|This is the legacy article from 10 years ago kept for historical purposes. this is the updated version.
First I would like to give a short explanation about why I decided to create this page. It all began when one of our users asked this question in our Q&A system, “has anyone tried the triad technique for anxiety?” last week I realized this page was getting around 1500 hits a month and no one was really able to provide a good answer. I decided I would have to take it upon myself to do some research and offer some answers to people interested in knowing what the triad technique is all about.
Calmclinic.com Informational Site
CalmClinic is a website that supposedly offers free anxiety information to the public. The design is very clean and it doesn’t have the usual pop ups and testimonials we usually see at the affiliate spammy sites selling questionable anxiety products.
This is a screenshot from SEMRUSH where you can see an estimation of traffic coming to the site from Google:
As you can see the site traffic had a dramatic jump since the beginning of the year, and now they are way past the 40K visits a month mark from google (it is always much more than what shows here). This was mainly done buying backlinks on many high authority sites (I am a SEO professional and have ways to check this things out). So somebody invested a great deal of money in the promotion of this site. Not only that the nature of their backlinks shows clearly these are internet savvy people and not just some amateurs. The site is ranked in the first page of google for main keywords related to anxiety disorders, like “Axiety attack” and all symptoms you can imagine
The people behind the triad technique Ryan Rivera and Rachel Ramos
In today’s world is very hard to hide our identities, if you do a search on any given person you will probably find out a lot of information about him. I decided I wanted to learn more about the people behind this site, so I goggled ”Ryan Rivera”. The first result is from the Calmclinic site of course, fell free to read it by yourself. The other results are guest posts in various blogs and some unrelated people with the same name; there is neither Facebook account, nor LinkedIn account or other mainstream social networks. By this point I was really intrigued to know how Ryan Rivera looks like so I did a photo search in Google.
There are many people with this pretty generic name, but this young fella appears 3 times:
Here you can see these results (probably not for long): http://ow.ly/ksDNL.
If you follow these pictures you will end out in his twitter account, which presents him as “Ryan Rivera president of calm clinic“ so finally we have found him. You may call me a cynic but this guy looks a little too cute to be real, so I decided to do a better search. After a few tries I found this:
These are the Google images results for “Muscular Young Man With Juice :
Here you can see the Shutterstock page for this model pictures: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-5859895/stock-photo-muscular-young-man-with-juice-smoothie.html
I don’t think much more need to be said on this matter, real people with no guilt and a great product will never hide behind stock photo. For Rachel Ramos there is even less information around, but I think by now I have already proven my point.
The 7 Minutes Anxiety Test
All over the site you will be able to see different banners offering a free anxiety test, it will never cease to amaze me how good marketers are at taking advantage of people in distress and hitting their weak spots.
This is how it works: a person in distress gets to calmclinic from Google because is looking for information about anxiety, he sees the 7 minute test and of course like any other human being in distress the person is curious to know about how bad is his situation so he takes it.
The Test Results
I guess that by now you can see where this is going. After going through this test you get a very serious looking eleven page report on your anxiety level. The first part explains how the scores are calculated then you can learn about the different aspects of your anxiety in a few charts BUT THEN… very fast the report becomes a sales pitch that prepares you to buy the triad technique program.
Here comes the unsettling part, around page seven starts a new section called “top 10 most dangerous panic-fueling mistakes men make while fighting anxiety” this section goes over almost every well known and proven technique there is to deal with anxiety and explains why they are ineffective, here is the list of the ten “mistakes”:
#10 Grabbing and Gulping Pills (AKA taking medication prescribed by a professional)
#9 Meditation and Yoga
#8 Thinking “right Breathing” will snap anxiety levels (AKA relaxation techniques)
#7 Not getting how human brains and anxiety work
#6 Fighting anxiety with inefficient tools like CBT (AKA best proven method to overcome anxiety)
#5 “Talking it out” in therapist’s couch
#4 Trying to “sweat it out” (AKA adding physical activity to your life, another supper proven method reduces stress and anxiety)
#3 Coping on the spot or “floating” (AKA using visualization techniques to calm down when having a panic attack)
#2 Facing your fears ( AKA doing the only thing will actually help you overcome anxiety )
#1 Not getting help (AKA not buying the triad technique program)
Right after that last one you are linked back to the video where “everything is explained”.
I have to say that video is so well done that for a moment I myself was really hoping this was for real, he lost me when he assured the triad technique was the only method approved by The International Association of Anxiety Disorders (iaoad.org) which is clearly a fake institution created for the sole purpose of adding credibility to the triad technique.
Conclusion and Some Final Words
Lets be clear about all this I have no idea what the actual Triad Technique products really are because I am not willing to invest the $60 they are asking to discover whether their technique is a hoax or whether it actually does help – who knows!!!
However, something is very clear to me, if anxiety could be treated with a 60 dollar program, AnxietySocialNet, all the other thousand anxiety forums, support sites and organizations would not exist. Is time to wake up people! there is no magic pills to deal with anxiety, some treatments are better than others but most people will agree anxiety is a chronic disorder.
The Triad Technique, The Linden Method and Panic Away are products created by those looking to make a profit from other people’s suffering. They know we want this stuff to work with all our hearths and that’s the way they make money.
If someone had discovered a real “technique” that helps people overcome anxiety fast and easy. It would be all over the place and shared in social networks. The fact that this site (and the others) don’t have any social network presence proves this is not real, any worthy technique eventually become a discipline like CBT and can not be marketed for $60 a piece in a website because it takes real work to get better!
This page has helped thousands of people already; Calmclinic is posting fake reviews anywhere in order to make this page go away. Help us get this information out there by sharing in social networks, if you have a site link to this page to help improve rankings in Google, thanks a lot!
