Doctor Bentley Part One
Bentley’s method had become a sort of spectacle in the psychiatric community. The APA board nearly broke out into a riot during a series of heated discussions concerning its inclusion in formal texts such as the DSM-6, with esteemed medical professionals hurling emphatic ad hominem verbal attacks at one other in the manner of a zoo monkey hurling excrement. The conflict centered around the undeniable empirical evidence for the method’s efficacy, and the categorically inimitable nature of its practice: no one but Bentley himself had ever successfully employed the method in a clinical setting. Nearly all attempts at the method by physicians who were not doctor Stephen Z. Bentley resulted in dramatic and irreversible damage to the patient’s psychological well-being, with many a hopeful depressive or weary schizophrenic, (individuals whose conditions likely would have gradually improved in the setting of the traditional medication + CBT approach over a number of years), responding to the experimental hypnotic treatment by deteriorating rapidly into either madness (the gibbering in gibberish kind), catatonia, or suicide. A rash of lawsuits against the unsuccessful physicians, and in at least one case a criminal conviction, thoroughly dissuaded them from further attempts at the method.
But for doctor Bentley, the method cemented him as a noteworthy figure in the cannon of medical science eccentrics alongside Freud and Beck. His once-failing private psychiatric practice made waves and headlines when, via the employment of his novel method over the span of roughly two months, Bentley cured over three dozen mental patients of their ailments. Narcoleptics, insomniacs, unipolar depressives, manic depressives, schizophrenics, meth addicts, heroin addicts, sex addicts, and criminally violent psychopaths, to name a few, were among the patients who Bentley’s hypnotic therapy seemingly pulled from the depths of darkest despair and madness into the shimmering light of bliss and altruism.
One of Bentley’s patients disclosed to us her diary entries before and after undergoing the method on April 14th of 2025:
Katie Zeph 3/2/2025: “I wake up each morning and am faced with the daunting task of distracting myself sufficiently such that I don’t think too hard about how desperately I want to escape from this life. Twelve years of talk therapy and over a half dozen different antidepressants have done nothing to meaningfully change the way I feel on a daily basis and have felt since I was a child. Everything I see turns blue — every job becomes dull, every relationship becomes fake and petty, every hobby becomes boring. I strive endlessly for something which can cut the darkness, but even hard drugs disgust me soon after the initial awe has worn off. I feel my fate is to spend this life suffering for nothing, prolonged only by my even greater fear of death.”
Katie Zeph 6/11/2025: “I suppose this is what it’s like to really believe in a benevolent god. Each and every day I find that I can, with surprising ease, direct my thoughts and attention to the sense of enjoyment I feel, which is somehow both physical and transcendently spiritual. My attachment to life was always somewhat anchored in a very subtle sense of enjoyment, but that enjoyment was inevitably and continually overwhelmed by the tides of misery. But now, the enjoyment has taken the center stage, and the misery simply watches from the audience — present but wholly uninvolved. Since my experience with Bentley, I have found myself appreciating a profound sense of meaning and purpose in my vocation, my marriage, and my personal hobbies. Words cannot express my deepest gratitude to Bentley for giving me a perspective on life I never knew to be possible. I feel connected to a grand universe and beautiful harmony, walking along the broad spiritual highway in the light of the divine communion between all humans and all living beings.”
fMRI scans of patients’ brains revealed a dramatic chemical change with regards to the volume of specific neurotransmitters, as well as a harder to detect change in which environmental factors did or did not cause the brain to release said neurotransmitters. Post-treatment, the teenage drug addict suddenly responds to OxyContin as though if it were ibuprofen and responds to selfless charity work as though if it were OxyContin.
Bentley became something of a celebrity, at first just in the American psychiatric community, and eventually, in wake of the lurid controversies which followed, in global pop culture from Scandinavia to Southeast Asia. His jubilant emotive style attracted a large following, and he found himself receiving both money and fame hand over fist through speaking arrangements, written publications, and a podcast streamed on Spotify where he would interview his former patients about their newfound happiness. Mentally ill folk from all over the world made treks to his office in Dallas in hopes of receiving the treatment. Bentley spent time every day giving treatments but the waiting line for his office began to swell rapidly. Bentley raised his working fee to $5,000/hour. He declined to accept patients who weren’t in the direst straits of mental illness — using his podcast to go on long rants about pop psych bullshit and healthy rich white people who feign mental illness as an excuse for laziness and cruelty, eventually coming to believe their own lies in a Munchhausen sort of way and use up medical resources which ought to be allocated to those in true need of help. These statements drew criticism, with many pointing out the hypocrisy of wanting to help those in need and yet charging exorbitant prices for your services.
Many colleague physicians discussed with Bentley the origin and practice of his method. Bentley welcomed their inquiries, especially after it became clear that they had no intention of or even ability to replicate his method. He allowed them to view his treatment sessions through a one way mirror. Bentley‘s method was a sort of hypnosis, which somehow made possible a guided reorientation of the faulty heuristic structures and emotive imbalances in the client’s mind. Bentley described his invention as the result of a deep meditative interrogation of his own psyche (whilst under the influence of an astronomical quantity of Holdramite (DM-Z)), combined with the patterns he had observed in his own clinical work and that of other psychiatrists. He claimed that the inadequacy of psychiatric treatment prior to his invention was caused by the physician’s inability to overcome the defense mechanisms that mental illness builds within the subject’s mind. For example, Bentley noticed during his work in substance abuse clinics, a phenomenon where a physician would very logically and persuasively explain to a client the basic consequential results of continuing to use versus deciding to commit to sobriety, and the client would nod their head and say ‘yes of course that makes sense and I want to live’, but then shoot up, overdose, and die the next day. Even in non-psychiatric settings, many physicians in fields such as infectious disease and transplant will resonate deeply with the experience of a patient refusing to or being unable to adhere to medical advice even in the face of severe illness and death. Bentley himself was prone to neurosis and melancholy, and had a lengthy history of alcoholism prior to his introduction to 12 step. He was more than familiar with the unpleasant friction between reason and desire, between the demands of a lifetime and the demands of the present moment, and as such he understood cognitive dissonance as the most important obstacle to reliable mental health.
