Psychology Has Paranoia

After meeting with my government-sanctioned licensing board--consisting largely of psychologists--in the mid-1990s, my attorney, one of the smartest guys I've ever known, told me he had never before encountered a more illogical group of people. That should give everyone pause.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

You got yourself some children. They all been running wild. So welcome back to Welcome 2, as the case may be because I said so the only podcast on the entire worldwide, universe-wide web where you will hear the truth about the Envarnished Truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, about children, child-rearing, now called parenting, and the mental health professions in America, from whom America's parents have been taking their marching orders for the last 50-plus years to the disaster of children, families, marriages. By way of introduction, if you're a first-timer to this podcast, I, or host John Rosemond, am a certified troublemaker and I fully intend to continue being one. To my knowledge, I'm the one and only troublemaker of my sort in America. Specifically, I make trouble for the mental health professions Psychology, mostly my profession. I make trouble for them because I'm determined to expose them as charlatans who, especially when it comes to children and child-rearing again now called parenting, have no grasp of common sense, don't know what they're talking about and have created more problems for children, parents and families and therefore culture. Then they know how to solve. By the way, there are individual psychologists etc. Who are exceptions to that general rule, but take it from someone who's been licensed to practice psychology by the state of North Carolina for over 40 years. They are rare birds. That's the introduction to the story of my awakening to the realities of my profession.

Speaker 1: 3:21

For those of you joining us for the first time, and again, I am licensed to practice psychology by the North Carolina Psychology Board. I've been licensed continuously, in fact since 1979. I want to tell you my story, but first some context. The fall 2023 issue of the Bulletin Board, which is the quarterly newsletter of the North Carolina Psychology Board, reports that over the past three months or so, six North Carolina psychologists either have been stripped permanently of their licenses or had their licenses suspended pending compliance in correcting certain problems. Of the six, three of them 50% engaged in inappropriate relationships with clients. They accepted lavish gifts from clients, they asked clients to supply them with illegal drugs, they went to a client's home for social purposes or they engaged in sexual intimacy with a client. The other three psychologists in question were guilty of we'll call them administrative errors which, in at least one case, appear to be purposeful. I took interest in these disciplinary proceedings for personal reasons. In the late 1980s, the North Carolina Psychology Board threatened to revoke my license because in my syndicated newspaper column, which was at the time appearing in maybe 500 newspapers across the country.

Speaker 1: 5:31

I told the parents of a five-year-old boy to stop taking him to a therapist that he'd been, whom he'd been seeing for six months. The boy's problem fear of the dark. Okay, now, fear of the dark. Five-year-old boy is afraid of the dark and his parents take him to a therapist and six months later he's still seeing the therapist For fear of the dark. This fear of the dark occurred most prominently at bedtime, as one might imagine, and because of his nighttime fears, the boy demanded that his parents remain at his bedtime until he was asleep, which they did, but then he would wake up several times during the night shrieking and screaming, and that'd have to go back in there, etc. Etc. You know it's not an uncommon scenario.

Speaker 1: 6:41

After six months of weekly therapy sessions involving I don't know what play therapy, talk therapy the boy's fears were unmitigated. After consulting with the fairly reliable Common Sense module of my brain, I told the parents to take the kid out of therapy and gave them experienced advice concerning children's nighttime fears. I mean, come on, fear of the dark is garden-variety flack with a child of five. Most of you listening to this podcast were afraid of the dark at one point during your childhoods. Does fear of the dark justify forcing something called therapy onto a child? No, it does not. It calls for giving the parents a plan for helping the child deal independently with his fears. Second, no change after six months of weekly therapy sessions is patently outrageous. That says the therapist in question was either trying to squeeze as much money out of the parents as possible or that he was incompetent, or both. Nonetheless, the North Carolina Psychology Board accused me of interfering with the therapist client relationship, which I definitely had done Because my scary lawyer accompanied me to the disciplinary hearing. The North Carolina Psychology Board merely put me on probation. I'm pretty convinced that they intended, prior to seeing my lawyer walk into the room, to strip me of my license permanently, but they merely put me on probation for three years and required that I obtain a PhD psychologist oversight concerning my column. Okay, fine, my lawyer said I could challenge the ruling in court and would probably win, but I decided to not draw further attention to myself. So I served my sentence and when it was over, I voluntarily continued the PhD's supervision of my column, having discovered that his feedback was helpful In the early 1990s and again through my syndicated column, I told the parents of an 18-month-old girl who'd been sexually molested by a teenage male babysitter who was not a family member, that the likelihood of the child remembering the event was slim to none and that they shouldn't talk about the molestation with or around her and in so doing, keep the incident stirred up.

Speaker 1: 9:56

My advice was based on a solid body of research into human memory, which determined that a child below age three was very unlikely to remember even an event that would be considered traumatic for a child above the age of three. At the time, significant numbers of mental health professionals, including members of my profession psychologists, were making big bucks off what is called recovered memory therapy, a sense discredited form of therapy based on the unscientific notion that even events taking place in very early childhood, like infancy even, are stored in a person's memory, like the brain is a video library, and that those early memories can be retrieved using certain psychological techniques, including hypnosis. Now, it's true that some people claim to remember infant experiences, but according to the research, the overwhelming majority of those memories and I put the word memories in quotes are false. They never happen. Research finds that people construct false memories for a variety of reasons, but probably everyone does it to one degree or another. But the professional scammers in question, including a good former, emphasized former friend, convinced person after person that any mental health issues they brought to the table or couch depression, anxiety, you name it were due to repressed memories of having been sexually molested as children, young children, like three, two, one. In almost every case, the supposed abuser was a male family member father, brother, uncle, grandfather. When these fake memories were elicited, the supposed victims often sued the male family member in question. Needless to say, these accusations tore families apart and, in many cases, irreparably. Notwithstanding that, the human memory research was clearly and unequivocally on my side when I advised the parents that the child would, in all likelihood and that is the phrase I used because she was 18 months old not remember the event unless it was continuously brought up by well-intentioned people.

Speaker 1: 13:15

The North Carolina Psychology Board pushed ahead with their complaint against me with the obvious intent of silencing a troublemaker and, as I told you before, I'm a troublemaker, I admit it. I had disrupted confidence in the profession of psychology, not to mention a lucrative form of fake therapy. I had to go After nearly two years of being in legal limbo, one of whom had argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. By the way, my lawyers were able to reach a consent agreement with the North Carolina Psychology Board in which neither party admitted to wrongdoing. Okay, the North Carolina Psychology Board was wrong, I was not wrong. Nonetheless, I agreed to the no fault agreement. Once again, I slipped through the noose. Then aha, it ain't over until the fat lady sings, or something like that.

Speaker 1: 14:36

20 years later, in 2013, I received a threatening letter from the state's attorney of Kentucky ordering me under threat of monetary damages and even incarceration. The state's attorney of Kentucky threatened me with incarceration If I did not stop publishing my popular newspaper column in Kentucky newspapers. According to the state's attorney, publishing my column in Kentucky constituted practicing psychology in Kentucky without a license issued by the Kentucky Psychology Board, which I was to discover was behind this attempt at blackmail. Two years later, with the assistance of sterling attorneys from the Institute for Justice out of Arlington, virginia, I soundly trounced the Kentucky Psychology Board in federal court. We sued them, we trounced them, we embarrassed them. My lawyers exposed their action as frivolous and unconstitutional and Kentucky newspapers continued carrying my column. Ta-da. Every Psychology Board in America was watching that case, folks salivating at the possibility that the Kentucky Psychology Board would prevail, in which case every Psychology Board in America was planning on bringing a similar action, in which case my career would have been toast over kapoot and I'd have been selling used cars on a lot in Northern North Dakota Nothing against used car persons or Northern North Dakota, by the way, although I don't quite comprehend why a person would choose to live there.

Speaker 1: 16:52

So with that backstory, I was fascinated that of the six psychologists recently disciplined by the North Carolina Psychology Board, not a one was disciplined for something he or she had said. They were disciplined for being irresponsible in one way or another. Irresponsible, downright stupid, having no common sense, getting carried away by their gonads. To my knowledge, I'm the one and only psychologist in America who's been targeted and indicted by his or her licensing board for speech. The Psychology Boards of North Carolina and Kentucky and every other state in America don't like what I say. And who could blame them?

Speaker 1: 17:45

What's fascinating to me is that the people in question, the people who sit on these Psychology Boards, they got to know that the First Amendment protects my speech, even speech they disagree with, unless it's libelous, which the people in question have never attempted to prove. They just don't like me saying things like the profession of psychology does not qualify as what's called a restricted profession and in other words, that requires a license issued by a duly constituted government agency like the North Carolina Psychology Board. They don't like me saying that no psychological therapy is outperformed father time. In other words, when one compares the outcomes of people who spend six months in psychological therapy any psychological therapy without a people with same sorts of problems who spend those same six months doing nothing, the end result is pretty much the same. Over those six months, concerning both groups, about a third of the people report getting better, about a third report getting worse and about a third report, no change. In other words, when one looks at the big picture, psychological therapy is no better than doing nothing, and doing nothing doesn't cost anything.

Speaker 1: 19:21

The North Carolina and Kentucky Psychology Boards don't like me telling you, and neither does any other psychology board in America. They don't like me telling you what I just told you. But hey, I just told you and my right to tell you which is true is protected by the Constitution of the United States of America. God bless America, god bless America. I don't think a lot of young people in America today and I'm talking about people in their 20s, even 30s really have any comprehension of the fact that we live here in the United States of America, in the greatest country human beings have ever invented. And that's a wrap. Keep on rocking in the free world, people. And while you're at it, check out my weekly sub-stack in my website, parentguruandjohnrosemondcom. You're the best. Keep coming back and please, if you enjoyed this, tell your friends.