🦑 Sordid 🦑

Here are different ways to limit the kill rate of your cat. A recent figure from the Mammal Society estimates that cats in the UK catch up to 27 millions birds each year, and 275 million prey items overall per year. discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/m…

In 2022, when I first started streaming, I was horrified to learn about the exploitation of the vulnerable streamer Reckful by the psychiatrist Dr. K (Alok Kanojia of @HealthyGamerGG). Dr. K had launched his own streaming career in 2020 by doing regular, therapy-like streams with Reckful where they delved into Reckful's childhood trauma. Dr. K also created confusion about whether he was Reckful's friend or his doctor. In one disturbing exchange, he told Reckful he'd love him for two years in an attempt to cure Reckful's possible personality disorder, and then withdrew his offer a short while later. Three months later, in July 2020, Reckful took his own life. Disturbed that streaming audiences and platforms such as @Twitch viewed (and still view) Dr. K as a saintly mental health guru, I made a documentary about Dr. K's irresponsible relationship with Reckful, titled "Reckless." I explained the ethical problems with their relationship and included interviews with a psychology ethics official, a doctor (@AviBittMD), and a therapist, who all explained the (totally absent) proper boundaries of a therapist-client relationship. The video was fairly well-received, even by Dr. K's own community. He replied to it with a defensive and evasive video titled "ethics," arguing that because he did not formally diagnose Reckful with a mental illness, he was therefore not acting as his doctor--despite literally telling Reckful he didn't know if he was his doctor or not. His audience seemed to mostly buy the argument that the lack of clarity somehow worked as a defense of Dr. K, and that he and Reckful were simply engaging in non-clinical conversations as friends. After posting my documentary to YouTube (from which I am banned) I reported Dr. K to the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, sending them a thumb drive containing his streams with Reckful and my documentary in the mail. As of June 2024, the board has finally taken action: Dr. K of has been reprimanded for "conduct that undermines the public confidence in the integrity of the medical profession," specifically for his relationship with Reckful. (I don't know if this was the result of my complaint, or another.) All throughout 2022, I maintained that Dr. K should (and hopefully would) lose his medical license for brazenly flouting ethics rules and laws in a case that ended in suicide. I still think he should lose his license, but a reprimand is better than nothing.