Z a c h H a n d y

Fellow human. Licensed Practicing Counselor. M.Ed clinical mental health counseling.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

@tedcruz I proudly stood in the way of your AI-data center amendment to the Big Beautiful Bill that would have given those companies immunity from the law. In fact, @mtgreenee and I got it stripped from the bill. Did your big tech cronies still let you cash their checks after you failed?

[Z a c h H a n d y @zhandy020]

@anish_koka @AhmadRehanKhan Check out @NassirGhaemi take.

https://t.co/42NLeOi7vW

[Prof James Davies 💭 @JDaviesPhD]

Mental Health 'Awareness':
"1. lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm & deepen it".

[Michael Inzlicht @minzlicht]

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.

What went wrong?

In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:

1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.

The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.

This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.

Link to paper: https://t.co/ucoGyhEuAj

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨SHOCKING: MIT researchers proved mathematically that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional.

And that nothing OpenAI is doing will fix it.

The paper calls it "delusional spiraling." You ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you. You ask again. It agrees harder. Within a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening.

This is not hypothetical. A man spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked "you're not just hyping me up, right?" it replied "I'm not hyping you up. I'm reflecting the actual scope of what you've built." He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free.

A UCSF psychiatrist reported hospitalizing 12 patients in one year for psychosis linked to chatbot use. Seven lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI. 42 state attorneys general sent a letter demanding action.

So MIT tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying.

Fix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. A chatbot that never lies can still make you delusional by choosing which truths to show you and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough.

Fix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. Even a perfectly rational person who knows the chatbot is sycophantic still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math proves there is a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation.

Both fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally.

The reason is built into the product. ChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. This is not a bug. It is the business model.

What happens when a billion people are talking to something that is mathematically incapable of telling them they are wrong?

[Psychiatry Letter @NassirGhaemi]

The term 'SSRI' is misleading. Most 'SSRIs' like Prozac also affect norepinephrine, making them SNRIs, similar to older tricyclic antidepressants. Only citalopram truly fits the 'SSRI' definition. #MentalHealth #PharmaFacts #Science

[Psychiatry Letter @NassirGhaemi]

The prevailing belief in treating depression with SRIs is rooted in neuromythology, not science. Despite 500+ trials, SRIs offer only a mild 0.3 benefit, falling short of what's considered clinically meaningful. #MentalHealth #ScienceFacts #Depression

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

As we all comb through Meta's internal docs, released via the lawsuits, it's fun to discover that @jean_twenge and I were getting under Meta's skin by 2019. See the screenshot below, from:
https://t.co/ARcQn8uh35

They then ran their own RCT to show that Jean and I were wrong, but oops, they found that when people were randomly assigned to quit Insta or FB for a week, their mental health improved.

They called it "Project Mercury."
It is study 6.2 at
https://t.co/Nv14Y2n2kH

They found that those who stopped using Facebook for a week "reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison"

Their own researchers (all of whom had Ph.Ds) concluded that: “the Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison.”

So whenever you hear the Meta talking point that the evidence is "just correlational," or that there is "no evidence of causality," know that this is not true, and they have known it's not true since 2019.

Please check out the other 30 internal Meta studies we found and catalogued at
https://t.co/Nv14Y2n2kH

Also, there is SO MUCH additional academic research demonstrating causality since 2019:
https://t.co/e2ifxADjd9

[Edward A. Perin - Psychologist @DoctorPerin]

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practise Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.”
--C.G. Jung

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

When a person thinks too much. Over-analyzes. Gets stuck in their head. Obsesses. Struggles to be present.. AND goes to a therapy where they analyze, evaluate, go back in the past, project into the future, judge, ruminate.. The therapy is harmful. Yes.. therapy can be harmful

[Z a c h H a n d y @zhandy020]

@Mdc0736 @TheOmniLiberal Uh what? Everyone has the potential to experience psychosis. I work in a psych hospital as a mental health counselor and see patients every weekend come in that are in active psychosis clearly from substance use.

[Edward A. Perin - Psychologist @DoctorPerin]

The DSM6 committee has decided to focus on biomarkers instead of personality and moving forward will stand for “Drug Sales Manual”

The DSM is dead. Long live the PDM.

[Roger Seheult, MD @RogerSeheult]

In a Bombshell preprint just released by Dermatologist Richard Weller from U of E in Scotland, If everyone in the 419K UK cohort avoided UV light and were followed for 15 years it would save 39 deaths (red arrow) from Melanoma at the expense of 2,982 deaths (green arrow) from everything else.

https://t.co/TyaWLfRx53

[Tristan Scott @tristan__scott_]

Car windows don’t just block out UVB but nearly all NIR and UVA light.

Next time you’re on a road trip, drive with the windows down or get some cabin incandescent lights.

[Ron Paul @RonPaul]

The Trump Administration Lied So Blatantly About The Shooting of Alex Pretti

[Holden Culotta @Holden_Culotta]

Thomas Massie just exposed that Trump is threatening to “ruin” his supporters’ businesses if they fund his campaign.

“I’m not talking about IRS audits.”

“It’s bigger than that.”

“Here’s what happens behind the scenes … ”

First, Trump allies are coercing Massie’s consultants into quitting his re-election campaign:

“Three of my consultants have quit on my campaign, all three for the same reason.”

“They were told: your other 30 clients will fire you if you keep working for Massie.”

“They make it hard to hire people.”

“I really love the consultants I got now, because they’re the ones who said: screw you, I’m gonna work for Massie brcause I believe in what he’s doing, and I’m good enough at my job, I’ll go find some other clients if you clowns fire me.”

Second, Trump allies are threatening to “ruin” Massie supporters’ businesses by abusing state power:

“I’ve got 15,000 donors across the United States. My average donation is $80.”

“Is that because I don’t want millionaires to give to a super PAC and to help me?”

“No. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“The problem is, if you’ve reached some degree of success where you have a million-dollar disposable income, you probably can’t afford to tick off this administration, or they will come at your business.”

“You won’t get the permits you need to do the business.”

“Over the MAGA split and on foreign policy, there are people of great means … who could put money in my race and post up against the Israel First billionaires.”

“But they’re staying on the sidelines, because their business will get ruined.”

This is why Marjorie Taylor Greene left Washington.

The Trump administration is abusing its power and influence to crush populist, America First voices in the Republican Party.

@jimmy_dore @RepThomasMassie @FmrRepMTG

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

PHQ-9 was developed for Pfizer as part of its marketing strategy for Zoloft. Pharmaceutical marketing is why it exists, and how it got into the healthcare system.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Government lies are getting clobbered by community notes and I’m here for it.

[☣️ Pleb Kruse = BTC foundationalist in exile 🟩🔆 @DrJackKruse]

100% Google is the most obvious