Neil Brick Investigation

Dear Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation (OCABR) Division of Professional Licensure (MA),

We the undersigned respectfully request that the authority of your office is brought to bear to examine egregious failings in the Allied Board of Health Professionals licensure division that has ignored the potential danger to health care consumers in your jurisdiction posed by Mental Health Counselor Neil D. Brick (Lic. #6716).

To briefly summarize but some of Neil Brick’s potentially dangerous state-of-mind and radically paranoid, unsubstantiated, delusional beliefs, please note:

• Neil Brick claims to believe that he was brainwashed to be an assassin for the Illuminati/Freemasons.

• Neil Brick claims that, as part of his brainwashing by the Illuminati/Masonic conspiracy, he was programmed to rape and kill “without feeling.”

• Neil Brick claims that he once murdered a man in an unreported incident in Europe.

• Neil Brick holds regular conferences wherein his delusional beliefs are propagated to Mental Health consumers by he and his co-conspiracists.

• At a recent conference (May 2016), Neil Brick expressed concern that attendees could “trigger” mind-control programming by touching their faces. Neil Brick imposed a prohibition against face-touching and asked that people sit on their hands. (Keep in mind, this is a man who claims that his own mind-control programming impels him to rape and kill. The implication is clear.)

• Neil Brick continues to propagate debunked and disregarded narratives of concealed occult crimes from the height of the “Satanic Panic.”

• Neil Brick demonstrates a complete lack of understanding regarding cognitive/behavioral development, claiming to believe that Masons and/or Satanic cults torture fetuses so as to begin mind-controlling them at the earliest possible stage.

Again, this is but an introduction to the shockingly paranoid and delusional conspiracist narrative that Neil Brick propagates, and that his licensure serves to indicate a certain credibility and sanction derived from the Allied Board of Health Professionals. One has but to peruse Neil Brick’s multiple websites and publicly-posted writings and seminar transcripts to gain an understanding of his deeply suspicious, highly implausible worldview relating secretive cult conspiracies and government operations to issues directly relevant to Mental Health Care practice — specifically, the assumption that Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is directly installed by the nefarious mind-control ambitions of the aforementioned secretive groups into targeted victims.

These beliefs are not benign and the authors of this petition have recently implicated an associate of Neil Brick’s, one Ellen Lacter, in cultivating the conspiracist beliefs that caused a mother to kill her own 8-year old child in an effort to preserve him from future abuse at the hands of a non-existent Satanic cult.

(Please see this video of Neil Brick at a conference presentation insisting that attendees refrain from touching their faces, lest they “trigger” mind-control programming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btQaGxTp_m8 )

Massachusetts General Laws Section 169 (M.G.L. c. 112, §§ 169) states that the Board, subject to a majority vote of its members, is authorized to deny, revoke or suspend a license granted pursuant to this chapter on the following grounds:

(2) violation of ethical standards of such a nature as to render such individual unfit to practice as a mental health and human services professional.

According to Consumer Affairs and Business Regulations 262 CMR 8.00: Ethical Codes and Standards of Conduct, 8.01: Ethical Codes: The Board of Allied Mental Health and Human Services Professions adopts as its official guides the ethical codes and standards of conduct For licensed mental health counselors the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics and the American Mental Health Counselors Association Code of Ethics.

The ACA Code of Ethics states, in relevant part:

C.6.c. Media Presentations

When counselors provide advice or comment by means of public lectures, demonstrations, radio or television programs, recordings, technology-based applications, printed articles, mailed material, or other media, they take reasonable precautions to ensure that

1. the statements are based on appropriate professional counseling literature and practice,
2. the statements are otherwise consistent with the ACA Code of Ethics, and
3. the recipients of the information are not encouraged to infer that a professional counseling relationship has been established.

We, the undersigned, contend that Brick’s public lectures printed articles, etc., in no way represent “appropriate counseling literature” based upon a proper, scientific, and rationally sound assessment of available, empirical data, but rather a highly speculative, suspicious, and even delusional conspiracist narrative.

C.7. Treatment Modalities

C.7.a. Scientific Basis for Treatment

When providing services, counselors use techniques/procedures/modalities that are grounded in theory and/or have an empirical or scientific foundation.

While we are not privy to records that indicate methods of treatment employed in Neil Brick’s practice, his public comments, seminars, publications, etc., make it abundantly clear that Neil Brick lacks a solid rational foundation whereby he recognizes what constitutes evidentiary “proof”, scientific consensus, or even reasonable inference. Aside from propagating long-debunked interpretations of alleged Satanic Cult crime paranoia from the 80s and 90s, Brick also extensively relies on a retrospective survey known as the “Extreme Abuse Survey” (EAS). The EAS was designed to prove, among other things, that,

 

• Ritual abuse/mind control (RA/MC) is a global phenomenon.

• A diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder is common for persons who report histories of RA/MC.

• RA is reported to involve mind control techniques.

This survey, administered online, and circulated primarily amongst already-invested believers in mind-control conspiracies, is unscientific to the point of being worthless.

C.8. Responsibility to Other Professionals

C.8.a. Personal Public Statements

When making personal statements in a public context, counselors clarify that they are speaking from their personal perspectives and that they are not speaking on behalf of all counselors or the profession.

In contradiction to this, Neil Brick holds conferences in which he espouses his conspiracy theories as accepted clinical truths. His conferences, held on behalf of “survivors, co-survivors, therapists, other helping professionals, lawyers and all others interested in learning more about ritual abuse,” in no reasonable interpretation of the Standard of Ethics could be said to constitute the expression of a “personal perspective” removed from any question of therapeutic conduct, especially given the emphasis upon Dissociative Disorders.

Neil Brick also holds “Clinician Conferences” in conjunction with his annual “Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control conferences. These Clinician Conferences are described on his website as “open to licensed practitioners in related fields to discuss issues in working with clients suffering from ritual abuse and extreme abuse symptoms. Students studying in related fields and retired licensed practitioners [are] also in attendance.”

We believe that Neil Brick’s propagation of delusional beliefs is a potential danger to mental health consumers under his care and poses a larger danger to the general mental health of the public who believe him to be a credible source for mental health-related information. Neil Brick’s purveyance of clearly implausible ideas, in his role as a licensed mental health care professional, serves to undermine the public trust in mental health care and the oversight boards tasked with upholding the standards listed above.

We, the undersigned, ask that the Board review Neil Brick’s license in light of the breaches of ethical standards noted above in hopes that his license is thereafter revoked.

Please see the online petition here.

To view the board's follow-up to our petition, click here.