The Breath Geek

The Breath Geek Breathwork, bio-hacking and life coaching Dr. Richard L. Blake

09/10/2026

The Satanic Panic gets remembered as religious hysteria. It was closer to a clinical failure — driven by therapists, spread by daytime television, and built on suggestive memory work.
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It began in 1980 with Michelle Remembers, a bestselling and later discredited account of "recovered" satanic cult memories. The psychiatrist who co-wrote it went on to marry the patient. Nothing in it was ever verified.
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The McMartin nursery case ran from 1983 to 1990 and became the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. Children were interviewed with highly leading techniques and produced claims no evidence supported — tunnels under the school, teachers who could fly. Seven years, over $15 million, zero convictions. The panic spread to more than a hundred other nurseries, and in some of those cases workers were jailed on charges later overturned. In 1992, FBI investigator Kenneth Lanning concluded the satanic networks did not exist.
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Why it was possible: memory is reconstructive, not a recording. Loftus & Pickrell showed false events can be implanted in healthy adults. Garven et al. showed McMartin's interviewing style reliably produced false claims from children.
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To be clear: child abuse is real, common, and was historically dismissed. The lesson isn't to disbelieve people. It's that certainty plus suggestion can build a vivid memory of something that never happened. And Otgaar et al. found belief in repressed memory has risen among clinicians since the 1990s, not fallen.
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Loftus & Pickrell (1995), Psychiatric Annals. Garven et al. (1998), Journal of Applied Psychology. Lanning (1992), FBI NCAVC. Otgaar et al. (2021), Perspectives on Psychological Science.
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09/09/2026

"For most of medical history, there was a clear line between grief and depression. In 2013, that line moved.
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The DSM — psychiatry's diagnostic manual — removed what was called the 'bereavement exclusion'. Before, you generally couldn't be diagnosed with major depression in the weeks after a loved one's death; that was treated as normal grief. Now you can. And in 2022, the updated manual added Prolonged Grief Disorder: grief that persists beyond roughly 12 months (6 for children) can be classified as a disorder. Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield documented this broader shift in 'The Loss of Sadness' — how normal sorrow has been steadily redefined as illness.
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The fair other side, because it's real: grief genuinely can tip into severe, dangerous depression, and some people get stuck in grief so disabling that treatment is a lifeline. Removing the exclusion means those people aren't denied a diagnosis just because someone died, and Prolonged Grief Disorder describes a real, impairing minority. The concern isn't that help exists. It's that the boundary between ordinary mourning and 'disorder' got blurrier, and a universal human experience now sits closer to something to be corrected.
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If you know someone who was made to feel broken for grieving too long, send them this.
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08/31/2026

"Real diagnoses are real. Real autistic people exist. Real depression exists. This research doesn’t deny any of that — it’s narrower. It’s about how social platforms shape the way mental-health identity gets expressed through reinforcement.
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Griffith & Stein (2021) sampled public posts from 14,626 users disclosing ten different diagnoses via hashtags. They found that community responses — likes, shares, comments — predicted how often people went on to post about their mental health. The more encouragement a disclosure received, the more disclosure followed. The strength varied by label, and posts tagged with autism received the most likes and shares on average across the dataset.
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Some caveats matter. This is observational and cross-sectional, so it shows association, not direct cause. Other readings are possible — people who post more are simply more visible, so they receive more responses. And nothing here suggests posters are insincere. The simplest reading is that ordinary people respond to social reward in ordinary ways, and platforms are built around that fact.
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Researchers including Lucy Foulkes and Jean Twenge have raised similar concerns about how social media may be amplifying mental-health labels in young people in ways that don’t reflect real changes in underlying illness.

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08/24/2026

If this hit something, comment with the lightbulb emoji.
And tell me — what's one thing about you your parents definitely didn't teach you?
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The 'Jim twins' are one of the strangest cases in behavioural genetics — but they point to something that unsettles a core therapy-culture belief: that your parents are the architects of your mental health.
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Bouchard and colleagues studied more than 100 pairs of twins separated in infancy and reared apart, over a 20-year programme at the University of Minnesota. About 70% of the variance in IQ tracked with genetic variation, and on personality, temperament, interests and social attitudes, identical twins raised apart were about as similar as those raised together (published in Science).
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None of this means parents don't matter. Severe abuse, neglect and chaos shape children in real and lasting ways. Genes interact with environment — they aren't destiny. And the Minnesota study has critics who've raised methodological concerns, so it shouldn't be treated as the last word.
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But the dominant story — that adult distress maps neatly onto parental failure — is doing more explanatory work than the evidence supports. Temperament is real. Heritability is real. And blaming ordinary parents for ordinary struggles doesn't tend to heal anyone — it just hardens into a worldview.

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08/19/2026

"Venting doesn't work the way you think it does.

Researchers analysed 154 studies on anger. Over 10,000 people, every age and background.

Rage rooms. Boxing. Jogging. Screaming into a pillow.

None of it lowered anger. Some of it made things worse.

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Every time you vent about someone, you're rehearsing the story, not releasing it. That's the part most people miss.

What actually worked was calming the body down, not revving it up. Slow breathing. A pause. Stepping away and coming back later.

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This isn't a case for burying it and saying nothing. Reflection matters, and so does feeling heard, especially straight after something happens.

The problem is repetition without anything new going in. Telling the same story to the same anger, on loop.

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If it's still there after years of getting it off your chest, that was never going to be the fix.

Kjærvik & Bushman (2024). A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal. Clinical Psychology Review.

Drop the 🔥 if this challenged something you believed. Tag someone stuck in a vent loop about their family.

08/16/2026

For decades, the message was loud and clear: depression = chemical imbalance.
But in 2022, Moncrieff et al. published an umbrella review in Molecular Psychiatry showing there’s no convincing evidence that serotonin levels or activity are associated with depression. (Nature)
Antidepressants do outperform placebo, but Khan et al. (2015) showed the difference is modest: ~40% respond to meds vs ~30% to placebo (PMC).
Other meta-analyses confirm the reductions in symptoms are often below “clinically meaningful” thresholds (BioMed Central).
This isn’t about dismissing anyone’s experience.
It’s about recognising that the healing you achieved was your work — not marketing slogans, not a serotonin story that never held up.
And if diagnosis growth keeps rising the way it has, soon everyone will wear a mental illness label.
We deserve better than myths. We deserve mental health built on truth.

08/15/2026

A 2024 study compared ayahuasca retreats vs guided breathwork sessions. Both groups improved — but breathwork surprised everyone:
Wellbeing ↑ 18.9% with ayahuasca, ↑ 13.8% with breathwork

Resilience ↑ ~5% with ayahuasca, ↑ ~10% with breathwork → double the gain

Self-compassion ↑ in both groups

Personality traits shifted in both: neuroticism ↓, agreeableness ↑

(Khubsing, R. S. I., van Leerdam, M., Haijen, E. C. H. M., & Kuypers, K. P. C., 2024, Psychoactives)
And these weren’t short-term changes — they lasted for months after.
This matters because the Big Five personality traits are some of the strongest predictors of life outcomes, stronger than IQ. Being lower in neuroticism and higher in agreeableness means you’re not only more successful — you’re also easier to live with, work with, and love.
The study didn’t specify which exact breathwork was used, only that it was “consciousness altering.” Most likely it was conscious connected breathwork — but if anyone knows differently, please let me know.
And here’s the kicker: this isn’t something you can DIY with box breathing or Wim Hof. This is deep, facilitated work that needs a trained professional to guide it safely.












08/14/2026

"Your brain aches for lost loved ones in a way that looks, on a scan, a lot like craving — and that’s not a metaphor, it’s neuroscience.
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O’Connor et al. (2008) found that activity in the nucleus accumbens — a brain region tied to reward and motivation — tracked with the intensity of yearning in bereaved people. The more someone longed for the person they’d lost, the more this region fired. Rather than framing grief as weakness or attachment as pathological dependence, it suggests yearning is closer to a biological drive — more like hunger or thirst than addiction.
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This matters because we’ve steadily eroded the structures that used to carry people through loss — extended family, ritual, community — and increasingly replaced them with a single weekly therapy hour. What the grieving nervous system tends to need most is sustained, embodied, relational presence: people.
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Caveat: this doesn’t mean therapy has no place in grief. There’s good evidence for specific interventions, especially for the roughly 10% who develop prolonged grief disorder. But for most people, the research points to social support and community as the strongest variables — the very things modern life strips away.
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08/14/2026

94% of therapists lean liberal.
That’s not balance — that’s monopoly.
📊 Studies show:
▪️ At a 2011 SPSP conference of ~1,000 social psychologists, only 3 identified as conservative (

08/12/2026

"Growth mindset is one of the most cited ideas in modern parenting and education. It’s also one of the clearest case studies in psychology’s replication crisis.
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Sisk et al. (2018) ran two meta-analyses across 273 studies and found the average effect of growth mindset on academic achievement was d = 0.08 — trivially small. Li & Bates (2019) ran a rigorous replication and found mindset interventions changed what learners said about intelligence but had no measurable effect on resilience to failure, ability, or attainment. A 2023 meta-analysis went further: when restricted to preregistered, blinded, properly controlled studies, the effect was indistinguishable from zero — and authors with a financial stake reported larger effects than independent researchers.
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To be fair, it isn’t entirely one-sided. Yeager et al. (2019), in Nature, found a small positive effect of a brief intervention in lower-achieving US students. So it isn’t nothing — but it’s nowhere near what parents and teachers were sold. The honest version: a small effect, for some kids, in some settings. Not a universal lever.
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The cultural cost is real. Parents were handed a simple story — praise effort, change outcomes — and many now blame themselves when their child struggles. Temperament, ability, environment and luck were always doing most of the work.

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