Once upon a time, therapists took care to hide their ideological views from their patients, presenting instead a “blank screen” that allowed the therapeutic relationship to function as intended.
Mark that down as one more casualty of the Age of Wokeness.
Elizabeth Bernstein’s recent Wall Street Journal article “Is Your Therapist Biased? Personal Agendas Are Creeping Into the Therapy Room” provides a useful entrée for the curious reader.
According to Bernstein, more and more therapists have begun to “push their own ideologies, encourage patients toward a path that worked for them, and even judge family members they have never met.”
Bernstein mentions therapist and former professor William Doherty, who argues that “many therapists are getting caught up in trends in both therapy and the culture, including the encouragement of victimhood, estrangements and the broadening of terms like ‘harassment’ and ‘abuse.’”
While Bernstein offers tips for prospective and current therapy-seekers (e.g., “Beware if [mental-health professionals] diagnose someone not in the room”), the reader gets the decided impression that the problem is becoming ingrained.
As clinical psychologist and psychology professor Joel Weinberger tells Bernstein, “It used to be that you didn’t tell your patient your personal view or orientation … [b]ut now there is this view that you do, because you’re sharing good values.”
This ongoing alteration of the therapeutic dynamic is not the first time that politics and ideology have intruded into the field of psychology.
As recent (and not-so-recent) students know, academic psychologists have embraced “liberation psychology,” “decolonial psychology,” and “climate psychology” for years, substituting vogue political grievances for such evidence-based therapeutic modalities as cognitive behavioral therapy.
Commenting on this trend in 2023, Chapman University’s Richard E. Redding remarked that the “political views of psychologists can and frequently [do] color and skew their teaching and research.”
That skew is what we’re observing today: Old-fashioned depression is out; “climate anxiety” is in.
Or consider the output of the American Psychological Association (APA), whose 2017 “Multicultural Guidelines” mention “privilege” and “oppression” more than 40 times each, with “social justice” appearing nearly a dozen times (and nearly a dozen more in the “References” section).
To the extent that therapists allow APA priorities to shape their practices, they will increasingly offer care along progressive ideological lines rather than on the basis of carefully gathered evidence.
Do No Harm covered this phenomenon recently. As we wrote last month, a number of mental-health professionals have begun advertising themselves as fellow activists and openly broadcasting their ideological priors (e.g., “I practice from a feminist and anti-oppressive perspective”).
So much for the blank screen: An activist therapist treating activists is almost certain to affirm when he or she ought to challenge, speak when he or she ought to be silent, or feed patients’ anxieties or delusions when he or she ought to alleviate them.
Sadly, we seem to be moving beyond the age of the apolitical therapist whose focus was on patient well-being, not mutual congratulation or complaint.
For the sake of the profession and patients, we should hope for a return to that standard.
