For those who don’t know, he is a twitch streamer/youtuber that talks a lot about mental health, specifically for gamers and people in the internet generation.
In some videos, he does “therapy sessions” (technically they are not for legal purposes, but they definitely feel like therapy) with various people in the twitch/youtube sphere. I am really interested to hear the perspective of different therapists regarding his content.
Are his interactions with people similar to what you see in real therapy sessions? Most importantly, would it be worthwhile studying how he conducts these sessions and learning from them?
Thanks for any insights!
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He’s okay! He fills an important niche and has a lot of good info. The main caveat I’d want to encourage considering when watching his content is to just consider his perspective. He’s a medical doctor first, and he’s had whatever list of experiences he’s had. He speaks with authority on many things and comes from a place of expertise, but even within those fields there will be disagreements. So I’d mainly watch out for his prescriptive judgments.
In particular, his stance on cannabis could use more nuance. He admittedly has never used it, so a lot of his concerns and hesitancy are based on whatever other data might inform his perspective. Cannabis research is severely lacking and there’s a lot we don’t know about it. Given his audience, he really does need to broadcast caution with it, as it is still a psychotropic drug and can still contribute to mental health issues in certain cases. And he goes pretty hard on that front, encouraging people to beware of the effects of it. It’s just disappointing when his conclusion always seems to be abstinence.
He recently dropped a new video saying that “discipline is an emotion” which seems like a pretty dubious claim. I’d like to rewatch it to understand the science behind it better but it seemed like a sort of sensationalist claim that discussed the emotional experience of “resoluteness” and ways to cultivate that experience. It seems interesting and useful, but definitely something to take with a grain of salt, not as gospel!
TLDR: Good content creator, well-informed doctor, has his own biases and perspectives, learn & listen but question before following. I recommend him to other clinicians whenever they’re struggling with a young male client.
Awesome, thank you for your perspective on this! That is along the lines of what I have been thinking as well.
I feel like he has a lot of things right - young men generally seem to be pretty lost right now, and most mental health professionals don’t really understand what their lives are often like. He’s helping an underserved population in a really good way.
I hadn’t heard of him until I recently watched a discussion he did (can also be watched without YouTube’s ads here), with a guy whose work I’ve been looking at. The guy in question is called Dr Mark Horowitz and he’s a training psychiatrist, and I think he passed med school and he did a PhD.
Anyway, a lot of this guy’s work is looking at withdrawal symptoms from antidepressants, and they talk about that. E.g. how withdrawals can be pretty severe for a lot of people, especially people who have been on them for years. Some people can take a year or more to come off antidepressants, slowly reducing the dose over that time.
Yes this community is about therapy, and antidepressants are a tangential topic. But still related to therapy and mental health topics. Perhaps the video I linked to is not of interest to you, fair enough if so. I found it interesting because I have tried different solutions for my own mental health, including counselling, and antidepressants. It’s interesting to find out more about antidepressants and potentially other solutions for mental health problems.