Registered psychologist accused of recruiting for Universal Medicine cult

Cynthia Hickman advertised herself as a "soul psychologist".

She wrote columns about her approach for a wellness magazine that hinted at her spiritual bent.

Reading these articles was a Victorian woman, who asked the Background Briefing podcast to use the name "Helen" so she could share sensitive details of her personal history.

Helen was impressed by what seemed like Hickman's "non-blame" approach to her clients.

She'd long put off seeing a psychologist, fearing it would "unleash and probably unravel in me an incredible family history" involving violence and sexual abuse.

But Hickman's columns made her seem like the ideal therapist and confidant.

So, Helen took the plunge, embarking on a 400-kilometre round trip from regional Victoria to Hickman's home in an affluent suburb of South Melbourne.

Her first impression was that the psychologist was "a very elegant person, in terms of her presentation".

"So I thought, 'OK, there's going to be quite a formality around this," Helen said.

She says she wanted to attend monthly, but was told "No, you must come weekly", and agreed to the 400km round trip each week, hoping to finally "let this grief go".

At the time, she couldn't foresee how her relationship with the psychologist would go on to derail her life.

Helen has shared her experience exclusively with the Background Briefing podcast, in the hopes of protecting other vulnerable people seeking care.

"I didn't want her to continue hurting and damaging people under the registration of a psychologist in this country," Helen says.

She hopes to "throw a spotlight" wider than her psychologist and onto a predatory organisation that includes more than 40 Australian healthcare professionals, as medical advocates call for their deregistration.

Helen's early sessions with Cynthia Hickman, in 2006, seemed like fairly conventional therapy.

They stirred up memories Helen had not shared with anyone else, from a childhood fractured by multiple instances of sexual abuse, and a violent father.

But once the rapport had been established, Hickman told Helen she'd benefit from attending talks by spiritual healers, and receiving "esoteric breast massage" from a former corporate lawyer named Serryn O'Regan.

"I was very nervous but I just went with it," Helen says.

She says that as she lay on the massage table, O'Regan explained that a woman's breasts told the story of her life, and Helen's breasts indicated her "body was dead".

Helen "felt like less than a person in that instant". She "went right back to feeling traumatised" and sat on a nearby beach crying for three hours.

Still, Helen thought her trauma was the problem, and followed O'Regan's suggestion of further treatment from allied health practitioners who worked from her house.

Helen estimates she spent $35,000 over about three years between therapy with psychologist Cynthia Hickman and the alternative therapies and talks.

"I saw myself as needing to be better, to be more in control of my sadness or my grief," Helen says.

And then in her third year of therapy, at O'Regan's urging, Helen flew to Byron Bay for a talk by another spiritual healer.

She saw familiar faces in the crowd: O'Regan, the health practitioners who treated Helen at her house, and up the front, psychologist Cynthia Hickman, "fully participating in what was going on up on stage".

"Things started to click into my mind that she actually was involved in this thing."

Helen learnt it was called Universal Medicine, and it revolved around the man on stage, Serge Benhayon.

"Everyone seemed to love him," she says.

It was about three years before news outlets revealed Benhayon was a formerly bankrupt tennis coach claiming to be the reincarnation of Leonardo Da Vinci after a divine revelation on the toilet.

It would be another three years before medical experts decried Benhayon, who had no medical qualifications but built a business empire on bogus therapies like "ovarian readings" and "chakra puncture".

And it would be over a decade before a NSW jury found he led a socially dangerous and sexually manipulative cult.

Benhayon had surrounded himself with influential people who lent him credibility, from executives to lawyers, members of UK nobility and, crucially, health professionals.

Medical advocate Professor John Dwyer has counted dozens of registered healthcare workers among the cult's devotees, including one of Australia's leading paediatric specialists and a respiratory physician who referred lung cancer patients to Benhayon.

Dwyer has spent more than a decade lobbying governments and regulators to take action, but says the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) has done little to "rein these people in".

" There are, to my knowledge, maybe registered health professionals [in Australia] practising Universal Medicine's nonsense as we talk," he says.

"They're not fit people to be registered health professionals."

Helen says the network of therapists she became entangled with led her to believe she had "bad energy", a damaging belief that was reinforced when she came face to face with the cult leader himself.

Helen says that at a Universal Medicine retreat, Serge Benhayon touched her on a massage table and told her: "You are full of poison."

"Did he mean I was a snake or a poisonous animal or something? That's how I felt."

Helen says she was so distressed she didn't emerge from her room until the next morning.

"I needed to prove to myself that I was capable of not running away from things that frightened me, because I'd probably done that all my life," she says.

As she continued her journey with Universal Medicine, she says Hickman began lacing her therapy sessions with its concepts, using the "same phrases" as Benhayon and "almost instructing" her.

It would take years for Helen to extricate herself from the cult, and it started with a letter from her mother.

"My mum wrote everything in capital letters," she recalls. "'Dear Helen. Something is wrong. I know not what.'"

Helen says that when she raised the letter in a therapy session, Hickman instructed her to "dig a hole and burn" it.

"I thought, 'I can't do that. It's from my mum,'" Helen says.

She'd begun therapy hoping to strengthen her relationship with her family.

Finally, after more than three years of Hickman's therapy, a session in late 2009 prompted a reckoning that's still hard for Helen to talk about.

"She said to me, 'Helen, do you know why you were sexually abused as a child? Because you've sexually abused other people [in a past life].'"

This idea was straight out of the Universal Medicine belief system. Benhayon has told followers that, "If you have been sexually abused, then you have been an abuser."

Helen says for her registered psychologist to propose this in therapy was "unhinged" and "absolutely morally reprehensible".

"It almost had the potential to undo everything I'd tried to do to work through and share those issues with someone for the first time in my life," Helen says.

"I thought she'd gone crazy. That's when I thought, 'I'm not coming back here.'"

While Helen managed to cut off her relationship with Hickman, she continued following Universal Medicine's teachings, even taking the drastic step of discarding most of her personal belongings on Serge's advice, some "1,500 books, 200 CDs" and 76 "paintings and little treasures".

The next year, Helen suffered a breakdown when her mother died within weeks of being diagnosed with cancer.

She had a moment of clarity about what she'd done under the cult's influence.

"I blamed myself … I really crucified myself for being so stupid," she says.

"'Where's your stuff? Where's the things you loved that you let go?'"

She felt Cynthia Hickman had groomed her to join an exploitative cult.

"I was encouraged by a psychologist who's registered, who advertised, who I trusted, and all these connections that I was introduced to led me down that path," Helen says.

Helen had a sophisticated understanding of trauma, having worked for decades in domestic violence policy. Yet she says "no matter your professional background" the practitioners are "really good at sowing doubt in human beings … they do it in a very insidious way".

It took more than a decade for Helen to come to terms with her experience and resolve to take action.

By now, Helen was in her 70s and living on the pension in public housing in Melbourne.

Propelled by a "mixture of extreme outrage … and sadness and grief", she decided to formally complain to AHPRA about her former psychologist.

"It is so important to hold people to account, particularly people who carry an oath, who carry the imprimatur of the regulators in this country to say 'you are suitable and qualified to practice', and what do they do?"

She learned the regulator had taken a complaint from another more recent client of Hickman's, who also alleged the psychologist tried to recruit them into the cult.

AHPRA placed conditions on Hickman's practice, including supervision about maintaining evidence-based practice, professional boundaries, and keeping her role as a psychologist separate from alternative therapies and spiritual advice.

Under the conditions, Hickman can no longer call herself a "soul psychologist".

The Background Briefing podcast has discovered that the Psychology Board of Australia has referred Hickman to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, asking the tribunal to determine whether she engaged in professional misconduct. A finding of professional misconduct can lead to a psychologist being deregistered.

Professor Dwyer believes anything short of deregistering health professionals promoting the cult will fail to address the risk to patients.

"In these cults, once you're hooked onto it … being just wrapped over the knuckles by AHPRA, it's just not reasonable to think that's going to actually change you," he says.

In 2021, UK authorities stripped the professional accreditation of a social worker who publicly promoted the cult leader Benhayon.

Professor Dwyer says this kind of action "should be commonplace" in Australia, but AHPRA had acted against only a "very small number" of registered health professionals who were devotees of the cult.

Cynthia Hickman, Serryn O'Regan and Serge Benhayon did not respond to questions from Background Briefing.