The Taproot Podcast - Tania Kalkadis on Evidence Based Practice and Clinical Training in Australia

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Tania's advanced training program which is starting on February 25th:   https://deepmindpt.com/deep-mind-mastery   In this episode, I’m joined by Tania Kalkadis for a deep, evidence-based conversation on the growing gap between research, academic psychology, and real-world clinical practice — with a sharp focus on the DSM and its role in modern mental health care. Together, we unpack the challenges of evidence-based practice in psychology, questioning how closely current diagnostic frameworks align with the latest scientific research. We explore where clinical practice diverges from academic psychology, why this matters for clients and clinicians alike, and how systemic pressures shape diagnostic decision-making. A key focus of this conversation is the Australian mental health system, including how DSM-driven practice operates within local funding, training, and service delivery models — and how this compares to psychological practice in the United States. We examine similarities and differences in diagnosis, treatment pathways, professional accountability, and the influence of insurance and policy on clinical care. This episode is essential listening for psychologists, therapists, mental health professionals, students, researchers, and anyone interested in how psychology is actually practiced versus how it’s taught and studied. If you care about scientific integrity, ethical practice, and the future of mental health diagnosis, this conversation offers clarity, critique, and nuance. Topics covered include: Evidence-based practice vs. diagnostic tradition Limitations and controversies surrounding the DSM Clinical psychology and academic research misalignment Mental health systems in Australia vs. the United States Implications for clinicians, clients, and policy 🔍 Keywords: evidence-based practice, DSM criticism, clinical psychology, academic psychology, Australian mental health system, US vs Australia psychology, psychological diagnosis, mental health research more@ GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made up tiki-taki little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. Welcome to Discover Hill Grow, the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. I'm here with Tanya Calcuttis from Australia. So tell us what tomorrow is going to be like. You're across the deadline. Hold up a newspaper. Let's go ahead and see what we're in for. It's just a bizarre that I call it me, you're struggling with. ice and snow and we're struggling with fires and heat so i think that's a beautiful metaphor for you know some kind of symbolic you know duality that that we live in but yeah we're we're hot it's hot over here in australia at the moment it's almost like a song of ice and fire on hbo starting

six seconds and yeah just follow the avatar series let's just do that yeah well i'm really excited to get into what we're talking about today. Tanya had reached out after some of the articles that I had written about the DSM, which, you know, I am not making an argument ever in what I write for removing science from health care, but I would like a better science, especially around psychology. You know, I talk about Theodore Porter a lot, and some of his stuff is about how there's a fundamental insecurity to soft sciences and because they don't have the hard variables of pure math. And so what they, what his argument is is that a lot of times soft sciences like, you know, economics or political science or psychology is they find these numbers and sort of make them

harder than they are as this way of pointing back to the empirical and, you know, take me seriously, daddy and trying to get this objective metric for things that there may be a, you know, a softer objective metric for and that we forget that a lot of times these numbers are what porter would say are just metaphors from distance we're pretending that this is sort of handed down by god but really it's a number that we made up to measure something maybe the frame is flawed maybe the math is not right and and we we kind of use them to take critical thinking out in order to act like we can have more certainty than maybe we can so i don't know if that was a part of the article that spoke to you it looked like based on your email maybe that was the part but i'll hand that over to you what do you what do you think and

And can you tell us about what's good? Do people say across the pond for Australia, or is that just a great idea? You're the first American that I've been with in a professional context. So this is a new experience to me. I've been to the States. I've got family there. But I think ideology and psychology and philosophy, I think it's wonderful to think about what this all means.

And the reductionist model is certainly it struggles in the space we work in. the variables are very, as you know, difficult to measure, but to reduce it down to a series of boxes. I think the difficulty is that there's too many identification points that people have in terms of then using those boxes to define what's going on in their psyche in any given moment of time. Well, and I think, oh yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. There's a little bit of lag there. So sometimes it looks like you're done talking. I apologize.

Go ahead. No, no, go on. No, I think that's true. And I think that, you know, we have to have, like, what is the problem that DSM is trying to solve is it's trying to say, you know, and that's, if anyone's not a therapist, that's the diagnostic old statistical manual of mental health disorders that is now on its fifth edition or 5.5, the TR. So, but the thing that it's trying to solve is how do therapists communicate, how with a psychiatrist? with an insurance company, which, you know, we have to do. You know, I may say with my conceptualization, well, this anxiety comes from a mother wound and somebody else may say this comes from an inability to meet reality on its own terms.

You know, we're talking about the same problem with it, which is anxiety, but how do we, how do we say, yeah, but this kind of anxiety, you know, and in some of those boxes, if they're too hard, I think it would reductive. And then if they're too loose, then they don't let communication happen. I mean, how would how would you go back and kind of redraw that model if you could? Or what do you think about, you know, that kind of conceptualization of diagnosis? How do you diagnose in clinical practice? I think if the labels were infused with attachment-based understanding from the part of the brain that has no memory,

so the implicit memory system, I think that if there was an understanding that the wounds are coming from a time where the person is actually not conscious, then the progression and the sequence of symptoms would make a lot more sense when you try to start to dialogue in the here and now about what is going on with said person A. I think it's the definitions of the, if you're just slicing into the here and now

and going, this is their current brain state without an understanding of the precursors, that's when it becomes inaccurate. Yeah, I think that's true. Could you flesh that out or kind of give an example of what that would look like in practice, though? You know, I think theoretically I see most clinical therapists, I think even the kind of hardcore, you know, academic people have come around at this point, if they have patient encounter at all, that they feel like there's some problems with the DSM

and then like to see it move a different way. And most of them would like it to see, you know, trauma, maybe conceptualize differently, you know, neurodivergence, conceptualize differently, an attachment. Those are the biggest kind of reflections I hear. But when it comes down to how do you build that system, that's where I see even the people that kind of agree on the problem, start to disagree. What's your take? I think that if you segmented the diagnostic criteria into different categories in terms of what the precursors of the current state, then you could probably go to, you know, down a few different routes in order to make sense of what's going on in the here and now.

But for example, an anxious avoidant, you know, someone who has an insecure, anxious attachment, who comes into the room with prolific amounts of anxiety. And then through the questioning, you find out that they were emotionally neglected to the extent that every single time they had a difficult emotional experience, they were isolated in a room on their own. And that was literally the sum total of the way in which they were managed. as a child in a family where they felt they loved each other, but the parents had no capacity to manage the emotional dysregulation of the child.

So she was isolated in a room to manage all her feelings. Fast forward, 29 years later, she has prolific amount of anxiety. She's had a run of many years of substance use to self-regulate and try to manage the dysregulation in her nervous system. So if that's the profile of somebody coming in with an anxious attachment with addiction as the main coping mechanism, you know, severe relationship dysfunction because you're only going to attract a similar type of person into that space who's also emotionally dysregulated, then you could clearly put into the all the whole cluster of anxiety disorders issues related to unmet needs with a emotional, you know, dysregulation that occurred early on in their childhood. So it kinds of gives it more of a five-dimensional feel rather than a two or three-dimensional feel, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and I think that the reason, I mean, my take is that there's things that we do because of academic tradition, which, you know, sometimes there's something too. You know, there was some, something is there, even if we're not aware of it. And then there's other things that we just do for the expediency of insurance, which I think should not be allowed into the scientific method at all. You know, the way that we pay for these things shouldn't start to cross-contaminate the way that the scientists are saying that they work. And a lot of what, you know, you're saying,

I think the real reason that the industry doesn't want to do that is that we've reduced most of psychiatry down to a 15-minute psychopharm visit. You know, most people, and then when you put that into research, a lot of people say, in actuality, that 15-minute psychoform check is actually less than 15 minutes in America that most of those studies are done, they show people sometimes spend five minutes with a psychiatrist.

And they want to know how to extract the amount of, to extract the amount of information you're talking about would mean that you need more time with the patient. So if the science is telling you that, I don't think the industry should stand in the way personally. But I don't, do you see a lot of other reasons why we wouldn't have adopted something that is similar to that anyway? I can't. The issue of cross-contamination, as far as it works here in Australia, I'm not quite sure about the states, but it's complete.

The medicalized system, the expediency of getting diagnoses quickly, of Big Pharma kind of controlling the outcome of the process is 100% complete. So before 2006, we had no government rebates for psychology. They worked tirelessly. to get rebates. Psychiatrists were rebated through the government. Can you explain a little bit more about your health care system for people who don't understand? Because the rebate system is pretty different than I think what we would think of as an insurance remit here. And how much is public, how much is private, how much is out of pocket? Just because most of my list, we do get a lot of Australian listeners, which is interesting. Australia is kind of the second biggest country that follows us.

But I think the majority probably would be American or European. Yeah. So we have a health system that is completely public where the, when you talk about someone coming to a private psychologist getting a public rebate, they get up to 10 visits where they get about 50% of the fee rebate. It's completely public, completely available to everybody. Private health sits in a completely different space where as a consumer you have to pay to get private insurance and you can get rebates for all across medical services, but they're generally less than what the government rebates. Government also rebates doctors and psychiatrists at about 50%. So the insurance system is not, it's completely separate. The public insurance system that everyone can access

is through the government and then you have private health insurers that have various ways they interface with service providers. So mainstream psychology got into the public insurance, the public health system. So they would pay for psychiatry, but it was psychotherapy, like actually sitting with the public system refused to pay for psychotherapy as a service? As psychology, we don't. So psychotherapy is not designated as a government rebateable service. Only psychology, you know, physio, osteo, Ote, physio, stuff like that. Like anti-psychotic medication or antidepressants, none of that would have been a dual? Yes, that is because that's all through GPs and psychiatrists.

So that was all available through the public health system as well. But what changed in 2006 was that mainstream psychology ended up getting public rebates. And that had never occurred until then. How does that compare to what they make? other places, is it kind of the same that they would be able to charge private or, you know, 70% of that or um? It's about 50%. Okay. And is the patient responsible for the other portion or did they just take a hit on that?

Yeah, it's called a gap and it can vary depending on the practitioner in terms of what's when we use the word bulk build in Australia is that there's no gap and the government, the government, the public government pays for the service. So some psychologists would charge that. So they would be getting about 50% less of what they could get. And they do that out of the goodness of their own hearts. And then you have gaps on top of that that are totally determined by the person charging. So that can go up to get it. That can go in excess of, I mean, if I decide to charge $350 for a service where the government rebates $145, the client is responsible for that gap.

But what changed in mainstream Australia when that came in is that all the students now completing the master's programs were inducted into this biomedical model where the sessions rebated through the public service now became the, interestingly, became the context upon which they were going to offer their treatment. So you would start to see treatment plans and protocols coming in according to the number of sessions the government were rebating. And we're pretty much stuck in that right now in terms of the training. So we've got to do, it used to be 18 sessions, then they cut it down to 12, then they cut it down to 10. During COVID, they increased it to 20. Now they've cut it back to 10. And psychologists are coming out of university believing that they have to respond to the needs of the clients within the 10-session limit.

Yeah, I left an insurance panel when I first started here because I had a patient with a dissociative identity disorder, which is one of the harder things to treat or longer-term, you know, I like it. It's not difficult to do, but it does take a longer time than some diagnoses. And an insurance company, a clinical director told me that I had five sessions to cure D-I-D-D, or else they just needed to be on an antidepressant and get over it. And I said, goodbye. I will not be in your insurance panel anymore.

That's right. It's a stitch up. It's absolutely impossible to manage that kind. I mean, even states of mind that aren't that fragmented as DID, even if you just took trauma on its own, even non-complicated kind of traumatic responses, to then have to explain or to basically have to interface with a private insurance, companies saying we need five sessions, we need five more, we need ten more, we need five more.

These are the kinds of ways in which early career psychologists are getting influenced in the way that they treat and the way that they think the process should occur in the room. That's where all the internal pressure starts to build. And then you become quite a fractured therapist who is trying to fit themselves into this kind of thinking. And I think that's where all the problems actually begin. So that's interesting because, you know, basically what you're saying is that what happened to the U.S. in the 1980s happened to Australia relatively recently, that when it was going to be paid for by, you know, an entity, yeah, government there, you know, private entities largely here. Once they made the decision to pay for it, it changed the way that people were being taught in school that it should work.

Which if you want to be scientific at all, does not make a ton of sense. I mean, what's happening in the White House right now does not affect the science that I'm doing. doing in my lab, you know, or it shouldn't. And if it does, that's a pretty good indicator that the scientific method is not being enacted very faithfully, you know. Oh, God. Absolutely not. And that's exactly what has happened. And that's the mindset that we're trying to shift. I'm trying to shift by giving therapists permission to treat the person according to the treatment plan that's required for their particular presentation, not according to what said company is saying government, private, public, or otherwise, how many

sessions you have and what diagnoses you want to give them. Well, when you think of, you know, could you kind of walk us through that process happening? Because you see the schools, you know, you have experience with the schools before the change and then you have experience with it after. I mean, what happens in the classroom? what happens to what they tell people as evidence-based, what happens to the hype of person teaching. You know, here it was we got rid of professors and just replaced them with adjuncts who didn't make anything and were going to be gone. And not that there's anything wrong with adjuncts because some of them were wonderful, but my problem with it is a lot of times you're hiring people who don't have a lot to do, you know, when you're going to teach a college class that requires a lot of work for $500 in some cases.

And then I think it was Berkeley recently went viral when their psychology department was like, it's a huge list of requirements for a job posting. And then hours and research and time and class work and grading. And then at the very end, it said, just to be clear, this is not a paid position. It is a full-time position, but we offer no reimbursement. This is just a resume booster so that you can apply later. It was like Berkeley is telling someone to teach psych for free. So, you know, can you walk us through, you know, kind of how you see that happen?

I'm curious the differences that it had here. Yeah. So I trained in the early 90s when there was no such thing as government rebates and the rhetoric was still unfortunately a lot of it was CBT based, but you would have a little bit more flexibility in terms of the way you would position yourself in the room and not feeling pressure to complete a process in X amount of sessions. Unfortunately, what happens is the universities accrue supervisors into the clinic. So when the fifth and six years students come through, they usually have, as connected to the campus, they have a public interfacing clinic where the public can come for very small amounts of money and they get the opportunity to start to do one-on-one work with people in a room under supervision. Generally speaking, what happens is the supervisors that the universities attract, they offer them about 50% less than what they would get paid if they were supervising outside.

And so you get about a 50-50 split between supervisors that are relationally driven and working at a deeper level and those that are going to essentially guide the students to become manualised and rigid in the way that they work with CBT and its derivatives. So that becomes unfortunately quite difficult for students if they have an interest in deeper process, if they've got a mind that suggests that they understand that something else needs to be taught, then they will experience, unfortunately, trauma in their training because they haven't been given the opportunity to develop those parts of their mind. And the university, unfortunately, doesn't give them that option either.

So it becomes, and that today is still the case, but the 10-session model through the government is actually, I think, made it a little bit more intense in terms of the pressure that these students feel when they graduate and go out into the world to structure themselves according to the number that the government decides. So they're kind of generic problems that have always occurred in terms of getting psychology students to understand the unconscious, if the university department don't have particular lecturers or professors who work in this way, then they won't get that important. When we transitioned into, you know, one of my theories or thesis that I've talked about when I read the history of the profession, because a lot of the truth of this stuff I find

in people's biographies and, you know, where they maybe had a point, but mixed it up with something that was not scientific instead of, you know, whatever, I just look at the history the profession a lot. But what happened here was that, you know, I think that the field got so broad, so new, you know, just kind of, there was really good trauma therapy, the seeds of it happening in the 70s, but it was mixed in with so much BS that was maybe, you know, abusive or metaphysical in a way that wasn't helpful. And the baby just got thrown out of the bathwater, with the bathwater. And they said, we're going to quantify everything. We're going to, like, you know, just. do cognitive behavioral therapy only. The unconscious isn't real. The body is not relevant.

You're just going to do psychoeducation and medication. And to their credit of the people who thought that way, antipsychotics had just been invented. And schizophrenia was the biggest problem in America at that point, from a mental health standpoint. It largely does not respond to psychotherapy without medication. And so they said, okay, well, we tried to psychoanalyze these guys. And then we gave them Thorazine and then the second gen's and they work. So maybe eventually medicine will catch up. Everything will be curably with a pill. And, you know, we tested that.

It turns out that isn't the case. You know, dopamine disorders do uniquely respond that way, whereas everything else maybe does not have that biomarker root and similar pathway that you can medicate. And then we quit teaching all these skills in schools that we're going back now and relearning because no one got them for 20 years. Can you explain witnessing that process here? Because I'm reading about it as a historical artifact that is largely before my lifetime.

Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, I think you're right. This was going on in the 70s. And wasn't it clear when they started integrating medication into mental health that the research was clear that it was a combination of the psychotropic medication and therapy that was going to create. the best outcome. Was that not part of what was discovered back then? What was discovered?

Was it that you would combine medication and therapeutic treatment that you wouldn't. So basically here in Australia, GPs are giving out antidepressant medication literally like jelly beans. It's jelly beans. And there's no recommendation for a random person coming in who's got contextual struggles going on that, as you know, are related to ABCDE to advise them to get some therapeutic help. They say it's not best practice, but a lot of people here do get just, they complain to their GP and the GP says, okay, fine, maybe you should try therapy and then the person doesn't, and then they get the antidepressants for a long time.

There hasn't really been a ton of pushback on that because, you know, we had an opiate epidemic or slash or in the middle one that's moving to fentanyl, the synthetic. And then we also in the 90s had this ADHD epidemic where people got too much of the medication. So those are harder to prescribe now. I haven't really seen the pushback against GPs, you know, prescribing anti-depressants because they're not really as abusable. You know, we don't see the effects of it, even though that person probably is, you know,

turning off that when I don't like it. anxiety medication over prescribed is it turns off the good anxiety. So people don't feel an anxiety and then say, should I act on that? What do I need to change? They just kind of white-knuckle it through life. Yeah. Yeah, similar. Similar. So the education around what's going to help an average person coming in with anxiety and depression, they think that they're going to stay on the medication for five, 10 years, never interface, you know, and do any work on themselves. And that's their treatment. That's quite common here.

Well, what do you see as kind of a solution? Because one of the things that was never a convincing argument for me is that people sort of said, well, if this was a, you know, I think that we should have more of a public option than we do. You know, Australia has that. And one of the things that I think left-leaning people are liberal people make in the States and the argument I've heard is this wouldn't have happened to psychotherapy if there was a public option. I think the public option would have solved a lot of problems that were good. And

people want to kind of blame private insurance companies, which are sort of a uniquely American phenomenon in the way that they're implemented for the shift away from evidence-based practice. I think if you had Medicaid for all in 1975, you still would have had the same split between, you know, academic and clinical practice that you're getting now. And maybe Australia is evidence of that, you know, if you have a public option and you're saying that they also have the same issue. Yeah, I really don't think it would make much difference. I think it's to do with what the, who writes the curriculum for the universities.

I think that's where it. Who writes the curriculums? Who decides that we're not going. going to talk about the unconscious. We're not going to talk about the history of psychoanalysis. We're not going to talk about the history of the mind. We're not going to talk about anything existential. We're just going to take a person, reduce them down to a label and a set of symptoms, and then manualize them out of it. Who makes those decisions? Well, in Australia, it's a board of people who decide what we're going to approve in that

fifth, six year, which in Australia is the Masters, which is essentially the segue into becoming a registered psychologist. And that's where I believe the problems are. It's in the curriculum. What is that board like? In America, it's the RUC or, you know, they have, you know, 32 members, I think 29 voting and then they sit down and psychiatry gets one vote. All the other disciplines are these incredibly specialized things. And you know, My point when you look at that is that they are sort of incentivized to wick money towards this incredible specialization, expensive testing, very expensive devices that, you know, in practice maybe do something, but usually the promise has never really happened. But, you know, a proton accelerator that hits this one specific type of, you know, genomic cancer, that person deserves help. But that is an encounter point that's like 0.001% of America, you know, with health care.

whereas psychiatry is like 30, 40 percent. And therapy is like, you know, getting close to 70 percent of people. So why is it that these specialties are able to wick all of the money, you know, over to their thing? Is there a similar thing in Australia? Is there any different? I'm going to be perfectly honest here with you, Joel, and tell you, the answer is, I want to know, I want to get into that room. I want to find out who those people are. I want to have a conversation with them.

But I don't know. I don't know. So there's no transparency in the process. Well, I don't know who they are that make these decisions about what we teach our psychology students. Because if they were being taught in a more, you know, in a deeper and wide a way, I don't think we have the same mindset once they're graduating and going out into the world thinking they can charge $300 and CBT everyone until the cows come home. I don't think that would be happening. And that's not going to necessarily solve the person's.

issues. There's nothing relational. You're not taught about what it is to sit in a room with another person and start to deal with the transference, which whether you talk about it or not, it's going on. That's the thing. Long before LLMs were a thing, large language models or AI or anything, I mean, back when I started and people were like, this is the perfect formula to do this, so you don't even need to know the patient. You just need to have, you just need to take a break to build positive regard with them. Where, you know, like, you know, like, you. It's a checkbox and then you just move on and you do your intervention, which I don't think at all. I think every step is relational.

My nervous system is important to the patient. You know, and you know, like I can't just be dysregulated and tell them what to do. And because it's just talking and I just told them now they have the information, you know, I don't believe that. And I was telling somebody and I was like, you know, if you're right, do you realize that in our lifetime you will be replaced with a computer? You're making an argument that a computer can do your job, which I don't believe. I don't think a computer can replace me for better or for worse. so and they were like well you know that that's exactly what has come down to yeah so there's nothing intrinsically about us to being humans being in the same room at the same time that's relevant

why live at all you know why not just go ahead to nuke the earth and as long as the server is running then it's checking now that's right what's the point exactly exactly can you tell us about how the psychotherapy hour and the education, the kind of implicit assumptions built into education, started to change, you know, that you've seen? What do you mean from what? From when you began, you know, from when you began and somebody said, I'm a therapist, I do this to somebody coming out of school and they say, I'm a therapist, I do this now. You know, what is, how does that answer different in what you see?

Well, in Australia, there are psychologists and there are different species, psychotherapists. They can completely different. They really have not that much in common. a little bit in common, but mainstream psychology, and then there's psychotherapy. If you want to become a psychotherapist, you have to head down a very different specialized training system that start, you know, and that's fortunately when I did a second master's, that's what I started to learn. And that's when my brain switched on for the first time because I was understanding things

at a deeper level. And even though it was a master's in clinical child psychology, it was psychodynamic, psychotherapy based. And as far as I'm concerned, that was a fluke. Okay, so it's a very different pathway. So what I'm trying to do in the interfacing that I'm doing is integrate and put back into mainstream psychology, psychotherapy principles that we've known for a long time

that are very, very useful in regards to the relational process and the understanding of the transfer dynamics between the therapist and the client. If you could get that into a mainstream psychology, I think it would be a game-changing. Is it like that in America in the same way? Like I want to be a psychologist. I get into college.

I do my undergrad. I do my post-grad. What kind of a species am I going to be at the end of that in the States? I think they do want you, if you're going to go in an academic route, to start publishing. And so your energy kind of goes there because it's very competitive and it's hard. And, you know, you'll have people that are eight years into a tenure program. And then they say, we're not going to give you a PhD. We're just going to give you a doctorate because, you know, we, there's a lot of politics.

I've had PhD, cleanse eye students who, you know, their advisors stole their research. And, you know, I knew somebody who they basically won a lawsuit against the school and the advisor. And then the lawyer said, if you want to, I wouldn't, I wouldn't pursue damages. I would settle here because if you don't, you'll never work in the institution anymore. Like if you sued a college, you're never going to work in a college, which just seems wild, you know. But, and then some of them do pursue clinical practice. But what I heard, I mean, the reason I ended up as a social worker is always thought that I had to go back to be Irvin Yollum and get an MD or to be Joseph Campbell. I had to go get a clinical psychology or a CITE practice doctorate, which is what I was going to do.

And then I talked to everybody, you know, that would have been around 2005. and all the people I talked to you said, don't do this. Don't get my degree because to pay for it, you have to do testing all the time. You don't get to do what you want to do. If you want to do this, what you need to do is go in and go to social work school because you're going to be two years in the master's program. In the second year, you're working anywhere in the field. And then you're out.

Like, if you do a PhD in clinical psychology, you're going to spend 10 years of your life, eight to 10 years of your life doing something that you don't want to do because I only had a bachelor's degree at that point. Then you have to get the master's. And they said, and then you're going to have to do something you don't want to do to pay for it. So, you know, you'd have to be working for another 10 years to accrue the income maybe to say, I'm going to step down and do this. And you're going to be in all this debt.

And I kept hearing that. And I never really thought I'd be in social work school. But it was a pretty good fit for me. Yeah. It's a little bit like the people who go down in counseling route here. That clinical psychology, unfortunately, is the most common. They've kind of taken over all the master's programs, pretty much wiped out all the others and producing. That's what they want to do here. We just had an article that went out because our state legislature decided to defund the school of social work at UA, which was the biggest and highest ranking school because of its autonomy.

It no longer has autonomy. So, you know, I can't see the future. But my guess is that it's going to be, you know, lumped in with, immediately lumped in with the clinical psychology, College of Arts and Sciences. it'll just be seen as less than clinical psychology. It'll follow a more biomedical path. And then UAB, the local college will probably, university will probably try and replace it by being like, look, ours is purely biomedical. It doesn't do all the systems and the environment stuff. It was so threatening to your politics.

Because that's the reason it was defunded is there were people who did not like some of the things that the professors were saying and doing is what was, I mean, I can't read their mind. They don't always make direct statements about it. But that is what a lot. my understanding is based on what other statements that they've made. So I don't want to get sued. I don't know, but it would appear that way. And that's an inference. Yeah. So it seems there's

something quite systemically quite interesting. And I think it's really big. And it's a movement away from person-centered work. It's away from things that take a long time and cost a lot of money. it's into something that can be controllable and unhelpful where big farmer makes all the money. Yeah. Yeah. And do you see... It's really hard to be cynical. So do you see kind of like we have here, you know, people like Gabor Mote tend to rank better in Europe,

whereas people like Bessel van der Kolk tend to rank better in the States? But there are these kind of, it usually needs to be a medical doctor. because they can get away with a little bit more that make sort of a rebellion against the way things are going and say, this is why it doesn't work and this is, this is why it's bad. Do you see kind of a rebellion or anything? I think it's there and I think there's interest. I think what I find with the people that cross my path and the supervisors that I work with is that they're still very anxious about embodying these things as true and letting them infiltrate into the therapy room

and how they practice as a therapist. And I think there's a transition that the individual needs to make away from, you know, the standardised rhetoric that seems to have a lot of fear. It's like there's a lot of infusion of fear and transmission of fear from the system into the individual. And then the individual, you know, does feel

that these new wave of thinking and this new understanding and the influence these you know these these these doctors come out to Australia and they talk they pull large audiences I think it's how to get the therapist in the room being able to release themselves from the shackles of the fear because it's so it's coming from the regulatory bodies it's coming from the um you know from the registration bodies it's coming from the government or they're interpreting it's coming from the government So I try to position the psychologist to go, look, these are the requirements with which we need to work, but we don't need to be defined by the 10 sessions. The government's going to give everybody $1,500 to get therapy every year. Take it. It's great. But that doesn't mean that I'm now feeling pressure to achieve some kind of outcome in 10 sessions. And that's the mindset shift that each psychologist needs to make.

Do you see, you know, being kind of a political thing? Because usually there's kind of like, historically in America, if somebody complains about politics, complains about therapy, it's usually the right wing because they see it as, well, it's just making people victims or it's encouraging people to be, You know, in the 80s, they said it's encouraging people to be gay. And now there's fear that the therapist is somehow making the person trans or something, which, you know, or their therapist is, I don't know, somehow encouraging this kind of victim mindset. Or there's different reasons.

But historically, it's the right wing that doesn't, not that liberals do a ton to further therapy in the states. But is there a political element to it? Is it really just kind of profit motive in the system? No, I think, I think there are those elements, absolutely. I think the fear that's being inserted into the psyche of everybody is, is definitely politically generated. And I think it siphons down into therapists and psychologists in quite an extreme way. We, our regulatory body here, people live in fear that they're going to have notifications made against them.

What does that mean? That means a member of a public can call the health ombudsman. and make a complaint about a therapist. The regulatory body gets that complaint, and then the therapist has to account for themselves. Now, of course, there are therapists out there who are doing inappropriate things and behaving in inappropriate ways, absolutely.

But you have this regulatory body that has a lot of power, a lot of control, and people are terrified to move outside, and we have protocols and rules that we have to follow, psychologist, a code of conduct it's called. And it's getting, it's, it's, it's becoming extremely, uh, dominating in terms of what it's doing to the psyche of the therapist, um, anxious, uh, terrified of, you know, questioning, um, even having an opinion.

Hmm. Is feeling, uh, and I, you know, I think that is an echo of what's going on politically on so many levels, but the way affecting the psychologist in the room, it's shutting them down. It's making them frightened. I had a lady, you know, call me the other day and she said, this code of conduct says it's very clear on this idea of, you know, multiple relationships. We can't see members of the same family as a child and family specialist. You know, when I grew up in training in psychotherapy, particularly with children, you would be

simultaneously the parent worker and potentially the individual therapist for the parents who invariably need work done on themselves. That's no longer possible. Yeah, I think one of the things, go ahead. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things that I see is that the, the sort of depth psychology, semantic psychology, you know, meaning making psychology traditions, is they didn't get invented after Freud. I mean, these are perennial philosophies that pop up independently across history. You know, a lot of the mystics, like, you know,

I like some Christian mysticism like Simone Vei and these different writers. They're chewing on the same ideas. They're using their own language because it's generally transpersonal psychology is dealing with a part of the brain that doesn't understand language or time. And because they pop up independently so much,

I mean, one, we could view that as, its own kind of evidence, I think, you know, that that is telling some kind of story that the deep brain is doing. But then, two, they're always going to be in tension with wealth and power. You know, there's some new theory that Meister Eckhart got killed by the Catholic Church, you know, for being too mystical in Germany in the Middle Ages. And, you know, they're never really going to be the favorite thing of the people that are running the world, probably. They also, you can't really kill them. Because even when you completely remove them from an educational discipline, like we basically accomplished in America, you know, and by the

90s, they come welling back up in people who care enough to see what is this work, what works for the person in a room. And I mean, that was my story. Like when I went in, I learned, you know, I knew Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and all this stuff from graduate school. And I did comparative religion degree. And I thought it was interesting. And then I was like, okay, time to get serious and do science with whatever. This is the randomized controlled trials. So this is the gold standard. I read 30 books on CBT and had sat through a master's program and was just kind of like, I don't get this. You know, but I, you know, whatever, and I was insecure enough to do it.

And then patients were bored and like, I already tried that. It's not helpful. You're trying to just reframe the way I'm thinking. I'm telling you it's in my body. And I had a drive and a fear, I think, of letting people down enough and an empathy to say, oh, my God, I need to get rid of what isn't working and really listen to you and follow that. And then in that, it led me into, you know, where I am now. If you, there always are going to be people that have that and follow it.

I wish the world was a little kinder to them, but, you know, if it's not going to be, I don't really think it's something you can kill. You know. Yeah, and history will tell us that, I mean, I mean, we don't really, we're not, I mean, the ancient Greeks, they knew all of this, that they understood so many things

that we think about now and use today and just take for granted, but it really comes from them. When you study the philosophers from that time, they were grappling with the same things. And I agree with you. It's never going to be the dominated thought of those in power, the ones that are in control.

And what I don't like about those arguments or not even what I don't like about them, I agree with that. But I also want to make a distinction because I think what happens a lot of the time is when people want to discard science entirely and live too much in the subjective, they tend to make these arguments about the medical model on the front end that I agree with. You know, when you let these kind of rampant abuses of power exist, you're going to drive people into the arms of pseudoscience because, you know, like we have a radio guy here and he will do all these conspiracy theories

and it's created a lot of political problems. But when he starts with this happened and they didn't care and this happened and this happened, these first three things are right, you know. So people are likely to follow him to that next conclusion. So it's not really good for the health of your society, I think, to leave those problems visible because people and then have the insecurity and the institutions covering them up because they'll happen. But, you know, there's a lot of people that will make these arguments like, well, Aztex knew how to cure cancer. They had astral pyramids. And I don't, I can't follow you there.

I don't, I think that science provided some things that are more useful for curing cancer than they we knew about in the broad stage. But when it comes to psychology and depth psychology, you know, Plato said, said, that the soul was tripartite, that there was a multiplicity of self because the part of me that wants to go out and seek glory and the part of me that wants to live for pleasure and the part of me that follows logic and the part of me that wants to embrace honor and understands that, you know, there's a bigger motivation in the future than all of these small parts now. We're somehow existing in the same person and intention, yet the synthesis of process resulted in a, you know, there was a confluence of drives.

you know sort of made up identity and you know the the ancient Greeks did know that in a way that i don't know that the hospital does now you know it definitely doesn't i mean that's part therapy isn't it we have all these parts that are coexisting simultaneously in different parts of the brain and different access to those parts and it's even neuroanatomically mapped now how they are all connected so i think that i think that it is a beautiful synthesis of both and but not reducing the clinician to an anxious mess who burns out within five to ten years and I like the way when you were sharing a bit of your story how you got to a point well I'm I'm inferring that you said that you had to have the confidence you know because you were so insecure enough to sort of take

on a rhetoric that didn't quite fit with you but then you have to develop into your own person where you go look I'll take that because it works because there is some good in most things but I'm going to reject the other parts that I don't agree with and then that and then I'm going to find my way. Now that takes a certain internal development of your own self and your own confidence to be able to discern between a teaching that is unhelpful, limiting and rigid and inflexible and useless for you

and then integrate that with things that are more helpful. So the journey for the supervisor or for the trainee is to find their own internal confidence to make those decisions. And I think that's what it really comes down to because it isn't a question of either or. It's a question of how we live in that space where all those elements are continuously relevant and what that's going to mean for us in those micro moments in the room with another human being. Yeah, that is one of the things that is kind of curious to me is like when I say,

hey, the profit motive or this incentive structure, if it's not the profit motive, maybe it's the way we conceptualize research during a decade or something, but the incentive structure is pushing people in this direction that is bad. someone will email me and say, well, I know someone that didn't do it. And I was like, I know I didn't say everyone has to do it. I didn't say you get killed if you don't. I said you're incentivizing people to move in this direction. And of course, there's going to be people that are self-motivated and deeply curious and kind of find their own way.

But when you make the, why would you make it harder to do something that is the right way to do it? And, you know, I know a guy that didn't do that is not an argument against a probabilistic, you know, outcome. You know, one time I rolled, you know, one time like I won when I rolled, you know, rolled, you know, a 66 red on Rouglat or something. And it's like, correct. You're just explaining to me the probability works. I know that. So I don't know. When you think about the incentive structure, what kind of forces you've outlined a couple do you see broadly moving psychotherapy away from what you do?

You know, why is somebody in 10 years less likely? to be a Tanya than a someone else. Fear. It's all fear. Absolutely. And it blends. It commerses with your own internal insecurities. That's the only thing that gets in the way.

Now, when I say the only thing, it's a big thing. But if you want to morph into somebody who feels they have autonomy, control, that they're not getting seduced or infected with the systemic fear that's coming in at them from so many different angles and levels, then you have to have a strong sense of self and an idea that you exist in the world, you exist within the structures that the world defines, but you exist in your own mind with a certainty and a confidence that is different. And that's how you segue out of the, you know, the indoctrination of the model where it's not working, because some aspects of the model do work. And that's

are important. It is important for us to have language, to have categories, to have a way in which we can communicate and share our understanding with each other. That's how that part of the brain works. It wants structure. It needs boxes. I'm not enough. That's, that's, you know, that's how we get through the day. That's how we move from 11 o'clock to 12 o'clock. Yeah, exactly. Completely arbitrary. Time doesn't even exist. But I need to know how I'm moving, you know, from A to B space that that's through my frontal load my brain the part of my brain that needs that structure so it's it's all about internal internal security that's i believe what it siphons down to i i believe that and i think again you know to say to go back to theodore porter you know those

structures are absolutely necessary i know that i think that my critique is that we have to apply them with context and remember that those structures are always metaphors from distance. Just because they're not obvious metaphors does not just make them a representational symbol. The clock is not a thing. It's a collective hunch because most of our clocks are sort of around the same time, maybe a couple seconds off and that lets me conducts therapy and schedule an appointment. And we agree. If we agree, then it's real. But it isn't. It's just because we have a shared understanding of reality. If I was tripping or an acid or psychotic, I would not be in the same reality is you and we wouldn't be able to have a coherent conversation. Our conversation would be

very different. So there's nothing objective about it. It's the internal experience of I'm okay. I'm okay in a world that doesn't necessarily agree with me that I can be in that world and not feel distressed. That's the difference. Yeah. And you know, we are all definitely entering a world that increasingly, you know, is not shared by as many people, you know, there are, there are people who are definitely entering their own reality. And that is a bigger conversation than just what psychotherapy is doing. Right. And I think that conversation is banging up against those boundaries of the meta.

And what is going on in this world is what is the micro of what is going on in psychotherapy. I think it's symbolic. I think it's happening. I call it a parallel. reality's model. It's going on in all these different planes of reality in exactly the same way with the same themes. Yeah. Well, this was a wonderful conversation. Is there anything that we don't quite put a bow on that you would like to wrap up or revisit or anything that people can go to if they want to encounter more of your work or to find out more about what you do?

I just want to say that I think it's really important to have conversations like this. Thank you, Joel for the work that you do and the amount of thought that you put into making sense of our profession. I think it's wonderful the amount of information and knowledge that you share. So thank you very much for that and thank you very much for giving your time amidst what's going on climate-wise. It's all very stressful and we're always, you know, working hard to find ways to connect amidst the struggles that we have. So I appreciate your time. And I want to encourage all the therapists out there, whether your early career, mid-career, late career, to understand that no matter what you're struggling with,

it's the internal process that's going to make the biggest difference for you and encourage you to do that work on yourself and to find like-minded supervisors, peers, colleagues to support you in the systems that you're working and that support is really what's going to make the biggest difference. So if anyone's interested in learning more about the work that I do in deep minds, psychedelic training. It's all about the connecting internally and connecting with like-minded peers, which I think at the end of the day when you have a small community around you that is

like-minded, that that is what is going to give you the confidence that you need to be able to define yourself in this crazy world that we're living in. Yeah, I do think collective finding a community is what the best thing to do is. You know, I could have just ranted from my basement about the model and what I didn't like or whatever and you're kind enough to read it. Most people aren't. I mean, I'm kind of realizing that figuring it out is the easy part. You know, how do you get anyone to actually engage or care, which, you know, I don't know, five years into doing this. Some people are reading articles, which is, I appreciate a lot. But also, you know, there were four years where no one did, you know, I get, you know, 10,000 people reading the blog now, but it was

three or four years of, you know, one or two people a month. And these things take time. You know, you're not doing it wrong just because you don't get the result right away. But, you know, Taproot, our practice was a way of, let's just get people the same way, you know, when I read the history, people come out of institutes. They came out of multiple people being a little different, but sharing a same language in Berkeley in the 70s and Eastland and, you know, all of these wonderful kind of places. I don't see really the colleges functioning like that.

anymore. I don't really see the practices functioning like that anymore. And so this was not as much a money-making venture as how do you get people together who are going to create new things and build this kind of new thing because we need something. And I don't see the places where historically that came out of existing anymore. You know, America is so tied up in the myth of the rugged individualist. I think that you just bootstraps and do it yourself. It leaves people empty. It leaves a lot of the important parts of life gone if you lean too much into that. Absolutely. We need each other and we need to feel supported in our work. Obviously, we have our families for connection, but I think the work is intense.

And I think it's hard at times. And I think we need to connect with other therapists who feel the same as us and who think the same as us. And I think that that is extreme, no matter where you are, no matter what you're doing, in order to overcome the, the intense pressure to get infected by that fear and to lose sight of what what you believe is actually important in the room. Yeah. Yeah. I thank you beautifully put. I really appreciate your time with us today. And I would anything that you want to me to put in the show notes for people to connect with you, send it my way and I'll definitely get that there episode turnaround time. Maybe I'm walking into a pretty crazy week. So it may be a little,

a little bit before this airs, but we'll get it out. I'll send you a link to the advanced training, which are those you who already work relationally, already understand about the transfer and what goes on in the room. This is your opportunity to connect with a group of beautiful therapists who want to remove themselves from the rhetoric, the parts that don't work and actually carve that space together. And yeah, just really hope that everything settles down weatherwise for you guys in the States and just remember connecting with other human beings is the most important thing in the world. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much. It's been amazing to have this chat and I'm looking forward to reading more of your amazing stuff that you post. It's fantastic, the amount that you educate like, and I just really appreciate and really appreciate that we've had this time together. And the people in the houses all went to the university where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same and there's doctors and lawyers and business executives and they're all made out of tickey tacky and they all look just a thing