Hey Better Babes. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and welcome back to Getting Better. This week,

mental health misinformation. What's helpful, what's harmful, and what just might be psychobabble.

Joining us is psychotherapist Joe Nucci and author of the new book, Psychobabble, which if there's

any authors listening or watching this right now, you know what a big deal it is when you see your hardcover in real life for the first time, and it literally just happened yesterday. So congratulations, Joe. We love the book. We love Joe, and we're so excited that he is here. His work focuses on dispelling mental health misinformation and replacing them within non-nonsense truth and accessible guidance for real healing.

Joe, how are you?

I'm so good.

I'm really excited to be here.

Can you tell this a difference?

What is a psychotherapist and then like a therapist and then like a psychiatrist?

Like what's the level?

Oh my gosh.

It's actually so confusing, but I think I can do it.

So there's psychologists. Now some psychologists are clinical. So that means they're concerned with like mental health and therapy and all sorts of stuff that we're going to be talking about today. But then some psychologists, it's like you're a social psychologist or a political psychologist or a whatever kind of fill in the blank psychologist. And they do research. They're still psychologists, but it's like, like who's one that I could think of? Like, do you know, like, Stephen Pinker at Harvard? Like, he's written a bunch of famous books or, like, Jonathan Haidt, for example. Like, they're social psychologists. So, like, a political psychologist would be studying, like, why people, like, are Trump supporters or why people go from one party to another. Exactly. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And so then you have, so clinical psychologists are closer to psychotherapists. And that's what I identify as. I am trained as a clinical counselor. But there are some counselors that are like school counselors, you know, and they don't necessarily have the clinical training that I have. Same with social workers, right? So you can have a licensed clinical social worker, but then some social workers aren't doing therapy. They're like out,

like in neighborhoods helping people navigate like the system for whoever they're helping.

Right. And so as long as it's clinical, it's psychotherapy. Therapy itself isn't actually like a

protected term. So if you think about like cryotherapy, massage therapy, it's just like too broad, right?

So psychotherapy is what we mean are like mental health counseling.

And so if you're a psychotherapist, okay, so wait, can you just give us like a therapy for dummies,

like hierarchy of like the categories?

It would be difficulty of a hierarchy just because I think the different

labels between psychologist, counselor, social worker, and then psychiatrists, we all have

different strengths. So like, I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know that much about medication.

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