Insights: The Case Against Dr. K
I made a video I want to share with you.
[The Case Against Dr. K | In Defense of the Internet — Watch on YouTube]
A note: this one covers some sensitive ground including suicide and clinical ethics. Please take care.
If you haven’t watched it, start there. What follows is some context on how it came together and what I’ve been thinking about since.
I found something I wasn’t looking for.
I was doing research for a routine medication video — fact-checking a claim about Wellbutrin — and the further I went, the more I realized the problem wasn’t one bad take on one medication. It was the model. A psychiatrist with 3.4 million subscribers, a coaching business, a parasocial audience, and a clinical history that had already been investigated by the Massachusetts medical board and covered by the New York Times.
The information was already public. All of it. For six years. And nothing changed.
That’s the part that interested me. Not the information itself, but why the information wasn’t enough.
Le Bon
There’s a book I return to often. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895. It’s a study of what happens to individual judgment when people organize around a charismatic figure. The short version is that they stop exercising it. The group mirrors the emotional state of the figure at the center. Critical evaluation gives way to collective feeling. What looks like agreement is actually contagion.
This is why six years of public evidence didn’t matter. The parasocial bond metabolizes criticism. Each piece of evidence arrives individually — a Reddit thread, a news article, a board investigation — and the group processes it, neutralizes it, and moves on. The figure stays protected. Not because the evidence is weak. Because the medium absorbs it.
So the question became: if the information can’t reach people one piece at a time, what happens if it arrives all at once?
That’s the video.
I structured it as a documentary. A historical parallel to a medicine show from the 1920s. Primary sources. A complete case delivered as a single narrative — too interconnected to be pulled apart and dismissed point by point.
McLuhan called it the medium is the massage. The form shapes the experience before the content is evaluated. I wanted the form to carry the emotional weight that the facts alone couldn’t.
The method behind the madness
But since to the untrained eye many of the critiques in the video might seem unfair — or at least unusually aggressive for a channel like mine — I wanted to give you an insider’s look at the method.
When I found the tapes — the recorded sessions with a vulnerable person, streamed live, archived on the internet — I understood the weight of what I was sitting with. This wasn’t a bad take on a medication. This was a documented pattern. And it was powerful material. The kind of material that speaks for itself if you let it.
So I knew they were coming. The defenders. The mob. Le Bon told me exactly what to expect. And because I knew, I could prepare the ground.
I made jokes. I was sarcastic. I opened with a medicine show from the 1920s — a con man named Brinkley who transplanted goat testicles and sold the cure on the radio. It sounds absurd. It’s supposed to. The humor is the Trojan horse. If you’re laughing at the goat testicles, you’re still in the room when the real evidence arrives.
The sarcasm and the historical framing do something specific. They filter the audience in the first few minutes. The casual viewer who came for drama either stays and commits or leaves early. The defender who came to fight has to sit through a comedy bit about a 1920s radio quack before they get to the part that threatens their attachment. By the time the serious material lands, the people still watching are the ones who chose to be there.
And if anyone hasn’t by that point left the room to write paragraphs that have nothing to do with the core of the argument — I had them. Now it was about building tension.
The proof I needed was his voice. His own words, on his own streams, in his own sessions. Not my interpretation. Not a summary. The primary source. The tapes did the work I couldn’t do with commentary alone, because commentary can be argued with. A recording can’t.
AOE
His business model is called AOE — area of effect healing. It’s a gaming term. In a video game, an AOE spell heals everyone in the radius. His version is: stream to thousands, and the therapeutic effect radiates outward to everyone watching.
That framing is the core of the problem. Therapy is not an area of effect. It’s a one-to-one relationship. The moment you turn clinical work into a broadcast, you’ve changed what it is. You can call it healing. You can call it education. You can call it community. But it’s not a clinical relationship, and the people receiving it don’t know the difference. That’s the harm.
But the video was also an opportunity to show the true injustice. Not just what one clinician was doing wrong — but what the medium itself does when clinical authority gets funneled through a parasocial channel. The audience bonds to the figure. The figure monetizes the bond. The coaching business catches the overflow. And the vulnerable person at the center of it — the one whose recorded sessions are still archived on the internet — never had a clinician. They had a content creator.