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In This Issue
Logged In: The Job Offer Was a Scam
Meme of the Week
Cut the Fluff: Mean Girls
Tool of the Week: Interoception
Off the Clock
Fresh Findings: 988 and Fewer Youth and Young Adult Suicide Deaths
Stories from the Community: Answers to last week’s question
Logged In:
The Job Offer Was a Scam
What this is about:
A Guardian piece tracks the rise of AI-enabled job scams: fake roles, fake recruiters, polished messages and recruitment processes designed to extract money, personal information, or both from people looking for work.
Why it matters:
This is not just “another online scam”. Job hunting already places people in a vulnerable psychological position: hopeful, financially pressured, keen to be chosen, and often willing to tolerate odd processes because the stakes feel high. AI makes that exploitation cleaner, faster and more believable.
What’s happening:
Fraudsters are using the promise of fake jobs to lure applicants into sharing identity documents, bank details, upfront “training” payments or other sensitive information. The old red flags, like clunky grammar, strange phrasing, obviously fake emails, are becoming less useful because generative AI can now produce convincing recruiter scripts, job adverts and follow-up messages at scale.
The catch:
The scam works because it mimics the real absurdity of modern recruitment. Long waits, faceless portals, vague job descriptions, automated messages and “next steps” already make applicants feel slightly mad. Fraudsters do not need to invent a broken system; they only need to impersonate one.
The bigger picture:
This sits inside a wider AI-enabled fraud economy. UK government scenario work has already identified criminal groups using increasingly capable AI systems to carry out scams and fraud as a plausible risk pathway.
Reality check:
Not every strange recruiter message is a scam. But the burden of detection is being pushed onto people who are already under pressure. That is the familiar pattern: platforms, employers and systems create the opacity; individuals are then told to stay vigilant.
The interesting bit:
The emotional injury here is not only financial loss. It is the humiliation of being conned while trying to improve your life.
The line:
The old scam asked you to send money. The new one asks you to trust the process.
Sources: Guardian | UK Government AI 2030 scenarios
Meme of the Week
Marianne’s Cut the Fluff
Mean Girls
We have spent nearly 14 hours traveling home from Vis, Croatia, today. I currently feel like a cross between post-night shift and hungover. I am awful. Max is giving me a wide berth. Thomas, my cat, avoided eye contact with me. But the break was needed. For a brief moment, I remembered that I do, in fact, have a personality outside of reacting to things. Lovely, while it lasted.
One of the things I kept thinking about out there was friendship: the friends we make as adults, and the amount of admin attached to loving people when everyone is already full. So many friendships shifted across the pandemic. Maybe they would have anyway, maybe not. I’ve got my sister-friends from childhood who can go quiet for months and still return feeling like no time has passed at all. Then there are my ‘Frolleagues’ (friends + colleagues), which is its own category of intimacy. My best American friend Ann, obviously-duh. And my political besti, which frankly feels more like a marriage at the moment. We are work wives; we finish each other's sentences, and one is rarely seen on the campaign trail without the other. There are three council seats in our ward, and the genuinely odd possibility that we may not both get elected. My best friend might knock me out of the race. Which is not a sentence they prepare you for in friendship manuals.
I am fascinated by the way adult friendship groups can still get ruffled when one person shimmies off and makes a new friend. Heaven forbid. It is one of the more depressing discoveries of adulthood that iterations of Mean Girls appear to have a pension plan. You can have a mortgage, a professional registration, a carefully curated skincare routine, and still find yourself navigating the emotional politics of “she went for coffee with her.” Maybe I have an inner Regina George, too? As a therapist, I’m interested in it. As a human, I find it exhausting. We talk a lot about romantic attachment, not nearly enough about friendship attachment, friendship jealousy, friendship grief. There is something quite exposing about admitting that platonic relationships can hurt, shape, regulate, destabilise and save us every bit as much as romantic ones.
Adult friendship is less effortless than we pretend, but no less sacred for that. It requires maintenance, elasticity, and occasionally the capacity not to lose your mind when someone else’s life expands in a direction that doesn’t immediately include you. It also requires humour, which is lucky, because I am currently on a nine-day self-care streak with my Finch bird and she is now a toddler. I am not sorry. She makes my life better.
So that’s where I am: travel-sick and reminded that friendship in adulthood is often less about grand declarations and more about who still answers, who still gets it, and who can survive the fact that none of us stay the same.
This Week’s Question
Have you watched the latest season of Shrinking?
Ann’s Tool of the Week
Interoception
Interoception is the ability to notice and make sense of signals from inside the body, like hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, nausea, fatigue, muscle tension, heart rate, breathing, or the need to use the bathroom.
In simpler terms, it is how we know what is happening inside us.
Interoception is often discussed in occupational therapy, especially in work with children, sensory processing, autism, ADHD, emotional regulation, and daily functioning. But it also shows up across many psychotherapy modalities, including somatic and trauma-informed therapies, mindfulness-based approaches, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and nervous system regulation work.
Why it matters: Many clients move through life feeling disconnected from their bodies. They may be used to tracking thoughts, obligations, other people’s emotions, or possible threats, while having much less practice noticing their own body cues.
Interoception can be useful for clients who:
struggle to identify or name emotions
get overwhelmed “out of nowhere”
miss early signs of anxiety, anger, hunger, exhaustion, or shutdown
dissociate or feel disconnected from their body
have ADHD or sensory processing differences
are working on trauma recovery
live mostly “from the neck up”
are learning emotion regulation skills
Ways to use it
For many clients, noticing the body can feel vulnerable or unsafe.
A gentle entry point is to ask about neutral body signals first. Use cues that do not require a client to explain, analyze, or “go deep.”
Examples:
“Can you notice whether you feel warm, cool, or neutral?”
“Are you aware of any hunger, thirst, fullness, or tiredness?”
“Do any muscles feel tight, heavy, restless, or relaxed?”
“Is your body telling you anything right now?”
“What is your breathing doing right now?”
“Do you feel more tired, wired, heavy, buzzy, tense, or settled?”
“Is your body asking for anything right now? Maybe movement, stillness, food, water, warmth, space, or rest?”
“Where do you notice the first tiny sign that stress is building?”
“What does your body do before you realize you’re overwhelmed?”
“What body cue tells you that a boundary may be needed?”
“What is the earliest sign that you are moving outside your window of tolerance?”
The Goal: To build a more reliable line of communication between the client and their body.
Spotlight:
Free Interoception Workshop
If this week’s Tool of the Week has you wanting to learn more about using interoception in your practice, this free experiential workshop put on through Insight Timer is the next step.
Clinical Applications of Interoception: Tools for tracking sensation and emotion
with Bhanu Joy Harrison, LCSW, SEP
Tuesday, May 5 | 4:00–4:30 PM PDT
The workshop is part of an Experiential Spotlight series designed to help clinicians experience expert-led practices firsthand so they can bring those tools into their work with clients with greater confidence.
Do you know of or have a great resource for therapists that we should highlight? Please email Ann at [email protected].
Fresh Findings
988 may be linked to fewer youth and young adult suicide deaths
What happened: A new JAMA research letter examined suicide mortality among people ages 15 to 34 before and after the July 2022 launch of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Researchers compared observed suicide deaths from July 2022 through December 2024 with expected deaths based on pre-988 trends from 1999 through June 2022.
What they found: Suicide deaths among adolescents and young adults were 11% lower than expected after 988 launched. That translates to 4,372 fewer suicide deaths than projected during the study period. States with the largest increases in answered 988 calls saw larger reductions than states with the smallest increases.
Why it matters: This is one of the clearest population-level signals so far that 988 may be associated with meaningful reductions in suicide mortality among young people and young adults. It also suggests that access matters: states with greater uptake of 988 saw bigger observed drops.
The caveats:
This was an observational study. It cannot be proven that 988 caused the decrease because the changes may have been happening at the same time, including shifts in mental health services, public awareness, socioeconomic conditions, or state-level crisis investments.
Access and trust also matter. Specialized 988 Lifeline services for LGBTQ+ young people, who previously accounted for about 10% of 988 contacts, have been eliminated, which could make some young people less likely to use the service.
Continued access depends on sustained funding. 988 funding is already estimated to be insufficient to meet demand in nearly half of the states.
Therapist takeaways:
988 is not a replacement for safety planning, ongoing care, or local crisis resources, but it is an important support to keep visible, especially for adolescents and young adults.
The study is a reminder that low-barrier access points can be part of a larger suicide prevention ecosystem.
Lastly and importantly, 988 has been in use for almost 4 years?!? Did that go by incredibly fast for anyone else?
Off the Clock
Ann’s Pick: The Diplomat
My husband, Steve, and I don’t really “binge” television with our busy schedules, but The Diplomat is the closest we have come to binging anything in a long time.
It is smart, fast, tense, and very hard to stop watching. Season 1 follows U.S. Ambassador Kate Wyler as she tries to help defuse an international crisis involving the U.S., the U.K., Iran, and Russia after a British aircraft carrier is attacked in the Persian Gulf. So yes, it may feel a little too close to home at the moment, but on the show, this geopolitical crisis management is led by sharp women and a diverse cast of characters, which feels refreshing and aspirational.
And as Steve said, it’s been nice growing up alongside Keri Russell, from Felicity to The Americans and now this.
Marianne’s Pick: Saying No
In my state of post-travel haze, whilst munching my way through a bag of ‘Mister Free’d’ Blue Maize Tortilla chips (occasionally pre-licked by Thomas), I have decided that it’s time for me to reinvigorate my ‘No’ era, so that I can indeed have something to write about for Off the Clock next time.
For example: I landed today to a request of ‘can you make a TikTok video of you doing x in your ward’- No, actually, no i can’t- because I hate it and want to burn it to the ground.
Stories from the community
Last week’s poll question was…
If you had an entire day to spend in nature, what kind of landscape would you choose?
And the winner, by a very comfortable margin, was…
Tropical beach — warm water, soft sand: 60%
The rest of the results:
Mossy forest/redwood grove: 20%
Desert canyon: 10%
Patio with snacks: 10%
Mountain meadow / alpine lake: 0%
Rainforest: 0%
Notes from the Community:
“I have recently leaned into an increased awareness that I like the idea of nature much more than I actually like being IN nature. I want to look at it, smell fresh air, and appreciate the beauty. AND i acknowledge the gut-level calming it gives humans. But... mosquitoes and any temperature that isn't mid- 70's with a slight breeze are things that seriously ruin it. ”
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