In affluent societies such as ours, self-help courses are popular. Wallets open for the idea that over the course of a weekend or a few weeks you can have your life transformed. But self-help courses can be legally controversial, as the Sydney inquest into the death of 34-year-old Rebekah Lawrence is revealing.
Ms Lawrence attended an intensive self-help course only days before jumping out a Macquarie Street window. Whether her participation in the course had anything to do with her death is obviously yet to be determined by the coroner.
But the Lawrence case is not the first time a self-help course has been scrutinised by the courts. The Landmark Education Corporation, which runs The Forum, one of the most popular self-help courses in Australia and across the globe, has been a litigant in several US courts in the past two decades.
Twenty years ago, Stephanie Ney attended a Forum course over a weekend. But in the days following her attendance she began to unravel. As the United States Court of Appeal noted in a 1994 judgement in which Ney was suing Landmark Education:
Ney began a process of psychological decompensation.
At the end of a three-day period she had a psychotic break with reality, suffered apparently permanent psychological injuries, and had to be hospitalised at the Psychiatric Institute of Montgomery County for 14 days.
While in the hospital, she was medicated and at times strapped to a bed in four-point restraints to prevent her from harming herself.
Unfortunately for Ney, the US Court of Appeals said that “although perhaps her participation in the Forum might have led in part to her psychotic reaction, even if that nexus had been established, [she] did not produce sufficient proof to recover under Virginia law.”
But the court acknowledged that “there is much in the record suggesting that Ney’s psychological difficulties are real and quite terrible”.
In Oklahoma, the family of a man shot by 27-year-old Jason Weed in 2001, have sued Landmark because Weed attended one of its courses only a few days before the shooting. The shooting was caused by Weed suffering a brief psychotic disorder, although his own psychiatrist could not determine the nature of the mental defect that caused it.
But the US government psychiatrist who examined Weed said that his “previous steroid use and participation in an exhaustive self-awareness program the week before the shooting could be ruled out as causes of the psychotic break.”
Landmark Education Corporation itself has been a regular initiator of litigation.
In Europe and in the US, the company has vigorously pursued those who have called its courses a cult or cast doubt on their psychological integrity. Most of these cases, brought against journalists, authors, psychologists and magazine publishers, have been settled out of court.
A survey of the case law about the impact of self-awareness courses such as The Forum and Turning Point — the course attended by Ms Lawrence — on the psychological profile of those who attend them is so far ambiguous. And the regulation of such courses is similarly vague.
Despite the fact that such courses are a multi-billion dollar industry, the law’s capacity to set clear ground rules around liability remains murky 30 years after their advent.
Some time in the mid nineties, a close friend attended a live-in psycho-therapy course at a private hospital in the north of Sydney. (The hospital no longer exists.) At the time she was in full time work in a responsible position. Since that time she has not worked again. She has been on a disability pension ever since. She attempted suicide in 1997, as a result of which she has a permanent physical disability.
The “system” in NSW failed her in many ways. Initially through a lax regulatory framework which allows psycho-therapeutic abuse to occur. Then in not providing the help and assistance she needed when her life fell apart. And in not providing the support she needed to bring the abuse to the attention of the proper authority, if such even exists. The system itself re-traumatised her, and has left her on the scrap heap of the disability pension.
She has tried, many times, to get various authorities and organisations and individuals to take up her case and see that this does not happen again, to others. No one has been willing to do so, or has not had the patience to persist. In the early days she was too traumatised to present herself well. Each time she tried again, the process retraumatised her. Her recovery has been slow, and now it seems likely that too much time has passed.
In the UK there is an organisation (now) called Witness (www.popan.org.uk) which is a support organisation for the survivors of psycho-therapeutic abuse. To the best of my knowledge, there is no similar organisation in NSW, perhaps not in Australia.
As someone who has attended a swathe of Landmark courses, and watched as my mother was sucked into the “cult”, I believe I can speak with some anecdotal authority on Landmark at least.
Almost the first thing you hear upon entering the Forum is that “The Landmark Forum is for those who are well”. They state it clearly that the Forum isn’t therapy and it’s not for those with mental illness or instability.
That said, the program is extremely confronting. I went in a scattered, confused but fundamentally sound human being. I came out even more confused, but slowly was able to use the tools they taught to bring myself under control. It was, on balance, a worthwhile experience, but I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone.
That brings up an important point. There is an innate conflict in the Landmark method. That is, there is an enormous emphasis placed on participants to recruit their friends, family and even work colleagues. This is, in the main, what I’d say contributes to the “cult” tag. Yet Landmark courses are very emotionally and mentally rigorous, even straining. Therefore before one recommends the courses to a friend, one should really be sure the friend is mentally up for it. This is clearly in conflict with the relentless push to convert others, and can be quite dangerous.
In closing, I’d recommend Landmark to many people. I would also not recommend it to many people. It depends on the person, on how well I believe I can judge their mental fortitude, on my perception of their need and willingness to engage with what is an enormously confronting, but therefore potentially very rewarding, experience.
I would research the ‘est’ movement of the 70s which became Landmark. Note that ‘Werner Hans Erhard’ behind the est movement was born John Paul Rosenberg who came up with a Freudian or Viennese sounding pseudonym in the 60s for reasons best known to himself. His wife similarly changed her name to match. This was the period of American shrinks with German names, the rise of the self-help movement, Transactional Analysis, etc etc. All pretty groovy and dated and nostalgia-inducing today, but ultimately probably not very helpful.
There are reasonable crosslinked wikipedia entries for est, Werner Erhard and Landmark Education, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Education
I was convinced by a friend to sign up to a weekend Landmark course for the not unreasonable sum of about $400, but after attending the first day pulled out by the middle of the morning in the break and argued for a full refund — at a point slightly after the first full refund point, and one they were reluctant to give. However, I have a strong background in university psychology, sociology, philosophy studies, etc, and could easily pick holes in what I was hearing. It’s a little like scientology or other easily refuted pieces of quackery that seem to rope people in these days. The only reason I went was as a favour to the friend, whose judgement I trusted at the time, but who I’ve realised since is highly gullible in character in general and always going to these things. While intelligent, he seems to 1) love seminars, and 2) not have any anchoring philosophy of his own.
Some people just like attending seminars, and modern life, modern capitalism and overwhelming media content can be so confusing people need something to latch on to — and many people don’t have the benefit of a ‘liberal arts’ education to provide any kind of real grounding or analytical framework, and will listen to any snake oil or demagogue. The reverence given to John Laws and Alan Jones are two examples. Look at Jonestown or Heavens Gate for further examples of how easily people can be lead with snake oil promises.
Landmark claim to ‘draw from philosophy, psychology, etc but is none of these things’ – although it never tries to communicate what it actually is, which was the joke with Burt Reynolds in ‘The Man Who Loved Women’ who suddenly found ‘it’ after a weekend seminar styled satirically after est, and used his new ‘insight’ to impress women henceforth. If grabbing the odd random, one-line and usually apocryphal quote from people like Einstein or Mandela or whoever, such as you see on motivational posters, counts as drawing from a number of disciplines, I suppose it qualifies in its claim to eclecticism, if not profundity.
In contrast, doing a year of sociology at any university will give you a good grounding and understanding of the history of capitalism, the rise of individualism (something courses like Landmark prey on with alacrity), some anthropology, some criminology, the key drivers of our society such as power, status, class and stratification, kinship and so on, the rise of industrialism and globalisation, gender relations, the professions, etc, which inform you of who you are and where you fit in to things.
In a similar vein, it would be very useful to police all these ‘wealth creation’ seminars through Depts of Fair Trading or the ACCC – once again, some seminar junkies like going just for the sake of it, but most of the wealth gurus had already been discredited by the time the GFC rolled around. Nobody believes the promises of unlimited wealth in a downturn, and so seminar spruikers and gurus are probably doing it tough. Only people like Neil Jenman speak out against them, never Depts of Fair Trading, while some tens of millions of dollars pour into worthless seminars using psychological tricks to attract attendees. People are being fleeced for $2,995 at a time. A recent Parliamentary Committee recommended they should be banned, but nothing was done of course. Interestingly, one well known spruiker who most recently formed ‘Wildly Wealthy Women’ who promised, once again, to make attendees rich through property, was shown in a recent High Court action against Channel 7 to own no property at all, and was living hand to mouth. Their promotional materials claim they made ‘$3.5 million in their first 6 months of property trading’. Such is the nature of the psychological tricks and image conjuring of the present day. Glossy packaging, imagery of yachts and luxury houses, and unrealistic and unsubstantiated claims, all going unregulated by the authorities and creating a worthless industry stealing money from impressionable working class folks who can ill afford it.
As an afterthought (while waiting for my first comment to come out of moderation), from a psychiatric perspective, a lot of what goes on in these courses can be quite dangerous to a lot of fairly normal, ordinary people, because they use techniques of ‘rebirthing’ or ‘NLP’ or whatever that require people to regress to a very young age and bring back memories that they may have repressed or suppressed in adulthood as a normal, healthy ego defence mechanism. It could be physical abuse, sexual abuse, family trauma, unusual punishments or even just low self esteem issues. By forcing people to dwell on these things as adults and bring them to the fore, they are undoing what is actually an evolved and healthy defence mechanism of actively suppressing unhealthy memories or feelings. This can make people with schizophrenia worse, and unhinge essentially normally healthy people also, as we are seeing. A lot of people report feeling very ‘bad’ after doing these sorts of exercises and it remains with them for several days or weeks, or in some cases hospitalises them or worse, as we have seen. While it’s meant to be ‘therapeutic’ it can be quite harmful and certainly unnecessary, as the claims of these courses that they’re giving you a new perspective on life or rejuvenating you or whatever are quite false and based on flim-flam, conjecture and nothing scientific or proven — in fact, the opposite could be proven if anything, if the medical or psychological fraternity took these operators seriously. (Unfortunately quite a few psych people get pulled into these courses too because of their own discourses around ‘therapy’ and ‘healthiness’ etc which can also be deconstructed and critiqued. Not enough postmodernism taught in psych courses, they are too insular and pseudo-scientific and unreflexively modernist still, failing to draw from the insights of other social sciences, instead trying to construct a model of health and illness that requires ‘interventions’ and thus will keep them in work.) Similarly, Freud’s approach to psychoanalysis of free association and regression has been found to often make schizophrenics worse, by bringing up old latent feelings and memories that they do not have the apparatus to control. Freud himself really created a pseudo-scientific and untestable form of therapy (psychoanalytics or psychodynamics) that has been increasingly refuted over the years, but held great sway from the 1930s to 50s, and created a lot of jobs and a lot of work for a lot of shrinks and ‘psychodynamic therapists’ at that time who helped people regress and ‘resolve’ their neuroses for $50 an hour, a favourite pasttime of New York neurotics and so on. It’s a pretty hit and miss therapy, as the theory is flawed. Freud himself was just trying to create a name for himself and much of his theorising was outright wrong and was of course turned into a religion. A few people may benefit from dredging up and ‘resolving’ their earlier issues, but many are better served simply repressing and suppressing them as nature intended, i.e. forgetting them and moving on. In fact, controlled studies have actually shown people who engage in suppression greater than average and get on with things in the here and now are actually happier and perform better in their day to day lives.
The act of doing this in large groups with minimal supervision and dodgy psychological theory based on a flim-flam movement like ‘est’ for 400 bucks for the weekend without regard for any individual differences or appropriateness of the intervention for any one person (one size fits all) or any followup in following days or any assessment of why this sort of thing is even appropriate at all is fraught with peril and dangerous for many individuals. It’s like trying to do amateur brain surgery at home with a copy of gray’s anatomy open.