You can't tell people to stop believing in a scam, but Kathy Wilson has some tips on how to help

them change that apply to a lot of scenarios in psychotherapy.

Welcome to the Carlisat Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chris Aiken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Psychiatry Report. And I'm Kelly Newsome, the Psychiatry Honest since 2003. I'm Chris Aiken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

We ended last week with the story of a bank CEO who embezzled, or in his mind, borrowed

$47 million from his customers, his church, his friends,

and even his daughter to fund a cryptocurrency scam he had been cheated into.

Even the FBI couldn't talk him out of the danger.

And when we've seen patients get robbed like this in practice, we haven't been able to stop them either.

When you tell people they are wrong, it only creates a divide, isolating them in their

false beliefs and giving them something to fight against. Kathy Wilson recommends a different

approach. I don't make a statement with people that, oh, this is a scam. You need to get out of it. I use the words, it might be, let's talk more about it. Give them a way to figure it out themselves. It's much more effective if you give them information that helps them discover that rather than telling them.

Instead of saying, this is so obviously a scam, the way we should approach it is to ask a question,

have you thought about the possibility that this could be a scam?

I know that might hurt to hear that, but there's a couple things that feel like red flags to me.

Do you think they might be red flags? Have you checked into this person any further?

So you're empowering the person to figure it out themselves, if that makes sense? So

important to do that because unfortunately, families will often alienate themselves

from the person, and then obviously you have no chance of helping them escape.

That's good advice for any change in psychotherapy. People are more likely to believe something

when they discover it for themselves. You're working against

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