Helping the family change how they interact with their children is therapy!
Someone would join the list and complain about the intractable, crazy making behavior of their impossible child. I would write a reply and say something like "That's a common issue with gifted kids. It's due to boredom and is easily solved by keeping them adequately occupied." They would go "Oh. My. God. That makes so much sense! Just before the last incident, he did actually say out loud 'I'm bored.'" and a long-standing, intractable pattern of problem behavior that had stubbornly resisted all prior intervention would largely disappear overnight once the parent made sure to keep their kid adequately occupied.
Or a parent of a particularly hard case would exchange a few emails with me for a week or two and then report back to me months later that all these terrible, intractable issues had magically changed and it had involved almost zero effort on the part of the parent who had spent years sinking enormous time, money and effort into resolving these problems, all to no avail until they spent a little time talking to me.
If it was therapy, it was like an *easy button" version of it, very unlike the roughly 3.5 years of intensive therapy I pursued in my youth to get my personal issues to simmer down to a dull roar before really resolving things around the age of forty when I got divorced and yadda.
In many cases, these were Twice Exceptional kids who had started doing really strange things around the time they were toddlers or preschoolers. The strong negative reactions of adults around them then compounded the problem and made it an intractable issue.
I was often able to help parents back off from this dynamic so the family and child could get unstuck. I wrote an anecdote about that sort of process in January. It can be read here: https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...
I'm a former military wife and homeschooling parent. People are quick to be dismissive and tell me I don't know anything about x, y or z, etc.
But my experiences suggest to me that a lot of mental health issues are rooted in relatively prosaic cases of "kids do weird and stupid things because they are kids, some kids do very weird and stupid things for various reasons, and parents often don't have effective tools for handling the situation, thereby compounding the problem." My experiences also suggest that a lot of this is fixable, without drugs or therapy, if you can help the family disengage from long-standing patterns of interaction and help the child in question understand where their dysfunctional behaviors came from in a non-blaming manner and give them some better answers and/or just breathing room to change on their own without interference.
I spent about two weeks writing the above piece and it's based on many years of education and experience. It got more than 60k page views and people are republishing it, some with my permission and giving me credit.
I would like to do more of that kind of writing, but it made me zero money. I am routinely told my writing has zero value and I should go get a real job. I'm not good at the self promotion thing etc.
I think I know some useful things that could help parents avoid becoming mired in the kinds of problems this man in the article has. But I have no audience and people who know what I used to do mostly are in my past or simply unwilling to vouch for me, including some prominent people on HN who knew of my work in that area at the time, to some degree or another.
I've largely made my peace with the fact that I can't afford to write for free and lots of people on the internet expect excellent content for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay anything for it either. No, they don't want to be a Patreon supporter.
So I content myself as best I can with leaving comments on the internet and generally being percieved as a blowhard and arm chair politician type who has an opinion on everything and zero credibility.
Que sera, sera.