Secret Cult, SES member and author Brian Hodgkinson responded to its allegation that the program encourages "destroying the personality". He said that description conceals the actual focus of the teaching, which is to free the mind from the limitations imposed by the ego. He added that "of course, no actual force was used. The whole teaching of the school is word of mouth. Anyone can walk away from a School meeting or event at any time. Some do!" Hodgkinson later wrote a history of the SES called In Search of Truth: The Story of the School of Economic Science, published in 2010. It included details of its economic and philosophical thought, and examination of positive and negative aspects of the organisation. In response to reports that some people had become emotionally disturbed while attending the program, he pointed out that such cases may have been caused by "outside circumstances, such as family relationships or careers" or pre-existing mental health problems. He added, "When they sought help from help from School tutors, the advice given may sometimes have exacerbated the situation, but there have been a great deal more cases where tutors' help has been much appreciated." In 2019, actress Emily Watson spoke of her upbringing in SES, which she described as "a quasi-religious organisation/cult" where people are "taught to think a certain way about the world, and about yourself, that is very denigrating to the individual and to women." When Watson took the role for Breaking the Waves (1996) the SES "told me to go on my undignified way," which she said she found "terribly painful" but didn't tell anyone, only confiding in her co-star of that film about it in 2018. She said that she drew from her SES experience for Chernobyl in that it explores the resistance to a dogmatic culture: "I related very strongly to that; being within a system where you were supposed to think a certain way and you weren’t really allowed to think any other way. And breaking out of that is a very, very powerful release in your life." In 2014 she described the SES central teaching of Advaita Vedanta as "a kind of spiritual communism where everyone is one and the same... which in principle is great but [it was] an organisation that had a lot of problems." At its day school, she said children were treated with "a sort of emotional