Steven Alan Hassan (pronounced /hɑːsɪn/; born 1954) is an American writer and mental health counselor who specializes in the area of cults and new religious movements. He worked as a deprogrammer in the late 1970s, but since then has advocated a non-coercive form of exit counseling.

Hassan has written several books on the subject of mind control and is sometimes described in the media as an expert on mind control and cults. Some researchers in the sociology of religion, however, are critical of his application of mind-control theory to new religious movements.^{[3][4][5]: 43}

Hassan is a former member of the Unification Church, and founded Ex-Moon Inc. in 1979. In 1999 he founded the Freedom of Mind Resource Center.

Hassan was raised in a Jewish family in Queens, New York.^[6]

At age 19, while pursuing a poetry degree at Queens College, Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church,^[7] and spent 27 months as a member.^[8][9] He was involved in recruiting, fundraising, and political campaigning for the Church. According to Rudin, Hassan was "a former Unification-Church high official who was a national leader of CARP". ^[10]: 37 Hassan reported living in communal housing and sleeping less than four hours a night.^[11] In an interview, he said that he believed Richard Nixon was an archangel and that, during the Watergate scandal, he and other members of the Church engaged in prayer and fasting to "prove their loyalty to the president".^[7] He also reported surrendering his bank account to the Unification Church, and quitting college and his job to work for the church.^[7] Hassan said that "he was ready to kill or die for" Sun Myung Moon.^[11]

In 1976, after working for two full days without sleep, Hassan fell asleep while driving, resulting in a serious automobile accident that required medical care. Hassan's parents hired "deprogrammers" who seized him from his sister's home and took him to an apartment. After five days of isolation and intensive deprogramming, Hassan became convinced that he had been "brainwashed" by the church. Feeling shame at his gullibility and guilt for his recruitment of others, he decided to "dedicate his life to studying cults and developing strategies to help their members escape."^{[11][10]: 37–38}

Hassan returned to his Jewish faith after leaving the Unification Church.^[6]

Social scientists Anson D. Shupe and David G. Bromley wrote in 2007 that Hassan's work lacks academic rigor and is used to fuel hysteria. They argued that the word 'cult' itself has become loaded and derogatory, capable of being applied to any new religious movement in a prejudicial way. They criticize anti-cultists for promoting a moral panic, from which they benefit financially. Shupe and Bromley are skeptical of the use of hazy concepts like brainwashing and mind control, and of the notion of intervention as a form of therapy. According to Bromley:

You get people who are caught up in trying to change themselves, become a new person or build a new world and they lose touch with who they are. It isn't to say some groups don’t take advantage of that process. But I don't think it's necessarily the case that they need someone like Hassan to come in with predetermined answers to their life problems.^[11]

Religious Studies Professor Eugene V. Gallagher argued in 2006 that theorists like Hassan take well-founded suspicion of some manipulative religious leaders and generalize it into a mind control ideology applicable to all "cult" leaders and "cult" members:

Their explicit and implicit generalizations tend to foster, whether they intend it or not, a generalized suspicion of all leaders who stand outside of an implied "mainstream". Such generalized suspicion is a major analytical principle for anti-cult activists like Hassan and Singer. When raised to its highest level of generality, well founded criticism of a few leaders is extended to all leaders, with a corresponding loss of specificity, accuracy, and persuasiveness. Such overgeneralisation ignores the abundant diversity of leadership forms in new religions on the assumption that all "cults" must be the same.^[3]: 37

In the book Misunderstanding Cults (2001, edited by Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins), forensic psychologist Dick Anthony called brainwashing a pseudoscientific concept that has been disconfirmed by scientific research. He argues that "the term brainwashing has such sensationalist connotations that its use prejudices any scientific discussion of patterns of commitment in religious movements."^[30]

Michael Langone, an advocate for exit counseling, questioned Hassan's humanistic counseling approach in 1995. According to Langone, Hassan's "Strategic Intervention Therapy" operates on the assumption that, deep down, all members of "mind control groups" want to get out of the group. In the context of family intervention, the "counselor knows best what the cultist really wants" approach contains the risk of the counselor "manipulating the cultist from point A ("I'll talk to you because my family requested it") to point B ("I want to leave the cult") while mistakenly believing that he is helping the cultist "grow"." For Langone, the fact that the counselor's assistance has in no way been sought by the subject casts further doubt on the ethical propriety of such manipulation.^[16]: 175

Although exit counseling models like Hassan's emphasise the voluntary nature of the procedure, Shupe questioned in 2011 how willing the NRM member can be when: (i) they are not actually the client of the counselor (who has been hired by others), and (ii) they are not aware that the counselor's primary, preconceived purpose is to convince them to abandon their faith.^[31]

• Combatting Cult Mind Control, 1988. ISBN 0-89281-243-5 — reissued 1990 (ISBN 978-0-89281-311-7) and 2015 (Combating ..., ISBN 978-0967068824).
• Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves, 2000. ISBN 0-9670688-0-0.
• Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9670688-1-7.
• The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, October 2019. ISBN 9781982127336.

• Anti-cult movement