Social-Justice Therapy
Why I'm glad I changed my mind about becoming a clinical psychologist
When I first completed my undergraduate degree in psychology, my plan was to become a clinical psychologist. I got onto a clinical program and began to learn the ropes. But in the second year of the five-year program, I realized that I didn’t want to take that path after all, and decided that I instead wanted to become an academic and author, specializing in evolutionary psychology.
For the most part, I’ve been happy with that decision. Every now and then, though, I’ve wondered if I’d made the right move, in part because of the increasing politicization of academia. Maybe clinical psych would have been a better bet.
But the more I’ve learned about the direction that clinical psychology has taken over the past decade or so, the more my doubts have faded. By all accounts, the field has become just as politicized as academia, if not more so. This point was really driven home for me a few years ago, when I read an article in The Spectator by Sally Satel, titled “Social-Justice Shrinks: How Identity Politics Infected Therapy.”
To be fair, the article highlights some of the most extreme examples of the problem, and it’s probably not this bad everywhere - just as with academia. Still, the trends it reveals are concerning.
Below are some excerpts from the article, but I’d recommend reading the entire thing.
In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.”
“We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.
Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special”…
Instead of treating each client as a unique individual and working collaboratively, the social-justice therapist reduces them to avatars of gender, race and ethnicity…
I’ve heard many reports of social-justice therapists scolding or rejecting patients. And reams of long-term data show that attaining a good rapport with a therapist is the most important factor in determining the outcome of therapy…
Good therapy helps clear a path to autonomy. Social-justice therapy inculcates victimhood by convincing patients that they have little choice or agency…
The teaching institutions and regulatory institutions, such as the APA [American Psychological Association], and the mental health profession in general, are being swept up in groupthink; those who balk are often too intimidated to speak up.
Meanwhile, clients are eager to avoid this alarming trend. There are list-serves catering to those seeking “non-woke” therapists…
Of course, skilled therapists must respect cultural values and traditions and educate themselves as best as possible in local anthropology. But preparation and sensitivity of this sort is far different from bringing a largely preordained, victim-oriented cultural script to a session and imposing it on a client.
Social-justice therapy risks additional harms by overlooking the fact that race and ethnicity may not be the most important of the many dimensions, such as personality variables, geographic region, political orientation, family experiences, educational attainment, which affect patients’ life experiences. Then there is the crowning hypocrisy of stereotyping certain groups as “oppressors” at the same time social-justice therapists consider prejudice directed at groups to be the cause of so much distress in the world.
You can read the full article here.
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Coming Soon to the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter…
This Saturday, I’ll be publishing the second part in my series on the Science of Controversial Science. Here’s the part one, if you haven’t seen it already.
