For the last five years, Calgary based clinical psychologist Jonathon Stea has been posting online to try and confront misinformation related to mental health.
“I really started out on social media and just in more popular media, trying to debunk myths related to the nature of cannabis addiction,” he said.
“Once I got to social media, I was blown away because I saw that the misinformation space is much broader and larger than cannabis misinformation. It extends to all of addiction and mental health and just health more generally.”
Stea addresses themes like pseudoscience and mental health literacy in his recently released book, Mind The Science: Saving your Mental Health From the Wellness Industry.
Stea says the wellness industry is worth $5.6 trillion, and includes legitimate sources of health, like club memberships and exercise classes, but he takes exception to other branches of it, like alternative medicine, which he described as the “commercial home for a lot of pseudo scientific approaches to health.”
“In the mental health world, there’s a lot of people who offer mental health services, so therapy or treatments that don’t have any license or training or qualifications whatsoever,” Stea says. “They may call themselves a wellness coach or a life coach or a wellness consultant, or even there’s more insidious terms like therapist or counselor or practitioner or mental health clinician.”
“Those terms, depending on particular countries or jurisdictions are what we call legally non protected, which means anyone can just hang a shingle… on their lawn and say, I’m a therapist or I’m a counselor, or set up an Instagram page and do that and say that they can treat your depression or anxiety.”
Stea says that the medical establishment isn’t beyond reproach.
“Big pharma, mainstream medicine, mainstream healthcare systems, they don’t get a pass. In fact, there’s lots of inherent problems with them. And in part, that’s what drives a lot of people to seek alternative medicine and to seek wellness,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon clinicians and researchers in science to make sure that there’s better transparency.”
“The solution to the faults of mainstream healthcare is not the wellness industry, and that’s sort of the problem, because we have to acknowledge that we do have gaps in our knowledge about health conditions. We don’t know everything about mental illness and how to treat it. That’s a fact. And we do have gaps in our healthcare systems.”
“There’s variability in the quality of psychologists and psychiatrists, et cetera. And mainstream medicine has the potential to do harm too, and they have done harm, but the solution to that is, again, better science, better transparency and getting our act together. It’s not to exploit people financially and emotionally by offering them pseudoscientific treatments and approaches that don’t work.”
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