A Conflict of Interest Disclosure Regarding My Picks for SXSW
Last day to Vote is August 21. That is what a call to action looks like.
OK, so it’s no morally-questionable lobster festival up in Maine, but as a staunch hysterical realist in journalistic orientation, I feel it’s my duty to present the following deeply conflicted recommendations for SXSW. The producers of this event have decided to use the same mechanism for panel selection that led to decisions like the disastrous Athenian invasion of Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War, and the election of representative Marjorie Taylor Green to the House of Representatives. Given the risks of unfettered democracy without an opinionated and self-confident plutocracy to guide the unwashed masses in their decision making, consider me your plutocrat for the day! I present the following recommendations for SXSW and strongly advocate voting so that the conference sucks less. If you do a strong enough job voting, I get to go and report on it. So there are multiple reasons to take action here.
I hereby present my recommendations, in the format of disclosing my conflicts of interest with each of the following panels:
Mind the Machines: Technology and Mental Health
Mimi Winsberg, Chief Medical Officer, Brightside Health
Carlene MacMillan, VP of Clinical Innovation, Osmind
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/128244
My conflicts of interest here are the most significant and glaring. The most obvious is the fact that my spouse, Dr. Carlene Macmillan, is among the panelists. So I not only have a personal interest in the topic of actual innovation in the field of mental health, but I have a vested financial interest in the above panel being selected. Furthermore it is only the selection of this panel that will give me enough juice with my wife to enable me to strongly advocate for my own trip to SXSW to be able to obnoxiously review these panels in public. I have every reason personally to convince you to vote for this panel. I will also note I am personal friends with Dr. Mimi Winsberg, and I have a vested professional interest in the success of Brightside, not because I have any money in the game, but because it’s going to enable me to have a reliable partner in a telehealth company with which to refer general psychiatry cases that I do not particularly want to manage given my growing personal focus on the interface of rheumatology and psychiatry. Therefore, having a great telehealth platform with a quality of care I can actually recommend to friends and family simplifies my life, because I just got to tell them to go to one place that I can feel confident in. I have it on good authority that Solome is also a fabulous presenter, and this again comes from the highly conflict of interest source that is Carlene MacMillan, MD. You’ve got to vote for this one. We have twin children together. Here’s how cute they are:
Ask the Intimacy Professionals Anything
Lila Donnolo, Podcaster, Horizontal with Lila
Gina Pellicci, Sex Positive Therapist LGBTQ+/Chronic Pain/Kink/Non Monog LCSW, Inner Lakes Therapy
Tiana Peters, Co-creator, SW Survival Guide
Major Tom Daily, Founder, Conscious Play
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/128979
Again, the above panel screams conflict of interest. It might not be immediately obvious why that is the case, but with a little backstory, you can see that I have only the most personal of vested interests in the success of the above panel. I don’t know Tina or Tom at all. I do know Lila Donnolo extremely well.
She is the remarkable host of Horizontal with Lila, a podcast that I was the producer of for the first six months of its existence. I have zero vested financial interest in the success of Ms. Donnolo (I was a volunteer, as it was out of the goodness of my heart and my strong faith that Lila is the second coming of all that is good in podcasting and intimacy). I am emotionally invested however in someone I helped get into the podcasting game land this baller SXSW panel. What is even more exciting is that the licensed clinical social worker presenting with her is none other than Gina Pellicci, who was a supervisor at my prior clinic for many years, and is among the strongest clinicians I’ve ever had the pleasure of training. She’s a phenomenal speaker, a phenomenal presenter, and her success reflects extremely well on me. Furthermore, both of these individuals crushed it on Clubhouse, and their success beyond Clubhouse makes me feel pretty good. Carlene MacMillan, mother of my children:
was also the person to tell Lila about Clubhouse in the first place. I have nothing but conflicts when it comes to the above panel, which is going to do a frankly phenomenal job of discussing intimacy in a way that is only good for my personal brand.
Back to the Future: Psychiatry and Psychedelics
Daniel Karlin, MD, MA, Chief Medical Officer, Mind Medicine (MindMed), Inc.
Maria Oquendo, MD, PhD, Ruth Meltzer Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Vinson, MD, Private Practice Psychiatrist, Lorio Psych Group
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/130679
The conflicts just keep coming. Not only is Dan Karlin a personal friend, I am a shareholder in Mind Medicine Inc., the company for which he is the Chief Medical Officer.
I also have a business relationship with Mind Medicine in the past, having served as a paid contractor in the role of principal investigator when I was running a large research clinic, and thus have an emotional attachment to its success. I will further point out that Dr. Maria Oquendo is not only the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, but was previously my personal psychiatrist when I was about 20 years old and a research subject at Columbia in a study for which she was a physician. I have a little bit of an ax to grind with Dr. Oquendo — that she did not choose to interview me for residency when I applied to Columbia, but given her conflict of interest with my former patient status, I’m gonna chalk this up to good boundaries on her part. Dr. Sarah Vinson is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, as am I, and this panel includes zero heterosexual white men among its panelists. This panel is good for a diverse and inclusive future, it’s good for SXSW, it’s got superstars in the field of psychiatry, and I don’t think it gets plausibly more conflicted than recommending the panel your prior psychiatrist is a presenter on.
Is Lack of Data Fueling the Mental Health Crisis?
Tom Insel, MD, former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/122072
Much has been made of my Column on Cerebral, and given it’s my most popular piece, I can’t help but think that the popularity of that particular column alone accounts for my endorsement of Dr. David Mou and his panel at SXSW. :
As previously noted, he was a medical student under my wife’s supervision during his time at MGH, and I consider him a friend. Tom Insel is of course one of the most recognizable names in psychiatry, and by his own admission did nothing useful to move the field forward in his time at NIMH. He has advised members of the What If Ventures fellowship, in which I participated previously, and I think his book is pretty great, but I have no other personal conflict of interest with relationship to Dr Insel. But even if you think Cerebral and NIMH are both total shit shows, you kind of have to vote for this panel, even if you’re just planning on hate watching it. It might be good, it might not, but it’s a little bit like if Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick did a panel submission: you kind of have to watch it no matter what you think of those companies or individuals. This one is an easy yes.
Tech Isn't Values-Neutral: Student as Change Agent
a.m. bhatt, Founder & CEO, DAE
Evie Velazquez, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment, New Haven Public Schools
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/127526?fs=e&s=cl
Connecticut is my home state, and I have spent a metric F ton of time on Clubhouse speaking with A.M. Bhatt My conflict of interest here is just thinking he is among the better speakers, and that given both my mother and sister still live in Connecticut and work in their role as arts educator/arts administrators, with cities around the state, I have a personal interest in the success of this panel selection as well. I will also point out, this is not some flashy health technology pitch-as-panel, this is real people who do real not-for-profit and education work, not people just shilling their stupid health tech company.
Promoting Racial Equity in Early Intervention
Kelvin Chan, Managing Director, Early Childhood, Robin Hood
Ruth Horry, Provider Engagement & Access Manager, United for Brownsville
David Harrington, Executive Director, United for Brownsville
Lidiya Lednyak, Assistant Commissioner of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Bureau of Early Intervention, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Bureau of Early Intervention
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/125755
This one is going to squeak through, because although I’m a child psychiatrist and I think early childhood matters, I have no professional relationship with any of the above speakers. They seem extremely legit. Brownsville is a really difficult school district in Brooklyn. I do know David Harrington personally, because my wife was in a book club with his wife. But that’s about as far as my conflict of interest goes on this one. Vote for it. It’s real. You should do that.
Redesigning the U.S. Healthcare System
Zak Holdsworth, CEO, Hint Health
Deb Gordon, Writer, Forbes
Liana Douillet Guzmán, CEO, FOLX
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/127992
Hint Health is the leading platform for Direct Primary Care, and I was a speaker at that conference featured this year. This is just quid pro quo. I also happen to think a16z is pretty cool, and I would love it if they would fund some thing I would do at some point. Through the transitive property of things a16z has invested in, I was a member of the Clubhouse creator first accelerator program, which accelerated me precisely nowhere,
and a member of the celo camp 4 accelerator program,
which had a similar outcome, but mostly due to crypto winter. Folx is a Health tech play for individuals other than just cis het white dudes and I am a huge advocate for trans and LGBTQAI health, and have been for a long time. This panel is a hands-down yes for me and I hope for everybody else. If nothing else, my endorsement will grease the skids with Andreessen Horowitz the next time I am pitching them some idea or other. It is also secretly my hope that Andreessen Horowitz will get more interested in Hint health, direct primary care, and maybe even Healthcare Rosetta as a result of doing this panel , and all of those things are in my personal and professional interest.
Vote early, vote often, vote before voting is closed tomorrow. SXSW can suck less, and can provide me with an excuse to go to Austin and advance my personal and professional interests with your engagement in the voting process. Thank you. And I hope you appreciate the level of deeply self-serving radical transparency in the above post.
All the voting links:
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/128244
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/128979
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/130679
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/130679
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/122072
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/125755
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/127992