and talk about how to do better care in those areas it just you know taking care of people high quality medical services. I don't understand why that's not tough enough to be able to deliver that for people.
I would have thought, I was doing some research yesterday, and I thought about your program as being sort of helpful and good in the sense that people get their needs met, and isn't that an important thing? But I was reading about, was it Poland, communist Poland or communist Yugoslavia or something? And the leader, what was the guy, the solidarity leader? Was it Clavel? Clavel? What's that his name? Not sure. In any event, this is something in the 70s and 80s.
And they were able to dismantle communism in that country. He said, which I'd never really read before, by creating parallel... universes, essentially. You know, parallel economies, parallel delivery systems, parallel. And he says eventually that crumbles them because these parallel systems are, of course, serving people's needs with what they want, what they need.
It's necessary. And I thought that was interesting. I thought before this was just sort of nice to see people sort of gathering with common interests and needs, but it's also an important way to fight some of the excesses off.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that and I hear I get contact. We get contact patients all the time. People are looking for a therapist. How do I find a therapist? How do I know it's somebody that I can trust? And I think and a lot of the people that contact us, I mean, are liberal. You know, it's not just people. It's not just right wingers. It's moderates, it's centrists, it's liberals, anybody who's self-censoring or in a really politicized environment. Most people want an open therapist. Right.
And but the fact that if they just find somebody online, they can't tell. And I know somebody as an example, I have a colleague who's a psychiatrist. He saw a patient. Really self-censoring, really isolated. It took him four months before he brought up to the therapist, you know what, I'm really self-censoring. I feel really isolated because of my views, because he was worried that the therapist was going to do the same thing that other people had done in his life.
you know blame him and judge him for his views um so it shows how much people have internalized the censorship culture and it and it enters the therapy room wow it it is it we are there right i mean wow It's incredible that we are – I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. I mean, science itself has become adulterated by weird thinking, and it's just so –
It's phenomenal to me to see it in this country. We thought we had some sort of buffer against some of this. So do you have a theory about what's going on here? like what are we into is this just well-meaning people going too far is this academics doing what they do which is again because they live in an ivory tower they're not amongst us they just try to find ways to
distinguish themselves? What really is going on? Well, I think it's a lot of, you'll know this, I think it's a lot of all or nothing thinking. You know, when you go through an education system where from kindergarten all the way through the end of your PhD, you only hear arguments on one side of the spectrum.
You know, it leads to this idea that one side is always right and always good and the other side is always bad and always wrong. And you get to the point where people can't even tolerate thinking about issues as having pros and cons.
They can't even tolerate it. You see this with kids where the idea of having a speaker at their school with a different view, and sometimes they're crying, they're shaking, they need... support because they can't get it's it's inducing this kind of inability to tolerate pros and cons and it it once that gets entrenched i think it has a tendency to to spiral um and people can really lash out viciously because they can't think about
Almost every issue in academia or anywhere else has pros and cons. There's evidence for it, there's evidence against it, and there's a discussion. And people really can't emotionally tolerate that anymore. I think it, yeah. And which is the opposite of mental health, right? I mean, one of the evidence-based treatments that has really come on in recent decades is exposure therapies of various types and resiliency building.
building skills in the face of exposure to tolerably stressful and tolerably frustrating circumstances. What are they doing with that? What are they doing with that part? It's not happening. I mean, that was one of the things that I made for Heterodox Academy, you know, this worksheet that was just kind of like.
This is all or nothing thinking. This is dialectical thinking when you think about pros and cons. And then just having them practice. It's like pick an issue, pick three pros, three cons, and something you're uncertain about. And people should be doing that in every class.
on every issue. When I was a professor, that was one of the grading criteria of papers. You had to say, pros and cons and um it's just not being taught and i think then you become it makes adults fragile and emotionally dysregulated and i think miserable other than creating There's sort of parallel opportunities like Open Academy, Open Therapy. What else do we need to do? Do we need to go out and try to...
I mean, do we, I think standing up for free speech is a critical piece of all this because, you know, it's very easy then to go to, we should be silencing what we don't agree with. Yeah. Well, I mean. So thinking about self-censorship, because a lot of this is driven by a censorship culture and people self-censor. So we just our last workshop for therapists that we offered was about self-censorship as a clinical issue.
What causes it? How does it impact mental health symptoms? What can therapists do about it? And one of the things that we're finding is the central symptom, one of the primary symptoms of self-censorship is isolation. Oh, sure. Say what you feel. Even if you have friends, they don't know what your beliefs are. There's this isolation with it. And often the first step, it's not.
trying to take everybody on single-handedly it's trying to find people you can connect to to get social support so they're like-minded or open-minded people and those connections that social capital is i think central and sometimes the first point contact is a therapist. It's a confidential space where you can actually talk about
figure out what you think about things, what you feel comfortable saying, and then you can start to maybe find a few people and it spirals and hope in a positive way. And you can connect to more and more people and start to start to be yourself, really. We'll see you next time. The sound of joy which takes you back to that family wedding. But remotely, sending money is a way to be there for those you love, no matter the distance. Stay close when you're far apart.
Send money worldwide with the Remitly app. Remitly UK Limited is authorized and regulated by the FCA. Are there populations for whom this has been good or whom are reporting that this is a worthwhile frame? Is this way of doing therapy? Is anybody saying, oh, I'm so glad I went to a therapist and here she presented themselves and really empowering. And although again, I don't know the empowerment is necessarily what we need in therapy all the time, but go ahead.
Wait, but you mean people who've come to the Open Therapy Institute? I'm going to ask about that later. I mean, you know, we've gone this whole direction. Is it helping anybody? Right. The people pushing this new politicized frame of therapy. seem remarkably uninterested in whether or not it helps people. There's often like...
They're not even doing the research to say these interventions are effective or it's having a positive impact. There's plenty of reason to think it's harmful. I mean, for for people, I mean. They're focused on minority populations, but a lot of them, it breeds sense of powerlessness or paranoia or hopelessness.
or anger that can end up making them miserable. And the groups that are attacked don't seem to benefit either. But it's interesting how little they're researching these models to try to demonstrate that they're helpful. And one of the things that I've noticed lately about some of these extremes is it has a, I'm going to use the word,
It's somewhat inaccurate, but it has kind of a delusional quality to it. And I'm not pointing fingers at anybody. I'm just saying that the fact that we've lived... you know 90 years without preoccupations in the daily discourse about nazis and now all of a sudden they come up every 10 minutes that That used to only happen that the discussion and preoccupation about, let's say, Nazis would only come up, only be brought up by psychotic patients. It was the only time it could be 30, 40 years ago.
Now we're another half a century out and it's coming up all over the place. And these excesses. including the specific symptoms of preoccupying about certain people being something that begs no alternative and they can't be talked out of. But the whole thing has this sort of excessive, let's put excessive, maybe that's a more accurate word, but it tends towards delusion when you try to talk to people about it. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like the...
the cluster B personality disorder worldview. Yeah. Yes, it is. And I missed. I mean, I watched that, you know, I worked in a psychiatric hospital for 30 years, and I watched the cluster B come on. I just watched it. It's just, we used to have A, B, and C diagnoses all over the place, and all of a sudden, only cluster B by early 90s.
And it was led by Borderline. Borderline were the leaders. And they also were the ones that at the time were taking advantage of the legal system. They were like running amok with the legal system. And the lawyers, the legal system kind of figured out what was happening finally.
But now a lot of them are the judges and the lawyers and things that were the ones sort of misusing the system at that point. And then the narcissists and the sociopaths, and I would argue we sort of elevated sociopaths to a special status. 60s and 70s. I mean, what were rock stars, but just young kids, sociopathic kids learn to play the guitar so they could act out. That's mostly what that was. Some of them were musicians, but mostly what that was.
sociopaths finding a way to be able to have their way. And so I... I've been, let's talk about cluster B and what might be going on with that and what it is for people too. Well, you were on an inpatient unit. So that's exactly the dynamic that resonates with me looking at culture because what would happen.
on inpatient units is one patient, maybe with a cluster B diagnosis, maybe borderline, would start framing the staff. Some staff are all good. Others are all bad. And they could pull the whole unit into. this split where everybody's fighting with each other all the time.
We dealt with that all the time. It's why, just so people understand, the way addicts split too, not just cluster B, they both populations do, and addicts operate on a cluster B sort of level. That's sort of how they get through life. And some of them are cluster B also. But you have to have a completely unified front of people. the more the merrier, that all have, that say exactly the same thing, that lock arms and aren't split by the patients.
This idea that we pat people on the back with these conditions and go, oh, you know, you're going to be fine. Here's some heroin. It's like that is manslaughter. That's murder, really, is what it is. We keep going. Splitting, you say. Well, and that the leaders have to maintain dialectical thinking. They have to hold for the patient that you can have pros and cons, but we have a certain...
rules that are fair that we're going to stick to. And what I see now, maybe in particular, it's at universities or other places where the borderline... Students or maybe even faculty suck the whole university into this split and no one at the top is holding fair, consistent rules and dialectical thinking and, you know, those types of ideas. And it's.
regular dysregulating for everyone let's talk about what can be done about it i mean we are on one hand you know we're using this term pejoratively i i have deep empathy for people with cluster b disorders they suffer as much as they suffer, and it's an awful condition. But we shouldn't be gratifying it. It's the opposite of what they need. What do we do?
Well, part of it, well, I mean, part of it, I think, is like what I said before about teaching dialectical thinking from high school. At least I think every student should be learning that skill and practicing it. Another thing, too, is what you were saying about building alternative institutions. People have to have a way where they can connect to other people that are open minded and like minded, because when they're afraid and self censoring, it's really hard.
get out of that alone. There's so many echoes of the Cultural Revolution in Mao, the psychologists, the Soviet psychologists that, you know... You know, that pathologized anybody who didn't totally embrace a communist ideology. Just so many crazy things have been done through history. I would argue that in addition to teaching a dialectic, we better teach history.
Because people have lost track of that completely. Yeah. And well, and I mean, another thing for the mental health field is keeping a patient centered. worldview. I mean, that was a consensus idea is that therapists had to be patient centered. Your goal is to you're there to help the patient not impose an ideology on them. And the idea. Imposing an ideology on the patient was considered not only counter therapeutic, but unethical. And the idea that.
national bodies of therapists are supporting what I would say is politicized non-patient-centered therapy is really alarming. Do patients need to start to sue people for these excesses? I mean, it's maybe the only answer. I think that it's it's hard to the problem goes so beyond the therapists who are bringing this into session. And there are.
I think the way it enters sessions is really complicated. I think what happens usually is that a patient will see that a therapist is really politicized and they leave. It's hard to win those types of lawsuits depending on what they are. And then the bigger problem is they control the training institutes. So nobody can get through training without being bombarded with this stuff and it weeds people out. I really think that therapists probably...
Need to be trained in how to work with people who have different socio political values, and we need to modify the training system so that they're actually thinking about in a respectful way, different worldviews. Isn't that how it was always done? Yeah, I mean, it used to be that was the that was the appeal of cultural competency training was you treat people to work with lots of different people with different worldviews. But in practice, cultural competency has just become another form of DE.
And it's this very narrow worldview on race, gender and sexual orientation that's taught. And it doesn't take political values or religious views into account. So talk to me about that page you have with all the surrounding sort of biases. Yeah. The whole thing, how you came to that and, you know, was it something that flew right out of your pen onto the page? You have to really sit down with a group and think about it.
We really we really thought about it and we really took time with it. I mean, I'll tell you, one of the key points when it started to come into focus was I was contacted by a really fantastic CBT researcher, Dean McKay, who's at Fordham. And he specializes in OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. And people with OCD, as you may know, they...
ruminate on whatever's socially taboo, and they'll have these repetitive intrusive thoughts on whatever's socially taboo. Now, historically, that's been stuff about sex or aggression or cleanliness or things like that. But increasingly, what he was seeing... was people with OCD where their ruminations were about saying or doing something that was going to be attacked as racist or sexist and get them canceled. Makes perfect sense. Perfect sense. So then the therapy is now...
talking explicitly around cancel culture, around PC culture, and the taboo thoughts and feelings they may have, or if they could survive saying or doing something like that. And we started to recognize, okay, wait. That same formulation can affect people with social anxiety, where their anxiety about being judged latches onto this for people with depression or and just think more broadly about how the socio political context. right now is really impacting patients. But a lot of patients think,
They're not supposed to talk about politics and therapy or they're not supposed to talk about. So they just exclude it. And then we started looking at other things. I mean, especially people who self-censor or people who were canceled or falsely accused. of bias or harassment.
People who get discriminated against at work through DEI policies. We're thinking about university students, anti-white racial aggression, victims of anti-white racial aggression who have often this really profound internalized stigma. about what they went through and are often very shy to share it. And they worry that they're going to be judged for telling their story. So we just started outlining these groups and noticing most of these issues. There's no academic.
on these topics. There's no trainings for therapists on these topics and there's no services. So patients with these issues don't know where to find somebody. And if they find just a random therapist online, there's actually a a chance that they're extremely biased and judgmental towards them, or at the very least, they don't know anything about it. So even if they're nice, they're not going to necessarily know how to help. And you put research and scholarship...
uh, in your flow chart. Yeah. You guys funding that? How's that working? Right now, our step one is we're writing a report of about 50 to 60 of these issues. And we have faculty and clinicians writing short summaries on each topic. some references just to put them on the map. And we'll have a report just overviewing these issues. We're hoping that that can be a launching point for trainings for therapists and for funding for more formal.
academic research am i correct that this happened kind of quickly I'm becoming aware of it and it feels quick because I just recently came to my consciousness. The Open Therapy Institute or the issues that were... This movement, I mean, you brought me all the way across the finish line, but the fact that this was going on...
I mean, was it going on eight years ago? I mean, I guess it was slowly going on. Well, I was in training. I started my PhD program in 2013, and I didn't notice that much politicization at that time. 2014 and 2015 it picked up um and then 2017 it was a different world and by the end of my training i was struggling to get through it. But when I would accurately describe what I was seeing in my programs, it didn't sound believable to people. I remember saying, you know, they think...
that if you call for genocide against a non-protected group, that's okay. But if you commit a microaggression against a protected group, that's a big problem. And it just didn't sound plausible to people. Then... The presidents of the universities on the Senate floor said exactly that in front of everybody. And it became people were like, I can't believe this is real. But I saw that several years before, but it didn't.
it didn't matter because even if i screamed it till i'm blue in the face it it just didn't seem believable until people saw it or or it's there's some sort of guilt or or shame or something that they they can't really muster their own self-support and response to it it's like okay maybe this will correct this thing i feel guilty about or they're or they're confused i mean a lot of people their heads were spinning when they encountered this and it took them a long time to like wreck it you know
get their eyes into focus and recognize this is really alarming and not true and not good. And just to get their head screwed on straight took a while. Sometimes it's the little things that make us feel close to family. Like the smell of food. Never quite as good as mom's. The sound of joy which takes you back to that family wedding.
With Remitly, sending money is a way to be there for those you love, no matter the distance. Stay close when you're far apart. Send money worldwide with the Remitly app. Remitly UK Limited is authorized and regulated by the FCA. Are you finding a lot of support? Are there a fair number of you out there? Are you finding one another? Are there other examples of similar things? Give me some hope.
People are coming out. Yeah, we get we get contacted regularly. You know, the word is just getting out about our institute and who we are. But we've got faculty from Yale and Harvard and Fordham and Columbia all involved with this project. And I think we're trying to build really top tier scholarship on these issues and good services for people. So we're we're starting. Do you need to get the government involved with this to sort of I don't know.
create a wind in the other direction to get like funding for research or things like that i mean yeah awareness or something is there other things because it feels like You know, they've taken over the academic reign so thoroughly. It's a tall order to fight it back unless they suddenly have a – the only thing I – as usual, the market might solve this, right? are you that was a program we so that i think with psychotherapy that's definitely a market-based solution is on our mind because if the
Demand for an open therapist is the large majority of patients and the supply of therapists openly saying. I'm open to diverse viewpoints. It's so small. There's a supply demand mismatch. If we can lean into that, there's a possibility that the market can start correcting this. I have no doubt it will correct it on the individual practitioner level. I was thinking in terms of the institutions of training.
that people just stop institutions and start going to ones like you. If you do training, training, uh, we do continuing ed. So it's for people who already have a license. You need continuing ed credits to keep your license. We offer those. And we've been accredited for psychologists, for social workers, for counselors. So we've gotten those accreditations and we hope to maintain them. I think we expect. We will. But building a new university.
program would be really daunting. And the hope is that every program will offer these trainings. Are those accreditations maintained by the state?
No, it's the APA for psychologists. Our workshops are accredited by NASW for social workers and BCC. They have kind of like a pseudo-governmental status because in order to keep... your state license you need accreditation certified by these private right professional organizations so they have this but they're technically private yes i'm familiar with that how did you get involved with uh becoming a therapist a psychologist what what uh
What led you in? Well, my major in undergrad was religious studies. I was really interested in spirituality. And I thought about going the route of clergy. And, but it didn't seem like they were really working with people the way that I wanted to. And so I started taking some classes in.
psychoanalysis, and I thought it was really fascinating. And then I went down the psychotherapy path. My undergrad psychology classes, they weren't bad, but they were very... like they were there was there's nothing wrong with them but they were very much like here's the parts of the brain here's the different here's how many
how many letters somebody can memorize in 30 seconds. It was stuff like that. It just didn't interest me. And then when I started studying the clinical stuff, that's what I really struck something in me. I just having a personal reaction, what you said in that. When I was in college, it was the behaviorists were in charge. There was a lot of monkeys and rats. I'm like, that doesn't interest me. Sort of moving towards neurobiology.
And then later, I found my way back to neurobiology in the context of confirming some of the things we were seeing clinically. A hundred percent. And once I was like actually connected to people, the neurobiology became more interesting. But when it's just a brain floating in a jar, it just didn't interest me. Old brain in the vat experiment. So let's just talk more globally for a minute. You know, what are you seeing out there? What are your concerns about other than this particular?
issue and domain and its impact. What, what, what, you know, we've, we sort of tilted a little bit at the, When we say cluster B, we're talking about trauma survivors, and so trauma is kind of, I'm sure, something in your mind. What are you worried about? What are you seeing? What are the trends? I think people are waking up and starting to speak up. And I think it's actually maybe what I see on the horizon is catharsis. I mean, I'll go. I just got back from a conference.
related to gender medicine a few days ago. And you talk to other professionals who spend so much of their time isolated and they tell their story and you can just feel the emotion. that comes out when people finally get an opportunity to share something that they've been holding back for so long. And it's just immense. So I think as, as people start.
be able to open up and say what they've been feeling and say what they've been experiencing. I think something really powerful and potentially cathartic is on the horizon. I worry that that catharsis will take the form of a... It's a word, Heidegger had a word for this. It's sort of a, you know, aggression. You know, there's sort of an out, you know, like...
I'm going to put those guys in jail that did this. I'm worried about that. And then that would be, yeah, kind of like a continuation of this enactment. Right, it'd be the same flip side of the same coin. But not if they use their words. I feel like so much of it is, well, maybe if they kind of, but I think when... People act out what they don't talk about. So if we move to a space of dialogue instead of these enactments, I think it has the potential to really be healing.
Do you agree with me? I mentioned my little delusion theory earlier. Do you agree with this sort of delusional quality to some of the excesses that we're seeing these days? Yeah, I mean, because there's certain groups that get totally idealized and others that get totally demonized, and they're not in touch with reality. And anything that doesn't fit that kind of all or nothing framework gets screened out.
And so, yeah. Yeah, and you can't argue because it begs no alternative. But what's happened to us that, I mean, I find myself reading a lot about mass delusions all the way back to 1790 France. And it's so familiar and it's so much the same. And I've been trying to put together, is there some fertile soil, you know, something about childhood trauma or, you know, whatever that sets this up? Or is it...
Is it Trump derangement that everyone sort of – I mean, what is this? What has happened to us? Or is it the technology? Our brains can't handle the rate at which we're flooded with information that we just sort of – And then, of course, COVID made people fearful. And in states of fear, people can have lots of false beliefs that they hang on to. So do you have a theory or am I going too far down the road? No, no, no. I mean, I'm interested in all of that. I tend to think.
this stuff is overdetermined and there's tons of different causes that are combining and technology definitely seems to play a role um but i think it's also you know there's this concept and of ambivalence and in mental health which is when you can tolerate contradictory feelings towards the same thing at the same time like i have strengths and weaknesses there's positive and negative about this there's positive and negative about that and that ability to tolerate
positive and negative feelings, strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons. That is a, it's an aversive feeling. I think it's a, it's a difficult thing. It can be real. What? Yes. Maturity. central to maturity but it's it can it's you have to work at it You have to work to maintain it because there's something, at least in the short term, that's very gratifying about things being all or nothing. And you see this sometimes with even depression. Yeah.
You treated people with depression, where everything in the world is negative, everything about themselves is negative. And you'll suggest that maybe they have a strength, maybe they have reason for optimism, and it's intolerable for them. And it's almost it's so interesting because it's easier for them to feel depressed than to tolerate that ambivalence, at least in the short term. But the ambivalence is the medicine.
And I think right now, similarly, that ambivalence is medicine that we need to take in. It requires, as you said, dialectical thinking and interacting with other people, and it requires the silenced or the people with alternative opinions of any type to speak up. But it's hard when people are so intolerant.
I said something this morning. I was having a conversation about these, you know, what is going on, what has happened here. And the guy I was talking to said that, you know, he thinks technology really had a major, major impact on this. And I said, well. This has been going on really since Martin Luther. But then I said, my next words out of my mouth were, but they probably couldn't have done this before the printing press.
So technology is probably a requisite piece of how these mass things occur. Right. Maybe like without technology, they'd have to be very localized. It wouldn't be a mass. It would be a fight in the town square or something, and it would be over. It wouldn't have an institutional quality to it. Well, I feel, I think...
Also, technology has made media so de-centered. And I feel like I have a hard time figuring out what's going on because it's like I get my feed, but I don't know what other people... And that's a kind of like a psychotic state where we don't know what's real. I last night I was on Twitter last night and I saw so many scary. videos of rockets landing somewhere. And I saw both. For some reason, the algorithm gave me a bunch of them. And they were labeled as both Iran and Tel Aviv.
I couldn't know which it was or if those were real pictures or if I want, I don't know what I was looking at. And then nothing in the, in the news feeds. So I, I don't, you know, that, that's how far from. A, being able to get access to good information is, and B, how skeptical we should be of everything. We shouldn't believe anything, especially with all the ability to create false content. It's beyond now.
Right. And then well, but then until I'm left, see, that's perfect. That's exactly right. Because then I'm left if I don't know what's happening. I have to fill that in with my ideologies of like this doesn't. hard for me not to. Like, be diligent about collecting things that seem factually so. And then, yeah, your ideas, at least, to interpret them.
Yeah, it's really challenging. So I'm sympathetic to people who can't do it well. I'm not even sure I do it great. You know, it's like, and I try hard. Where are we? I just never, oh my God, never would have imagined this country would sink into this stuff. But it has happened many, many, many times before. It always seems to happen historically. The more I...
read about these sorts of phenomena, the more I'm impressed that they happen. I have a sneaking suspicion that this country's sort of, what's the word I'm looking for? I used the word bromide before, but it's antidotes to the potential of this really being a problem is the fact that we still, thank God, still do have freedom of speech, that we... are able to create parallel institutions. And I just have the feeling that our state system is such a bulwark against any sort of national huge trends.
Because the states are all now almost individual countries again. They're getting so different. And I think that's a strength. I think that's a good thing. Well, I could if somebody I'm in New York, but if somebody goes after my license in New York, potentially I can get licensed in Florida or something. And my life isn't totally over the way it would be if, you know, somebody. went after my national license or something and then i can't work in my profession anymore yeah i listen i i um
The state system was a genius of the Founding Fathers. Many other genius elements, but that one, I think, is helping us out right now. My friend Adam Carolla, when this all started happening, I was like, what the hell? What's going on? He goes, it's going to be safe spaces and octagons. That's it. You're going to go to a safe space state, and that's the way people are going to go.
He said the trouble is going to happen when the safe spaces state's economies fail. And then they're going to start going to the octagon state and saying, you need to give us something. So that'll be interesting. That's going to take a long time, I suspect. yeah i think so um
Well, it's and I think there is the possibility, too, for like you're talking about getting the government involved for some of these. Maybe it's at the state level that's more likely where they can promote some of these trainings or research or services. Well, listen, what else do you, before we wrap this up, I don't feel like I've, in a comprehensive way, said what...
it is you're doing, just lay it out there, where to go, what it is. People can be a part of it as either a patient, accessing resources, or as a clinician wanting further training. Yes, it's the Open Therapy Institute. They can go to OpenTherapyInstitute.org. If you hit contact, you can send us an email if you want a therapist. Tell me what it is. It is. We deal with... political bias and mental health care. And we do training.
research, and services. So if you're a therapist, you can come to our trainings, you can become a member, and you can collaborate with us on research. If you're a patient, we will make a referral for you to a therapist. It occurs to me also, you must have this, do you have support groups for therapists looking to bring things back to their peers when they've dealt with difficult material out in the world?
The members, if you become a member, we have a monthly group. Yes. I'm sure. Because that is what, that's a necessary part of, you know, tolerating this situation. It's difficult and you need support. And you can't address it unless you have those connections. And people figure out what they think and find words and vocabulary and can respond. I'm going to push on you one last opinion.
Because you do come from the world of at least academic religion. I don't know if that's actually formally what we're into, just spiritually. But we often talk about there being a spiritual vacuum in this country and it being... You and I have been throwing around terms about cluster B and whatnot as well. But those people, to get better, they have to have a spiritual program, typically, oftentimes. What are your thoughts on that issue with our present time? Well.
I this is my take a little bit. I guess I have two concepts that I go to again and again. It's a secret and the mystery. Now, a secret is something that you can know what it is, but you can't put it into you can't. articulate it so for example think about trying to explain to a kid what falling in love is you know even if you're very articulate they're not going to know what it is until they've had that experience um
A mystery is something that you can experience, but you can't know. It's bigger than your mind. So that's like, think about the fish in the ocean. Yeah. The fish can't. understand the ocean because the ocean is everywhere and it has no form and it's endless. The idea of the mystery is such a healing concept. To recognize that there's a lot that we experience every day that we can't capture in language, that our minds can't capture, and making space for that, I think, can be profoundly healing.
All right. And do we do it as a group? Do we do it individually? That's interesting. I guess I think maybe it does. I think people can do it together. and learn it from other people. I think a lot of people do it alone too. There are practices in different religions that help people remember and connect to that mystery, whatever they call it.
The word awe occurs to me when you're describing the mystery, and certainly the mental health benefits of awe have recently been elaborated quite substantially. It's a central part of human experience, because when we think we know everything or can know everything, it actually kind of it's a trap. It blocks us from learning and growing and healing. Appreciate you being here. And if somebody wants to talk more with you, where should they go?
They can contact me at the Open Therapy Institute, opentherapyinstitute.org. And on the bottom of the website, we have links to join our mailing list on Substack. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. all the social media. And we have a weekly podcast called Open Therapy that's on YouTube and Spotify.
and Apple Podcasts. But you left that out. I didn't know about that. That sounds like a wonderful place to send people. That's how you develop communities and support, using technology to go that direction. Yes. And it's great because we can each one of these issues like self-censorship, it's to really do it justice. We need to go into depth and really have several episodes breaking down what people can do. And so it's more in-depth discussion of these issues.
Andrew, thanks for joining me and thanks for contacting me and thanks for doing this work. Thank you so much. Specialty board certifications by the American Board of Internal Medicine. In the American Board of Addiction Medicine, he is not functioning as a physician in this environment. The same applies to any professionals who may appear on the podcast or drdrew.com.
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