Episodes

  • Revisiting The Trap: How a Paranoid Mathematician Broke American Therapy

    Revisiting The Trap: How a Paranoid Mathematician Broke American Therapy
    Jan 19 2026

    https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-dark-reflection-adam-curtiss-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/

    Why is the most therapy-literate generation in history also the most depressed?

    This episode traces the hidden history connecting Cold War game theory, a 1964 pop psychology bestseller, and the mental health crisis devastating Gen Z.

    The thread starts with John Nash—the schizophrenic mathematician who built models assuming all humans are paranoid, self-interested calculators. It runs through Eric Berne's "Games People Play," which taught millions that relationships are just strategic transactions. It continues through Reagan, Thatcher, and the rise of CBT—a therapy model that treats your mind like buggy software. And it ends with a generation drowning in optimization, starving for meaning, and wondering why all their self-knowledge isn't helping.

    Featuring the tragic story of George Price, the scientist who slit his own throat trying to disprove his equation proving love is just calculation. Plus: why therapists can't legally unionize, how a secret committee of surgeons sets the price of your mental healthcare, and why the "just do it yourself" wellness movement is the final victory of the worldview that broke us.

    This isn't self-help. This is an autopsy of the assumptions we've been living inside.

    Topics covered: Game theory and psychology, Eric Berne transactional analysis, Adam Curtis The Trap, John Nash Beautiful Mind, CBT criticism, Gen Z mental health crisis, Theodore Porter Trust in Numbers, neoliberalism and therapy, Rosenhan experiment, C. Thi Nguyen gamification, purpose vs point, George Price equation, Wilhelm Reich, depth psychology, mental health policy
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Why Can't Psychotherapists Form a Union (Spoiler Alert:They Can't) What is the RUC in Healthcare

    Why Can't Psychotherapists Form a Union (Spoiler Alert:They Can't) What is the RUC in Healthcare
    Jan 17 2026
    Can Therapists Start a Union? The Antitrust Trap, the Shadow Committee, and the Economic Strangulation of American Psychotherapy Analyzing America’s Healthcare Regulations and Their Effect on Us: Why the Law Prevents Therapists from Organizing While Allowing a Private Committee to Fix Prices for the Entire Medical System https://gettherapybirmingham.com/can-therapists-start-a-union-spoiler-alert-they-cant/ The Monthly Rage Thread If you hang around therapist forums long enough, you will see it happen. It operates with the regularity of the tides. Someone posts a thread, usually after receiving a contract from an insurance company offering 1998 rates for 2025 work, and asks the obvious question: “We are the ones providing the care. The system collapses without us. Why don’t we just all go on strike? Why don’t we form a union and demand fair pay?” It is a logical question. In almost every other sector of the economy, workers who feel exploited band together to negotiate better terms. Screenwriters shut down Hollywood to get paid for streaming residuals. Auto workers walk off the line. Teachers fill the state capitol. Nurses at major hospital systems have successfully unionized and won significant concessions. So why, in the midst of a national mental health crisis, does the mental health workforce remain so politically impotent? The answer is not that we lack will. It is not that we lack organization. The answer is that for private practice therapists, forming a union is a federal crime. This is not a political manifesto. It is an analysis of the bizarre regulatory environment that governs American healthcare, a system of antitrust laws, shadow committees, and bureaucratic classifications that effectively strips clinicians of their bargaining power while empowering the corporations that pay them. If you want to understand why corporate tech monopolies are ruining therapy, or why the corporatization of healthcare feels so suffocating, you have to understand the legal straitjacket we are all wearing. And you have to understand the one group that is allowed to set prices, the one group exempt from the rules that bind the rest of us. Part I: You Are Not a Worker, You Are a Standard Oil Tycoon The primary reason therapists cannot unionize dates back to the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was designed to prevent massive corporations like Standard Oil from colluding to fix prices and destroy the free market. It prohibits “every contract, combination… or conspiracy, in restraint of trade.” The law was a response to genuine abuses: companies buying up competitors, dividing territories, and coordinating prices to gouge consumers who had no alternatives. Here is the catch: In the eyes of the federal government, a private practice therapist is not a “worker.” You are a business entity. Even if you are a solo practitioner struggling to pay rent in a subleased office, seeing clients between crying in your car and eating lunch at your desk, the law views you as the CEO of a micro-corporation. You are classified as a 1099 independent contractor, not a W-2 employee, and that distinction makes all the difference in the world. If two workers at Starbucks talk about their wages and agree to ask for a raise, that is “collective bargaining,” which is protected by the National Labor Relations Act. But if two private practice therapists talk about their reimbursement rates and agree to ask Blue Cross for a raise, that is “price-fixing.” It is legally indistinguishable, in the eyes of the Federal Trade Commission, from gas stations conspiring to raise the price of unleaded. It sounds absurd, but the FTC takes it deadly seriously. When independent contractors organize to demand higher rates, when they share information about what they are being paid and coordinate their responses, they are engaging in horizontal price-fixing, one of the most serious violations of antitrust law. The Sherman Act provides for criminal penalties, including fines and imprisonment. The law that was meant to break up monopolies is now used to prevent social workers from asking for a cost-of-living adjustment. The irony is crushing. The same regulatory framework that prevents two therapists from discussing their rates allows massive insurance conglomerates to merge repeatedly, concentrating buyer power in fewer and fewer hands. UnitedHealth Group, for example, has acquired dozens of companies over the past two decades, becoming the largest healthcare company in the United States. When they offer a “take it or leave it” contract to providers, they do so with the full knowledge that fragmented, legally prohibited from organizing therapists have no counter-leverage. The antitrust laws, designed to prevent monopoly power, have created a system where sellers are atomized and buyers are consolidated. Economists call this “monopsony,” and it is precisely the market distortion the ...
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Is The DSM Dying Part 2: What is a Diagnosis Anyway?

    Is The DSM Dying Part 2: What is a Diagnosis Anyway?
    Jan 15 2026

    https://gettherapybirmingham.com/what-is-a-diagnosis-anyway-is-the-dsm-dying-part-2/

    The Archaeology of a Label: What We Forgot About Diagnosis and Why It Matters Now

    The book that decides if you're sane was written by the military to process soldiers. The committees that define your mental illness hold "typewriter parties" where they shout symptoms until someone wins. And the federal government declared the whole thing scientifically invalid—two weeks before the latest edition dropped.

    In this episode, Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S, takes you inside the bizarre, hidden history of the DSM—the document that shapes every therapy session, every prescription, every insurance claim in American mental health. You'll learn:

    • Why the DSM started as an Army logistics manual, not a medical document
    • How a single awkward psychiatrist named Robert Spitzer staged a coup against Freud using checklists and political horse-trading
    • The "dopamine miracle" that saved psychiatry from total collapse—and the price we're still paying
    • Why the biggest research agency in mental health publicly divorced the DSM and nobody noticed
    • What Joseph Campbell and Star Wars have to do with the therapy your insurance won't cover

    This isn't anti-psychiatry. This is pro-understanding. Because the system isn't broken by accident—it was built this way. And if we want to fix it, we have to see how we got here.

    "The DSM was never a description of nature. It was a set of administrative protocols created by the military, adapted by the bureaucracy, defended by a profession fighting for legitimacy, and captured by industries seeking profit."

    Subscribe. Share. And maybe question that diagnosis.
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    1 hr and 23 mins
  • What is BPD as a Diagnosis and How did it Get Here?

    What is BPD as a Diagnosis and How did it Get Here?
    Jan 14 2026

    https://gettherapybirmingham.com/is-bpd-really-multiple-disorders/
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    50 mins
  • The Death of the DSM: Why The Book For Sanity is Making us Crazy

    The Death of the DSM: Why The Book For Sanity is Making us Crazy
    Jan 10 2026

    Is the DSM Dead? The "Bible" of Psychiatry, The Thud Experiment, and The Crisis of Diagnosis

    Episode Description:

    https://gettherapybirmingham.com/is-the-dsm-dying-rethinking-suffering/

    It dictates every diagnosis you receive, every medication you’re prescribed, and every insurance dollar spent on your mental health. But what if the "Bible of Psychiatry" isn’t actually scientific?

    Pull back the curtain on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to reveal a document in crisis. From the secret backroom deals that voted diagnoses into existence to the "checklist revolution" that stripped therapy of its meaning, we investigate how American mental healthcare became a system of billing codes rather than healing.

    We explore the infamous Rosenhan "Thud" Experiment that humiliated the psychiatric establishment, the accidental creation of "false epidemics" like ADHD and Bipolar II, and why the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) effectively abandoned the DSM years ago.

    Most importantly, we ask the hard question: Why does the system demand you be "broken" to get help, yet deny you care if you are "functioning" enough to work?

    If you have ever felt misunderstood by a diagnosis, frustrated by the medical system, or wondered why your "high-functioning" suffering doesn't seem to count, this episode is the validation you’ve been waiting for.

    In This Episode, We Cover:

    • The "Thud" Experiment: How 8 sane people got committed to asylums and proved psychiatry couldn't tell the difference between madness and sanity.

    • Reliability vs. Validity: Why the DSM prioritized "agreeing on a label" over "finding the cure."

    • The Productivity Trap: How the "Clinical Significance Criterion" denies care to people who are suffering but still employed.

    • The "False Epidemics": A look at how diagnostic inflation created the modern ADHD and Autism boom.

    • The Divorce of Psychiatry & Therapy: Why your psychiatrist doesn’t do therapy anymore (and why that matters).

    • The Future: Moving beyond the checklist toward a model of narrative, systems, and human connection.

    Quote from the Episode: "The DSM is not a description of nature. It is a description of what American healthcare requires nature to be."

    Resources Mentioned:

    • The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz

    • The Book of Woe by Gary Greenberg

    • The STAR*D Study’s true remission rates (2.7%)

    • Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)

    Connect & Listen: Subscribe to hear more critical investigations into the mental health system. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review and share it with a friend who needs to hear that they are more than a billing code.

    Keywords for SEO: Mental Health, DSM-5, Psychiatry, Psychology, Trauma, ADHD, Neurodivergence, Joel Blackstock, Taproot Therapy, Clinical Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Big Pharma, Medical History, Rosenhan Experiment.
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    1 hr and 24 mins
  • The Story Science Forgot: Why Psychotherapy Needs Narrative More Than Ever

    The Story Science Forgot: Why Psychotherapy Needs Narrative More Than Ever
    Jan 8 2026
    The Story Science Forgot: Why Psychotherapy Needs Narrative More Than Ever by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 15, 2025 | 0 comments Joseph Campbell is arguably one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. If you have watched a Marvel movie or read a modern fantasy novel or sat in a screenwriter’s workshop you have encountered his fingerprints. George Lucas explicitly credited Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the structural backbone of Star Wars. Every major Hollywood studio has copies of his work floating around their development offices. Even filmmakers who actively deconstruct his monomyth model still have to be in conversation with Campbell to do so. You cannot escape him if you are telling stories in the Western tradition. But here is the thing about Joseph Campbell that we need to hold in our minds when we think about what psychology has become. He was a showman. He was a legitimate scholar but also someone who understood that the truth sometimes needs a little theatrical assistance. The Showman and the Bear Bones One of Campbell’s favorite presentation techniques involved showing an image of ancient bear bones that were perhaps two million years old and discovered in a cave. The bones had been arranged in a particular way with pieces shoved back into the bear’s mouth. Campbell would present this with his characteristic gravitas and explain that the ancients understood that nature must eat of itself. They knew that to take life is to participate in a cyclical loop of giving and receiving. The bear consuming itself was a ritual recognition that we are all food for something else. It is a beautiful interpretation. It is probably even partially true. We know through depth psychology and early anthropology that prehistoric humans were almost certainly trying to make meaning of existential realities. Ritual practices around death and consumption are well documented across cultures. Campbell was not fabricating this from nothing. But also come on Campbell. These are two million year old bones shoved in a hole. Maybe the jaw just collapsed that way. Maybe soil shifted. Maybe an animal disturbed them centuries after burial. He did not know. He could not know. And yet he presented it with the confidence of revealed truth. Here is why this matters. Campbell’s influence is incalculable despite his methodological looseness. He told a story that resonated so deeply with something in the human psyche that it became the invisible architecture of our entire entertainment industry. He was not objectively right about those bear bones but he was pointing at something real about how humans make meaning. The story he told about that meaning making was more powerful than any peer reviewed paper could have been. We need to remember this when we think about psychotherapy and what it has become. The Dream I Had and the World I Found When I first entered the field of psychotherapy I had a fantasy. I thought I was going to be Joseph Campbell. I was going to find my way to someplace like Berkeley and immerse myself in the grand conversation between psychology and mythology and anthropology and philosophy. I imagined something like the Esalen Institute in the 1970s where Fritz Perls developed Gestalt therapy and where researchers and mystics and clinicians sat together in hot springs and argued about the nature of consciousness. Those places barely exist anymore. What I found instead was a competitive model built on H-indexes and impact factors. I found academic departments that had been siloed into increasingly narrow specializations. Each department defended its territorial boundaries against incursion from neighboring disciplines. The institute model where a psychologist might spend an afternoon talking to an anthropologist about ritual has been systematically dismantled. What we have instead are specialists who do not read outside their sub specialty and researchers whose entire careers depend on defending one narrow hypothesis. We have an incentive structure that actively punishes the kind of cross pollination that leads to genuine discovery. The Hollow Room: How the Biomedical Model Fails This is not just an academic inconvenience. It is a catastrophe for the human sciences and for the actual treatment of patients. There is a reason Freud stuck around. It is not because psychoanalysis was rigorously validated through randomized controlled trials. It is because as the science writer John Horgan observed old paradigms die only when better paradigms replace them. Freud lives on because science has not produced a theory of and therapy for the mind potent enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all. The biomedical model promised us a better story. It told us that humans are biological machines and that suffering is just a mechanical malfunction. It promised that if we could just find the right neurotransmitter or the right gene ...
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    54 mins
  • The Science Behind the Light: Dr. Steven Vazquez on Inventing Emotional Transformation Therapy

    The Science Behind the Light: Dr. Steven Vazquez on Inventing Emotional Transformation Therapy
    Aug 19 2025

    Join Joel Blackstock for an extraordinary conversation with Dr. Steven Vazquez, the inventor of Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT), as he reveals the 25-year scientific journey that led to one of the most innovative breakthroughs in trauma treatment. From skeptical experimentation to treating cancer with eye movements, discover how specific wavelengths of light directly impact the brain's emotional centers.

    https://www.gettherapybirmingham.com/emotional-transformation-therapy-ett-dr-steven-vazquez/

    In this illuminating episode, Dr. Vazquez shares the fascinating evolution of ETT's four core technologies, the neuroscience behind why colors disappear during dissociation, and remarkable case studies including elimination of Parkinson's symptoms, instant resolution of 15-year chronic pain, and complete remission of colorectal cancer through targeted eye movement protocols.

    Key Topics Covered:

    • The accidental discovery: From syntonic optometry to emotional transformation
    • Building and testing 7 different light devices over 25 years
    • Why the optic nerve's path through the brain stem changes everything
    • The substantia nigra connection: Treating movement disorders without surgery
    • Temporal-parietal junction: Why trauma survivors are 4x more likely to be re-traumatized
    • Real-time dissociation detection through visual distortion
    • Converting EMDR practitioners: Why they switch and never go back

    Breakthrough Cases Discussed:

    • Arthritic pain eliminated instantly with orange light
    • Colorectal cancer remission confirmed by oncologist next day
    • Father's visual trauma from discovering son's suicide - resolved in 10 minutes
    • Sciatica eliminated in 20 minutes (physician patient, still gone 1 year later)
    • Birth trauma causing adult osteoporosis - complete resolution

    Resources:

    • ETT Training Programs (7 levels): www.etttraining.com
    • Research and publications on wavelength-specific brain activation
    • International training locations and certification pathways

    Perfect for neuroscience enthusiasts, trauma therapists, EMDR/Brainspotting practitioners, and anyone seeking to understand the cutting-edge intersection of light, brain science, and emotional healing.

    #EmotionalTransformationTherapy #ETT #DrStevenVazquez #Neuroscience #TraumaTherapy #LightTherapy #BrainScience #EMDR #Brainspotting #Innovation #PTSD #ChronicPain #Dissociation #TherapyResearch
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    40 mins
  • From Skeptic to Believer: MJ Denis on the Science of Emotional Transformation Therapy

    From Skeptic to Believer: MJ Denis on the Science of Emotional Transformation Therapy
    Aug 16 2025

    https://mjdenis.com/whoismjdenis

    Join Joel Blackstock as he sits down with MJ Denis, LPC, LMFT, and certified ETT trainer from Austin, Texas, for an eye-opening conversation about Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT) - a groundbreaking approach that integrates light, color, and neuroscience to transform emotional healing.

    Read the blog article: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/from-skepticism-to-science-how-emotional-transformation-therapy-is-revolutionizing-mental-health-treatment-a-deep-dive-with-mj-denis/

    In this compelling episode, MJ shares her journey from skepticism to becoming one of the leading ETT trainers in the country, having conducted over 3,100 sessions. Discover how this evidence-based therapy goes beyond traditional talk therapy and EMDR to create rapid, lasting change for trauma, anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, and chronic pain.

    Key Topics Covered:

    • The science behind using specific wavelengths of light for emotional regulation
    • Why ETT succeeds where EMDR and traditional therapies plateau
    • Real case studies: From lifelong phobias resolved in minutes to chronic pain relief
    • How therapists can integrate ETT with existing modalities (IFS, somatic experiencing, CBT)
    • The neurological basis of color perception and emotional processing
    • Virtual ETT sessions and expanding access to care globally

    Resources Mentioned:

    • ETT Training Information: www.etttraining.com
    • Find an ETT Therapist Directory
    • Dr. Steven Vazquez's research and methodology

    Perfect for mental health professionals, trauma survivors, and anyone interested in cutting-edge therapeutic approaches that bridge neuroscience and emotional healing.

    #EmotionalTransformationTherapy #ETT #TraumaTherapy #EMDR #BrainSpotting #Neuroscience #MentalHealthInnovation #LightTherapy #ColorTherapy #PTSD #AnxietyTreatment #DepressionTherapy #TherapistTraining #HolisticHealing
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    54 mins