Woke Therapy

We have become increasingly aware of the dominance of woke ideology in schools, in the media and in government. Most of those who propound this groupthink are not shy about advertising their intention. 

Yet, we are often blissfully unaware of the influence that this ideology has in therapy sessions. How has woke ideology transformed the field of therapy, and how can we discover what is happening behind closed doors?

If things are as bad as we think they are, more and more therapists insist that the only real problem their patients have is bigotry. They even deny treatment to those who refuse to acknowledge their bigotry.

If, perchance, a Wall Street Journal op-ed explains, you complain to your therapist that you missed out on a fellowship because it was given to someone who fulfilled a diversity quota, the therapist will pronounce you a bigot and will tell you either to deep six your bigotry or to go elsewhere.

No kidding:

A patient came to a clinic where I worked a few years ago. He was looking for help with depression but also told his therapist that he was feeling frustrated after having lost out on a research fellowship. The patient, who was white, felt the reason was affirmative action. The therapist was Arab. A group of psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists discussed the case at a clinic-wide meeting and came to an apparent consensus: Confront the patient and tell him that if he didn’t overcome his biases, he would be transferred elsewhere. They argued that it would be unfair for a clinician of color to have to provide therapy to a “racist” patient.

One understands that if your therapist thinks that you are racist, you should probably find another therapist. And yet, woke ideology has infested the major national psycho guilds:

The American Psychological Association has decried “traditional masculinity.” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a paper describing “Whiteness” as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” Two years ago, a prominent psychiatrist speaking at Yale shared her fantasies of killing white people. Recently, the president of the APA’s division of psychoanalysis said that therapists should “center Palestine . . . as a central working tenet of any clinical praxis.”

One senses the dank odor of anti-Semitism, mixed with a general hatred of America. One understands that the people  who think this way are mentally challenged, not so much in terms of emotional development, but in terms of general intelligence. If this is what they have learned in graduate school, they have been transformed into blithering fools and imbeciles.

Being profoundly stupid, they have tried to enhance their billable hours by embracing leftist politics. One might say that we ought to forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.

One forthcoming study charts a more than 500% increase in politically slanted communiques at the APA from 2000-02 to 2017-19. A 2018 study showed that psychology departments, like most of academia, have extreme bias, with almost 17 registered Democratic professors for every one Republican. The bias is larger at higher ranked schools, and most Republican academics report higher rates of self-censorship.

If anti-racism training has made its way into corporate offices, we should not be surprised that it has made its way into counseling sessions.

The American Counseling Associations’ official competency guidelines frame counselors and clients as either “privileged” or “marginalized.” The National Association for Social Work, which represents many therapists, has a code of ethics requiring “all members of the social work profession to practice through an anti-racist and anti-oppressive lens.”

In part, this involves a failure to educate. The people, mostly of the female persuasion, who practice therapy are simply undereducated. Or else, perhaps the profession attracts those who are mentally deficient, and who could not pass courses in science or math:

Years of one-sided education have made many of them unable to tolerate being around people with different views, much less support them as empathic therapists.

Consider this a portrait of a profession in decline. When politicians and talking heads talk about how drug addicts should receive proper treatment, keep in mind that these mentally deficient therapists will be charged with treating them.

It is well enough known that drug addiction is extremely difficult to treat. Perhaps the nation’s streets are littered, not with people who do not have access to treatment, but with people who have undergone the inadequate treatment that is currently available. 

You do not really think that today’s woke therapists are capable of treating much of anything, do you?

Subscribe to my Substack.