It has been 130 years since Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer introduced the world to the idea of a “talking cure” in their 1895 paper on the treatment of hysteria. And while many schools of psychotherapy have since come and gone, the mission of the vast majority of mental health professionals has until recently remained the same: To free troubled patients from self-defeating beliefs, to help them decide for themselves the deeper questions of faith and personal philosophy, and to encourage them to set their own priorities.
It is therefore ironic -- and even more disheartening -- that having done so much to help earlier generations think for themselves, professional psychology has today become an institution that seeks to promote a rigid, externally devised, and even painful worldview. Dispensing with long-established techniques for helping people overcome cognitive and behavioral difficulties, a growing number of counselors now practice a progressive alternative called “Social Justice Therapy” (SJT). As the name implies, it blames personal problems on the social power of uncaring elites and attempts to recruit patients as activists for government programs to assist disadvantaged groups.
While exact numbers are elusive, recent research by concerned observers like Richard E. Redding of the Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University, suggests that between 25 to 40 percent of working therapists -- social workers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and various counselors -- now believe that their primary job is to engineer social change. And while this range is not yet a majority, it is already at or above the 25% threshold usually needed for a rising trend within a profession to become a settled norm. Indeed, even therapists who do not subscribe to SJT report growing pressure to mimic its tenets at public forums and academic gatherings.
What is clear is the extent to which SJT now dominates the training of American mental health workers. For example, the five core values of George Mason University’s Counseling Program, highlighted in its mission statement, are “social justice, multiculturalism, internationalism, advocacy, and leadership.” The University of Tennessee’s psychology department similarly bases its coursework on the “feminist, multicultural, and social justice principles of equity, sharing power, giving voice, raising consciousness, and cultural humility.” Even many medical schools, as American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Sally Satel has warned, are shifting their psychiatry curricula “toward social justice and the identity of the physician [as] activist.”
Equally clear is the alarm of traditional therapists like Jonathan Alpert, who has seen firsthand in his New York City and Washington, D.C., practices how a healthcare system that once fostered resilience has become a tool for promoting victimhood and social division. One female patient, he remembers, “told me her previous therapist urged her to quit a new job after only one week because it ‘triggered’ her. The real issue was [her] difficulty taking directions. But instead of confronting it, the therapist simply validated her discomfort.”
“Another patient was told that setting ‘healthy boundaries’ meant cutting off her entire family. No conversation, no healing -- just isolation framed as progress. This is not therapy. It is enabling [unhealthy relationships].”
To fully appreciate what has happened to psychotherapy, one must first recognize that the field has always attracted a disproportionately large number of leftists. A 2019 survey by Nili Solomonov of Weill Cornell Medical College and Adelphi University researcher Jacques P. Barber is just one of many which reveal the extent to which mental health workers are politically biased. In their own study, two-thirds of therapists identified as Democrat, just under a quarter as Independent, but only 7 percent as Republican.
But until recently, almost every trained counselor would have said that letting one’s politics influence patient treatment was not only unethical, but professionally incompetent. A long line of studies, beginning in 1936, has consistently shown that the only factor associated with successful outcomes is the willingness of the therapist to separate his or her private convictions from those of the client. To develop a posture of caring neutrality technically known as “the therapeutic alliance.”
The clear implication of this approach, as Dr. Jerome Frank noted in his classic text, Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy (1961), is for a therapist to never begin treatment with a predetermined idea of what the patient should end up thinking. And historically, even the most left-leaning counselors have observed this caution.
The unfortunate willingness of today’s practitioners to violate the therapeutic alliance owes much to the rise of progressive activism at the colleges and universities where they were taught. As University of Chicago research associate Pamela Paresky and California State University professor Bradley Campbell have documented, what started as left-wing campaigns to censor supposedly harmful words (“microaggressions”) eventually became a pretext for not just keeping conservative speakers off campus but dictating what could be taught in social science departments, with the result that aspiring counselors who already leaned Left were no longer discouraged from mixing politics with therapy, while politically moderate students felt little choice but to get with the new program.
And even after graduation, most therapists remain under the sway of journals, publishers, professional organizations, and other progressively biased academic institutions. For example, the American Counseling Association (ACA) Code of Ethics lists “promoting social justice” alongside “cultural competence” as a core value of the field. And the American Psychological Association’s (APA) official “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” frames stoicism, competitiveness, self-reliance, and other traditionally male traits so negatively that one reviewer compared it to psychiatric abuse in the old Soviet Union.
The good news is that despite the many pressures to conform, a small number of mental health workers are attempting to reverse their profession’s shift from individual healing to social activism. In 2020 an organization called Critical Therapy Antidote was set up with the explicit goal of preserving “the long established apolitical… tradition in talking therapies.” And in 2022, former University of Pennsylvania Medical School dean Stanley Goldfarb founded a non-profit called Do No Harm, which focuses on keeping identity politics out of health-related education, research, and clinical practice.
There is even an online directory for would-be patients wanting to discuss their problems with someone who is not a political activist. And at least two recently published texts, Cynical Therapies. Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice, edited by Dr. Val Thomas, and Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology. Nature, Scope, and Solutions, co-edited by Dr. Craig Frisby and others, help students to see the inherent contradiction of trying to free a troubled mind while simultaneously indoctrinating it.
Supporting all these efforts is the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, founded in 2022 out of concern that “sociopolitical dogmas and ideological norms” were ruining social science. In addition to publishing its own journal and textbooks, the group hosts conferences, sponsors online events, and runs a website aimed at separating progressive activism from professional practice.
But perhaps the most promising development is the growing body of research which suggests that social justice counseling not only fails to cure emotional problems but actually aggravates them. Recent studies from the Journal of Research in Personality, SSM-Mental Health, Pew Research, and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver all show that left-wing thought has an intrinsic tendency to make people depressed, anxious, and indecisive -- some quite seriously. This is consistent with older psychological experiments on so-called “learned helplessness,” which showed how believing one’s problems to be caused by powerful external forces (rather than subject to personal control) made them harder to overcome.
Even though such findings have yet to persuade today’s progressive therapists to reprioritize patient well-being over social justice recruitment, they will eventually have to come to terms with the fact that practicing SJT has harmed their own mental health. Until then, any unhappy person wanting to talk with someone else about his or her troubles needs to be aware that too many in the so-called “helping professions” are more interested in changing the world than in curing the individual.
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