I love this show as a mental health practitioner. I could go on about how wonderful it is (4yrs listener) but for now I’m leaving this one star review up to protest their use of Betterhelp ads. BH willingly handed over private health information about their users over to companies like META for personalized advertisement purposes.
I have a lot of respect for Dr. Honda and his ethics; I am also constantly thinking about how to navigate the black-grey-white with my clients, my opinions, my actions etc. So it is very surprising and disappointing that Kirk has still been running these ads. When it came out, I listened to his 2020 episode “Is BetterHelp evil?” as I knew I had a quite negative and dogmatic view on the platform (based on personal experiences as well as those of other therapists/clients) and I always appreciate his knack for suggesting different perspectives, presenting research backed evidence and so on. However, this new discovery about BH’s extremely harmful and unethical practices has happened since, and I think it deserves a new episode reviewing all that has happened and what we know now. Just please remove the ads :( would be a nice bonus if you did a follow up episode.
Also- love Bob with all my heart, Humberto is obnoxious and I’m sad he’s on so many episodes with topics i’d love to hear Kirk talk about, Rebecca RULES and should switch places with Humberto in terms of frequency, and Kirk is a very well educated, authentic, funny and perfectly imperfect host/therapist. I’m surprised how many people accused him of being arrogant and shutting down his co-hosts in these reviews… maybe they listened to a Humberto episode. I just think he has strong opinions and, like any of us, can be wrong and still believe firmly that they’re right. And yeah, he rambles. I find it soothing and human, and sometimes I even fall asleep to the sound of his voice lol. Let’s remember therapists are people with their quirks and traits too, and if you don’t love the main host, maybe this one isn’t for you! PS is definitely more personal and laid back than most of the other psychology pods out there, but I like that.
I hope you’re reading this, Kirk (or maybe your niece who’s been organizing emails and such for you). I love love love this show and I am a patron. I don’t want to have to protest by unsubscribing but if this keeps persisting, I may need to do just that until these ads go away. Obviously BH has a lot of money to throw around, between paying their clinicians in pennies, settling lawsuits and keeping them hush hush, and paying every podcaster I love for advertising their services. This is about making the ethically sound choice. So take care of these ads… because we and all of those BH clients whose PHI got tampered with deserve it!