Opinion

A growing movement wants to regulate the wellness industry

(RNS) — Seek Safely is a nonprofit organization that aims to add guardrails to the wellness and self-help industry by focusing on three main areas: education, advocacy and legislation.

(Photo by HUUM/Unsplash/Creative Commons)

Ann Gleig

June 23, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — In 2009, 18 people were hospitalized with kidney failure and dehydration and three died after participating in a Spiritual Warrior “sweat lodge” retreat led by self-help guru and multimillionaire entrepreneur James Arthur Ray. 

Participants had paid nearly $10,000 to attend. Ray had lied about his credentials. Two years later, he was found guilty of causing three deaths by negligent homicide. He served just 20 months in prison.  

One of the victims was 38-year-old Kirby Brown. Her family describe her as an intelligent and safety-conscious woman who ignored her body’s warning symptoms because Ray convinced her they were signs of a spiritual breakthrough rather than extreme dehydration. She would also have been determined not to leave, they explained, because of her “indomitable spirit” and the fact that she had invested her life savings in the retreat.  

Ginny and Jean Brown, the mother and sister of Kirby, want to honor her memory by exposing the dangers of the self-help industry and trying to make it safer for others. But how are safety, ethics and accountability fostered in a culture that places responsibility solely on individuals and has become a billion-dollar unregulated industry? 

In 2014, the Browns founded Seek Safely, a nonprofit organization that aims to add guardrails to the self-help industry by focusing on three main areas: education, advocacy and legislation. 

The Seek Safely movement is part of a wider ethical reckoning happening in contemporary wellness and spirituality — the emergence of critical and constructive approaches that are placing safe and ethical communities rather than the individual at their center. 

Seek Safely logo. (Courtesy image)

At Seek Safely, education includes providing resources such as a Red/Green Flag list to help individual consumers assess and develop informed consent about what self-development services they choose to engage with. Seek Safely has also developed the “Seek Safely Promise” — a pledge consisting of a set of ethical and pragmatic principles designed to protect the well-being of consumers. 

Working with a consumer protection model — laws that are designed to safeguard buyers of goods and services from fraudulent operations — Seek Safely has also been pursuing legislative advocacy. For the last 10 years, the organization has been working on New York State Senate Bill S1155A, which would require nonlicensed self-help providers to disclose information to their clients about risks of their practices as well as a risk-management plan.   

The Browns’ mission was reenergized after they met Anne Peterson, who also reports firsthand experience of the harms of the self-development industry. Peterson sacrificed 20 years of commitment, community and a leadership position at Landmark to become a whistleblower and public critic of what she argues are exploitative practices in the organization. Realizing that her experience was not unique to Landmark, Peterson created Confronting the Line, a public platform “dedicated to exploring the boundary between genuine transformation and exploitation in the self-help industry.” 

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Seek Safely Summit  

The Browns and Peterson joined together to host the recent Seek Safely Summit, held on May 30. It featured a loose coalition of advocates, educators, therapists, cult experts and lawyers and was structured around four questions: 

• Why do we need a movement for Safe Seeking? 

• How can we equip people of all ages to recognize and resist manipulation? 

• What laws and policies are needed to hold self-help providers accountable? 

• How do we ensure healing and visibility for those who have been harmed? 

In their joint presentation “Bringing Common Sense to the Self-Help Industry,” Peterson and Jean Brown began by highlighting the size, influence and dangers of the self-help market. They reported that the global self-improvement market was worth $41.23 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow to $81.77 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.1%. The U.S. market specifically was estimated at $15.99 billion in 2023, projected to reach $27 billion by 2032 with a 6% growth rate.  

Yet, despite the size of the self-help industry, it largely operates without any regulatory bodies or oversight. Among a number of problems identified, they pointed to unrealistic promises of specific outcomes. As Jean Brown noted, licensed professionals like lawyers and therapists can lose their licenses for making such false promises. Yet most practitioners within the self-help industry are offering services without professional credentials and so do not face the same consequences licensed professionals would face.  

While education is a key part of Seek Safely’s mission, the organization rejects the idea that consumer ignorance or naivete is the sole problem. As Jean Brown points out, many people who join harmful groups are sincere and intelligent.

“It wasn’t just [that Kirby] made a bad decision, or it was a stupid move, or she was being naive,” she said. “She was doing something that she thought was going to improve her life and better herself. And I think that’s a really noble effort that so many people obviously undertake.” 

As they explain, the problem is that many of these people become victims of groups that intentionally employ manipulative tactics to exploit their good intentions. Some of these tactics were identified by speakers Chris Shelton and Jon Atack, hosts of popular podcasts in the Cultic Studies network.  

In a session focusing on legislation, Ginny Brown reflected on how Ray’s defense lawyers kept asking why Kirby had not just left the retreat. Such a question fails to acknowledge the role of indoctrination and undue influence. Ginny Brown emphasized the importance of the American legal system recognizing coercive control — an intentional pattern of behavior designed to assert domination over an individual. Coercive control in the context of intimate and family relationships is recognized as a crime in the United Kingdom. A number of researchers and survivors are advocating for it to be extended to other contexts, including spiritual and religious communities.   

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RELATED: We traded church for wellness. Now, we’re paying for it.

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Self-help and religion  

Jean Brown and Peterson see the decline of institutional religion as a key factor in the rise of the self-help industry. They acknowledge that religious communities have traditionally met many of the legitimate individual growth and social needs that lead people to turn to self-help culture. Seek Safely is not calling for a societal return to the ethical foundations or organizational structures of Christianity, but it is interrogating the harm engendered by the individualism, narcissism and commodification of modern wellness culture. 

As Peterson reflected, wellness culture’s emphasis on extreme individual responsibility within the wider context of American individualism and consumerism has led to much exploitation and abuse. For her, “collaboration is how we actually change things. … Coming together we can create the kind of evolution that we were all looking for in this space in the first place.” 

The movement to check the self-help industry is a shift perhaps from a “me” to a “we” culture.  

(Ann Gleig, a professor of religion and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida, is author of the forthcoming “Talking About Cults: Abuse and the Study of New Religious Movements.” Her work is supported ​by the John Templeton Foundation. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service). 

 

Ship Recycling Governance: Moving Beyond the False Basel-HKC Dichotomy

File image courtesy NGO Shipbreaking Platform

Published Jun 21, 2026 3:05 PM by Prof. Dr. Ishtiaque Ahmed

The recent response by BIMCO to my article, "HKC Certification Can't Substitute for the Basel Convention," reflects a broader debate that has occupied the ship recycling community for years. Such exchanges are healthy and should be encouraged. Yet, perhaps unintentionally, the discussion continues to revolve around the wrong question. The issue is not whether the Basel Convention and the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (HKC) are competing regimes. Nor is the issue whether one convention should replace the other. Legally speaking, there is little room for serious controversy. Both conventions apply. They regulate different aspects of the same activity and perform different functions.

The difficulty lies not in the law itself, but in the facts. More precisely, the problem lies in how the international community has struggled to operationalize the Basel Convention's open-ended standards in the ship recycling context within the realities of developing countries. Consequently, the central question should not be whether Basel applies. The real question is how Basel is to be implemented.

Unfortunately, the international debate has increasingly moved in the opposite direction. Much of the contemporary discourse implicitly assumes that one convention must prevail over the other. The IMO recently adopted the Provisional Guidance on the Implementation of the Hong Kong Convention and the Basel Convention with Respect to the Transboundary Movement of Ships Intended for Recycling (IMO Circular HKSRC.2/Circ.1). Yet, the premise underpinning the Provisional Guidance appears to rest on an assumption whose legal basis merits further examination.

The Basel Convention governs the transboundary movement and environmentally sound management of hazardous waste. The HKC establishes a framework for the safe and environmentally sound recycling of ships and regulates operational standards at recycling facilities. These are different subject matters. Nothing in the HKC repeals the Basel Convention. Nothing in the Basel Convention can reasonably be interpreted as excluding the application of the HKC. Nor does Article 30 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties authorize states to disregard obligations under one treaty merely because another treaty addresses related issues. The answer has never been "Basel or HKC." The answer has always been "Basel and HKC." Indeed, even the BIMCO article acknowledges that both conventions exist within a broader regulatory system.

BIMCO’s discussion subsequently shifts to the historical shortcomings of the Basel regime in the ship recycling context and portrays the Hong Kong Convention as a practical response thereto. However, even if those shortcomings are accepted, considerations of expediency or regulatory convenience do not, as a matter of international law, generate exceptions to treaty obligations or alter the legal relationship between the two conventions. BIMCO argues that the Basel Convention's prior informed consent procedure has never worked effectively in the context of end-of-life ships and that the HKC emerged because no functioning global regime existed. There is considerable truth in the proposition that Basel's mechanisms were not designed with ships in mind. But this does not lead to the conclusion that Basel somehow ceases to apply. International law contains many obligations that are difficult to implement. Climate agreements are difficult. Biodiversity protection is difficult. Human rights treaties are difficult. Yet no one argues that practical obstacles extinguish legal obligations. Difficulty is not a recognized principle of treaty interpretation.

The fact that the Basel regime has not operated optimally for ship recycling does not mean that the Convention is inapplicable. It merely demonstrates that the international community has not yet developed adequate methodologies for implementing Basel in a manner compatible with the realities of global shipping and developing countries. Failure of implementation should not be confused with failure of law.

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding in this debate is the assumption that the controversy concerns competing legal norms. It does not. The problem is methodological. The Basel Convention relies on concepts such as "environmentally sound management." Like sustainable development, due diligence, best available techniques and equivalent protection, these are indeterminate standards. They deliberately provide flexibility because environmental regulation must accommodate different economic and technological realities. The difficulty is that international law has supplied no clear methodology for determining when such standards have been satisfied. How much downstream waste infrastructure is sufficient? At what point should environmental protection be considered environmentally sound? Must developing countries replicate OECD waste management systems? Or does international law permit context-sensitive solutions? These are the questions that remain unanswered.

Consequently, the debate has shifted from determining how Basel should be complied with to questioning whether Basel should be complied with at all. That is a dangerous shift. BIMCO correctly observes that nobody intends to replace the Basel Convention's prior informed consent system. Yet the increasing reliance on the HKC's International Ready for Recycling Certificate has generated a tendency to attribute to the flag state functions that Basel reserves for exporting states.

The issue here is not whether the flag state plays an important role. Undoubtedly, it does. The issue is jurisdiction. The HKC certificate is issued pursuant to maritime jurisdiction exercised by the flag state. The Basel Convention, by contrast, is built upon territorial export control. These are fundamentally different legal obligations and concepts.

Jurisdiction under international law does not arise from convenience, familiarity or practical efficiency. It arises from legal authority. The fact that flag states may possess greater familiarity with ships than environmental authorities in exporting states does not alter the legal architecture established by the Basel Convention. Otherwise, expertise itself would become a source of jurisdiction. That proposition has no basis in international law.

Ironically, the Basel-HKC debate exposes a much broader problem affecting international environmental law generally. Many treaty obligations are expressed through flexible standards. Environmentally sound management, sustainable development, due diligence and equivalent protection all belong to this category. The purpose of these standards is to accommodate diversity among states. Principle 11 of the Rio Declaration expressly recognizes that environmental standards applied by some countries may be inappropriate and impose unwarranted economic and social costs on others, particularly developing countries. Similarly, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities acknowledges that states differ in their capabilities and developmental circumstances.

Yet despite these principles, the international community has provided very little guidance concerning what compliance actually looks like in developing countries. As a result, developing states are often measured against unstated OECD benchmarks. Compliance thereby ceases to be anchored to fixed legal standards and instead becomes a fluid target, with legal obligations varying according to the regulatory capacities of individual States. More improvements are always demanded, but no objective endpoint is ever defined.

Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have invested heavily in upgrading their ship recycling sectors. The progress is undeniable. The entry into force of the HKC has undoubtedly accelerated this transformation. These achievements deserve recognition. But acknowledging progress should not lead us to abandon the question of Basel compliance. Quite the opposite. Progress should compel us to ask a more sophisticated question: What constitutes environmentally sound management in the context of developing countries?

For years, the debate has focused on whether Basel applies to ships. That question has largely been answered. The Basel Convention applies. The HKC applies. The real challenge is operational rather than doctrinal. How should environmentally sound management be measured? How should equivalence be assessed? What level of downstream infrastructure is sufficient? How should sustainable development and common but differentiated responsibilities influence compliance assessments? These are the questions that deserve the attention of governments, international organizations and industry.

The problem is not one of legal incompatibility. It is one of scientific and methodological uncertainty. The answer therefore lies not in choosing between two conventions, nor in constructing artificial hierarchies between them. Rather, the international community should devote its energies to developing transparent and context-sensitive methodologies capable of identifying when environmentally sound management has been achieved.

Only then will the debate move from endless arguments over treaty interpretation to meaningful discussions about measurable compliance. The success of the Hong Kong Convention should be welcomed. The improvements witnessed in South Asia are real and substantial. Workers and the environment are undoubtedly better off today than they were twenty years ago.

But the existence of progress should not tempt us to convert practical difficulties into principles of treaty interpretation. The future of ship recycling does not lie in choosing between Basel and Hong Kong. Both conventions are here to stay. The real question facing the international community is not whether Basel applies. It is whether we are finally prepared to develop the tools necessary to make Basel work in the context of developing countries. Until that question is addressed, the debate will continue to ask the wrong question. And when we ask the wrong question, we should not be surprised when we fail to find the right answer.

Dr. Ishtiaque Ahmed is Professor and Chair of the Department of Law at North South University, Bangladesh. A former Merchant Marine Engineering Officer, he earned his Doctor of the Science of Law (J.S.D.) degree from the University of Maine School of Law, USA, with specialization in international ship recycling law and policy. He served as the sole legal consultant in the drafting of the proposed Bangladesh Ship Recycling Rules 2025 and the revision of the Bangladesh Ship Recycling Act 2018. Dr. Ahmed is a Barrister of England and Wales, a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (MCIArb), London, an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, and is listed as a panel arbitrator of the Changsha Arbitration Commission (CSAC), People’s Republic of China. His research and professional interests lie at the intersection of maritime law, environmental regulation, and sustainable ship recycling governance. He may be reached at ishtiaque.ahmed@northsouth.edu.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

 

Turkish Cruise Ship Remains Detained as It Loses Flag and Classification

Cruise ship Gemini continues to be detained with its classification suspended and reports of a false flag (Miray Cruises file photo)

Published Jun 15, 2026 1:03 PM by The Maritime Executive

Problems continue to build for the small Turkish cruise ship Gemini, which has been under detention for more than 200 days. A Greek court refused to release the ship last week, while media reports are that the ship is running out of fuel and provisions for the skeleton crew of 25 on board. The ship is also reported to have had its classification certificates withdrawn and is now under a false flag.

Built in 1992 in Spain, the Gemini is 19,000 gross tons and was flagged in the Bahamas. The ship was operated by a series of lines over the years before being acquired in 2020 by a Turkish businessman who is also a tour operator. She was registered for Miray Gemicilik and ran short cruises along the Turkish coast and the Greek Islands.

The problems began in September 2025 when Greek inspectors identified hull damage impairing the seaworthiness of the ship and issued a detention order based on reports of non-payment of crew wages. The ship, which has a normal crew complement of 340, was reported stranded in Salamis, Greece, with its cruises suspended. By October, the Hellenic Seamen’s Federation was highlighting the plight of the crew and reporting that some crewmembers were leaving the ship despite not having been paid for up to four months.

The ship’s P&I Club and the International Transport Workers’ Federation intervened to complete the repatriation of the crew. Turkey’s Denizbank, however, filed for a lien against the ship for unpaid monies, and then the P&I Club and a tugboat operator also filed with the court for monies they were due.

The ship stayed at the Greek Island of Salamis under detention, but the cruise company, Miray Cruises, began advertising its 2026 season with cruises scheduled to start on May 24. The company’s website showed a season of 3- and 4-day cruises as well as scheduled trips to the Black Sea.

According to media reports, a skeleton crew of 25 was sent to retrieve the ship in March. However, they only got as far as Karistos in Greece and took refuge in the bay due to bad weather. The Gemini has remained in the bay at anchor, with databases showing the detention reaching 233 days.

Classification society BV lists that the ship’s certificates were suspended as of May due to its survey being overdue. Then the ship lost its flag in the Bahamas. It is reporting that it is flagged in Cameroon, but Equasis lists that as a false flag.

A Greek court held a hearing last week and ordered that the detention should continue. This is despite media reports that the ship is out of fuel and low on provisions for the remaining crew. The crew is saying it has not been paid for two-and-a-half months, and the media says several crewmembers were again preparing to abandon the ship.

Miray Cruises delayed the start of the cruise season until July and is now telling the media that the reservations are for another ship that the company is chartering. The company has a history of problems as it was linked to a failed marketing effort for a three-year world cruise due to launch in 2023. It first promoted the cruise on the Gemini, but later reported it was acquiring another, larger cruise ship for the world cruise. The sale was not completed, and passengers were informed at the last minute that the cruise was canceled.

There is no indication that the court has ordered the sale of the Gemini to satisfy the liens, but the fate of the cruise ship seems uncertain at best.