Renowned Indian American Psychiatrist Alok Kanojia in Trouble Over Conversations With Celebrity Gamer Before His Death

Last month, Dr. Alok Kanojia, an Indian American psychiatrist, had his medical license reprimanded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for a series of livestreams he did in 2020 with troubled gamer Byron ‘Reckful’ Bernstein. A celebrity gamer since his teens, Bernstein had a vast audience, and shared intensely personal material on the live-streaming service Twitch, including his breakups, his childhood trauma, and his bouts of depression, according to The New York Times. The six sessions between Kanojia, colloquially known as Dr. K, and Bernstein were shared on Twitch, a video live-streaming service, in February 2020, a few days before Covid shutdowns. A few months after Dr. Kanojia and Berstein’s sessions were live-streamed, Bernstein committed suicide. 

While the Harvard-trained physician played no direct role in Berstein’s death, his medical license was reprimanded following a complaint filed by another gamer — Max Karson — who accused Dr. Kanojia crossed the line. He told The Times that he didn’t know either Bernstein or Dr. Kanojia, but the interviews had “shocked” him. He said the interviews “blatantly flouted ethics guidelines and benefited Kanojia by attracting an audience and donations.” Karon spent a month reviewing the interviews, he told The Times, “compiling a video record that highlighted moments of blurred boundaries, which he submitted to the licensing board along with a written complaint.”

The board claimed Kanojia and Bernstein “engaged in conduct that undermines the public confidence in the integrity of the medical profession.” Unlike a revocation, a reprimand enables Dr. K to be able to continue his practice both offline and online. He can also run Healthy Gamer, a business he co-founded with his wife Kruti Kanojia to offer coaching, content, and community to promote mental wellness. The business was founded as a “way to provide resources to a generation struggling with mental health and struggling to be understood by traditional resources,” according to its website.

Kanojia is also an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is a leading voice for alternative methods within the psychiatric community at top psychiatric institutions including McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. According to Kurti Kanojia’s LinkedIn profile, Healthy Gamer is based out of Houston, Texas. While Kanojia Psychiatry is based in Boston, Massachusetts, he lives in Houston with his wife and two gamer daughters, according to his profile on Penguin Random House who published his book “How to Raise a Healthy Gamer.”

In a January 2021 interview with NPR, Kanojia said “The mental health care system was ill-equipped to handle new assaults on our cognition” even before Covid-19. Even before COVID-19, the mental health care system was ill-equipped to handle new “assaults on our cognition — apps designed to keep you scrolling, video platforms designed to keep you watching, games designed to keep you playing.” Because psychiatry “isn’t enough,” he suggested the need for “a more holistic approach, like we take towards physical health,” and the “need to stop thinking about just medicine.”

During the six different conversations between the two, they discussed Bernstein’s mental health, drug use, and his brother’s suicide. He “almost immediately began recounting his lowest moments, sometimes breaking into sobs,” The New York Times reported. They spoke for multiple hours online across their various sessions before taking their conversations offline. The Times report described the interviews as “especially raw.”

A lengthy piece in The Times, mental health reporter Ellen Barry mentions details Dr. the sessions between the two, Before the first livestream session, Kanojia confirmed with Bernstein that their interaction was not a therapy session; but just a just conversation, Barry reported. He began by telling about his own life. How, he, the child of two physicians, played video games “so obsessively in his teens that he nearly flunked out of college.” At 21, on his father’s advice, he” traveled to India and spent three months on a Hindu ashram, studying meditation and yoga and, for a while, contemplating life as a monk,” The Times said. 

Upon his return, he went to medical school, completing his residency at Harvard’s prestigious teaching hospitals. As he was going through training to become a psychiatrist, he asked his teachers and mentors about video game addiction. After coming up short on answers, he turned to his gaming peers and asked questions about their mental health and reliance on video games. He found common threads between them — challenges around social anxiety, confidence, lacking purpose or meaning. 

So he started holding informal group discussions both online and in person about gaming and mental health, teaching participants about meditation and allowing space for people to open up. By the fall of 2019, the Kanojias thought that other people could benefit from these conversations, so they started the Twitch channel.

Apart from Bernstein, Dr. K has engaged with several gamers over the years, speaking with them while thousands watched along live. Just as he told Bernstein, he says he frequently reminds both guests and viewers that his streams are in no way a replacement for actual therapy.

While Dr. Kanojia presented himself as “an innovator, straining against a medical system that was unable to meet the needs of young people,” he was also “conscious of professional guardrails,” according to The Times. In one instance, during their first conversation, he told Bernstein that he hoped he doesn’t get sued, “because I’m not really delivering medical care,” The Times noted “You know, what happens if someone comes on stream and then kills themselves or something like that?”

Reporting about their second interview, The Times mentioned Dr. Kanojia asking Bernstein if he had a therapist, and the gamer remarked that he had tried therapy a few times but had never seen it as useful enough to continue. “This time, I do,” he said. “Well, OK this is not ‘therapy,’” he added, making air quotes with his fingers.

By the time they met for the sixth interview, “Bernstein was buoyant,” The Times said, “Everything in my life started working out as soon as we started talking,” he remarked, and credited Kanojia with steering him toward success in his work and social life. The two men agreed to continue their conversations offline, according to The Times. 

The videos drew some criticism, mostly from other mental health professionals in the gaming world. Psychologists dealing with gamers told The Times that conversations between Kanojia and Bernstein were indistinguishable from therapy. But his wife defended him, telling The Times that her husband was taking precautions offline. “Though the first conversation between the two men was spontaneous, Kanojia went on to ask Bernstein to sign a waiver acknowledging that he understood that he was not receiving treatment,” she said. The conversations between the two “appeared to be benefiting everyone,” she told The Times, adding that many viewers had commented of being inspired to seek out mental health treatment themselves.  “It was so much more powerful than anything I’ve seen in a public health setting.”

Two days after Bernstein’s death, Kanojia released a video, where he publicly discussed his death. Crediting the celebrity gamer for making Healthy Gamer popular, Kanojia recalled watching Bernstein playing World of Warcraft, long before the two met, and wondering if he could ever be as good. “What do we do when a champion falls?” he asked. Openly sobbing, he begged his viewers to live. “I tried with Reckful, I really did,” he said. “But I can’t do this alone. Cause at the end of the day, I’m not superhuman. I’m just me. I have two hands, I have one heart, I have one voice, I have two ears. I’m human.”