Would this have gotten me canceled? Maybe.

Hi {{ first name | Reader }},

I almost posted a reel this week that would have gotten me dragged in the comments, and rightly so.

For context: I love when you send me Instagram posts with eye-popping stats about loneliness or estrangement or relationships, with "Thought you'd find this interesting."  Please keep doing this. 

But about half the time, when I go and look further into the aforementioned stats, the number is either invented, badly framed, or comes from somewhere that should make us all uncomfortable.

This week's example was a good one.

The stat I was going to post about was this:

“60% of US adults have cut off a relationship in the past year.”

This stat is everywhere right now. And it feels true, right? 

So I went looking for the source.

Here’s the truth, FNAME: It came from a survey of 2,000 adults run by a press-release polling shop called Talker Research. The survey was commissioned by Talkspace, an online therapy company. The quote interpreting the findings came from Talkspace's own Chief Medical Officer.

Read that again: A therapy company paid for a survey that found people are severing relationships at epidemic levels. Then their in-house doctor explained what it meant. Then the media ran with it. Then someone made it into a graphic. Then it landed in your DMs, and you forwarded it to me.

That is a marketing exercise dressed up as research.

And here is what bothers me most: It isn't even close to what the actual science says.

The peer-reviewed work on estrangement, the stuff that goes through proper review and uses nationally representative samples, puts the numbers much lower. Reczek and colleagues, looking at a nationally representative sample of more than 8,000 mothers and 8,000 fathers in the US, found that only 6% of adult children reported estrangement from their mother and 26% from their father (Reczek et al., 2023). German data using a decade of panel research lands in a similar range (Arránz Becker and Hank, 2022).

The Talkspace number is ten times higher than what the research proves. 

And that’s all because it’s measuring a completely different thing. In their world, blocking a flaky friend on Instagram gets counted the same as severing a 30-year bond with your mum. 

A bigger number gets more headlines. More headlines sell more therapy.

Here’s why I keep showing up for you on Instagram, in this newsletter, and in my future book, FNAME:  The therapy industry is now financially incentivized to manufacture the very crisis it sells the solution to. Awareness is a marketing strategy now.

And the people doing the reframing, sometimes well-meaning and sometimes not, are often the same people who want £100 an hour to help you process the fallout.

To be clear, this isn't me defending abusive families. The research is clear that estrangement can be a healthy response to an unhealthy situation (Blake et al., 2020). Some relationships genuinely need to end, and I'm not talking about those. Wiley Online Library

I'm talking about the cultural drift. Where a difficult parent becomes "narcissistic." Where the default response to friction is exit rather than repair. The clinical psychologist Joshua Coleman has written about how therapeutic narratives have become the dominant cultural narrative, leaving adult children better equipped to indict their parents than to communicate with them (Coleman, 2021). Where Parents Talk

And the people who pay the price aren't the therapy companies posting record revenues. It is the 800-plus adults Lucy Blake's team at Cambridge interviewed who described Christmas as the hardest time of year, who felt judged, stigmatised, and often isolated from the wider social fabric (Blake, Bland and Golombok, 2015). The cure isn't always cheaper than the disease. Sometimes it is the disease.

I'm writing about all of this properly in my upcoming book. But I wanted you to see the machinery up close, because once you see it, you can't unsee it—at least I couldn’t. 

Get on the book waitlist

In short, every time a viral stat tells you that everyone is cutting everyone off, check who paid for the survey. And please keep sending me the screenshots.

Genuinely. I'd rather we work it out together than let one more invented number do the rounds.

Take a breath, 

Richard

P.S. If you enjoy my conversations on therapy culture and estrangement, it would mean the world to me if you would send this email to someone who needs it.

P.P.S WhatI recently had the privilege of being on Alana Pratt’s podcast. You can listen to my interview by clicking Here.

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References

Arránz Becker, O. and Hank, K. (2022) 'Adult children's estrangement from parents in Germany', Journal of Marriage and Family, 84(1), pp. 347–360. doi:10.1111/jomf.12796.

Blake, L., Bland, B. and Golombok, S. (2015) Hidden Voices: Family estrangement in adulthood. Cambridge: Stand Alone and the Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge.

Blake, L., Bland, B. and Imrie, S. (2020) 'The counseling experiences of individuals who are estranged from a family member', Family Relations, 69(4), pp. 820–831. doi:10.1111/fare.12385.

Coleman, J. (2021) Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. New York: Harmony Books.

Hank, K. (2024) 'Family estrangement and its association with life satisfaction and depressiveness in adulthood', Family Relations, 73(4), pp. 2189–2202. doi:10.1111/fare.13063.

Reczek, R., Stacey, L. and Thomeer, M.B. (2023) 'Parent–adult child estrangement in the United States by gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality', Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(2), pp. 494–517. doi:10.1111/jomf.12898.