The Media vs. Hypnotherapy

The other night I watched an episode of The Mentalist in which practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, an offshoot of Ericksonian Hypnosis ) were suspects in a murder.

Besides the triteness of the script, my objection to the episode was not the notion that a therapist might be charged or guilty or capable of murder. Such things have happened. People who present themselves as healers are not beyond suspicion. Nor should they be. What particularly galled me was the notion that anyone could possibly be capable of putting a perfect stranger into a full-Monty trance with just a touch on the shoulder. As if that weren’t enough, the real killer/hypnotherapist managed to induce a complete amnesia and generate an utter complicity in a police officer so that he would passively do her bidding.

It is unfortunately the stuff of snake oil salesmen and charlatans and it makes the work of genuine practitioners doubly difficult—not only do we hope to be up to the task of genuine healing utilizing the tools of hypnosis, but we have to battle the false perceptions cultivated by a media scrambling to beef up their ratings.