Six years ago, an Esalen student showed me the PDF files she had just received for subscribing to the Holistic Psychologist’s newsletter at $20 per month. To put this in context, I should confess up front that as a psychotherapist I am the worst businessperson anyone has ever met, loathing any and all marketing, never buying Google Ads, never paying for SEO stuff, and hopelessly confused about finance in general—unable to comprehend why the same person who complains about a $17 movie ticket for two hours of entertainment will gladly spend $17 for a bottle of water at the Chateau Marmont or a smoothie at Erewhon. In addition, having studied Lacan for the last 12 years, I consider my views about psychology to be somewhat subversive, but perusing the Holistic Psychologist’s handouts I could see that what was being sold in those PDFs wasn’t the psychology that we studied academically.
Lord Acton’s statement that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” seems to apply to therapists who “go viral” without having the intellectual substance to warrant such acclaim. Today, our profession affords successful practitioners a level of authority as well as power to influence not only the individuals who sit across from us in session but, thanks to social media, also “followers.” Known to 9 million Instagram followers as the Holistic Psychologist, Nicole LePera has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the New School for Social Research and subsequently spent years telling her followers that traditional psychology shouldn’t really be trusted.
This subversiveness was massively successful, racking up four New York Times bestsellers and a paid subscription base of tens of thousands of members each month. However, according to The New York Times, her most recent book “Reparenting the Inner Child” was written with a ghostwriter, even though LePera and her wife swore in legal filings that every book bearing her name had been written solely by her.
Lord Acton’s insight was that scale removes the friction that normally keeps a person honest with herself. A therapist seeing 20 patients a week gets corrected constantly, by silence in the room, by a client who doesn’t return, by a negative review, by a missed payment. A therapist performing to 9 million followers loses that friction and her only feedback becomes engagement numbers and book sales. The New York Times recently reported that LePera’s business partners helped produce psychology content despite having absolutely no clinical training.
The platform economy has made it difficult to tell a real intellectual from a great marketer. A clinician who has sat with various psychological theories for 20 or 30 years tends to hedge, qualify herself, admit where the research contradicts itself, and always does her best to remain intellectually honest. I was suspicious of the Holistic Psychologist when I saw the two pages of PDF files she sent my student and I imagine that many of her followers will question her insights after reading the New York Times article.
What is fascinating is that the Holistic Psychologist sold transparency and radical honesty as her brand, instructed followers to recognize people who mistreat them, and choose peace over chaos, while her own household—according to dueling lawsuits replete with allegations of surveillance, misused funds, a protective order, and a physical altercation that left someone with an injured ankle—appears to have run on the chaos her books tell her followers to walk away from. Listen, we’re all wounded healers, but a psychologist shouldn’t build an empire on the claim that her own profession can’t help people while secretly paying others to produce content in her name.
Actually, what our profession needs is a new code of ethics written for the 21st century because the code of ethics we have for the consulting room says nothing about the podcast studio, TikTok, or Instagram. A license should mean the same thing whether a therapist is speaking to one person or 9 million, and we all need to have as much personal congruence and integrity as possible. It may sound trite to articulate that therapists should practice what we preach, but until licensing boards start treating social media as clinical conduct, the field will keep creating therapists and followers who learn the hard way exactly what Lord Acton stated 150 years ago.