Social Work as Brainwashing

From its onset my blog has drawn some serious attention to the simple fact that in today’s America it is much easier to call for mental health treatment than it is to find it. Politicians and talking heads like to talk about how much emotional distress there is. They tell us that the mentally ill need but have a referral to a licensed professional.

Not once do they remark that most treatment on offer is substandard, if not useless. One reason must be the quality of professional training offered to social workers in today's America.

Thanks to Pamela Paul in the New York Times, we discover that training in social work is worse than I had imagined. And that took some real effort. As Paul notes, most therapy in this country is being dispensed by social workers.

They do not even need to pretend any more. They do not pretend to be offering services or even to be offering anything resembling therapy. It’s political indoctrination and even brainwashing, all the time. Unabashedly.

It ought not to be news. And I am hardly alone in having point it out. Sally Satel,  author of “PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine,” wrote this in 2021:

 “Mental health professionals — mainly counselors and therapists — are increasingly replacing evidence-driven therapeutics with ideologically motivated practice and activism.”

If you do not buy into the program you will never be able to survive at the Columbia School of Social Work. So explains Pamela Paul in a terrifying New York Times column.

If you were wondering why anti-Semitism is running rampant on American campuses, this article exposes the horrifying truth. Radicals have taken over at the Columbia School of Social Work.

The result is that therapy has now become an indoctrination in radical ideology. Hate America. Hate white people. And especially, hate Jews.

At the least, no one should pretend that these institutions are liberal. Or that they teach the liberal arts. They are factories designed to produce, not social workers, but social justice warriors. Better yet, they are recruiting people to become part of a revolutionary vanguard, who will work to overthrow the capitalist order and produce what radical socialism has always produced, mass starvation.

And you were worrying about Donald Trump.

Consider the glossary offered to incoming students. It shows very clearly an ideological and even an anti-Semitic bias. Paul describes it:

Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Askenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).

The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

Keep in mind, this is your ticket of admission. It is not being questioned or critiqued. The students are being told that their access to professional credentials depends on their becoming true believing ideologically driven social justice warriors.

Paul asks the salient question:

Will radicalized social workers be providing service not just based on the needs of their clients but also to advance their political beliefs and assess clients based on their race or ethnicity?

What is social work? Paul offers a short history:

Social workers, who are the most common providers of mental health care, as well as the people who carry out social service programs, help the country’s neediest people. Whether social workers are caseworkers in government agencies or — as is the case with most Columbia graduates, I was told — therapists or counselors in private practice, their clients are often the elderly, the poor, veterans, homeless people, people with substance abuse issues and domestic violence survivors.

In short, the profession is designed to indoctrinate people in leftist ideology, to make them fully fledged members of the vanguard of the revolution. As for the track record of radical socialist governance, they have nothing to say. When reality impugns your motives and your ability to think, better to keep quiet.

Columbia does not even pretend any more:

Columbia updated its mission statement in 2022 to say that its purpose is “to interrogate racism and other systems of oppression standing in the way of social equity and justice and to foster social work education, practice and research that strengthen and expand the opportunities, resources and capabilities of all persons to achieve their full potential and well-being.” What was once its central mission — to enhance the world of social work — now follows an emphatic political statement.

Those who require the services of social workers have now been redefined as victims of white supremacist capitalist oppression. It is an old idea, one that feminists have been touting for a couple of generations now. Its source lies in Friedrich Engels’ book, The Origin of the Family. It says that the only solution to your personal problems is political action. Dare we say that it is a counsel of despair.

One does not quite understand why radical leftist ideology, the kind that failed miserably in the twentieth century, is alive and well at Columbia.

As for the currently trendy notion that Israelis are colonizers, the school has long been teaching a course about how social work needs to be decolonized.

Paul writes:

[There is] a required course called Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work.

According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous people/First Nations people and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia) and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of anti-Black racism on all previously mentioned systems.”

As part of their coursework, students are required to give a presentation in which they share part of their “personal process of understanding anti-Black racism, intersectionality and uprooting systems of oppression.” They are asked to explain their presentation “as it relates to decolonizing social work, healing, critical self-awareness and self-reflection.” Teachings include “The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness,” “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People” and “What It Means to Be a Revolutionary,” a 1972 speech by Angela Davis.

Students are not just required to read the radical texts, especially those that promote Communism, but they are required to show off how well they are applying the theories to their lives. The issue is not merely understanding the ideas, but making them a part of your life. That means, joining the revolutionary vanguard.

Unfortunately, when you are indoctrinating people you will always doubt whether they really believe in your swill, or whether they are mouthing woke ideology in order to get their degrees. The solution, as those who practiced brainwashing discovered, is to force them to show by their actions and behavior that they are living the ideology, not just pretending to believe it.

In the past this was called thought reform or brainwashing. Considering that failing to believe the right beliefs and even to live them will cause you to flunk out of Columbia School of Social Work, the analogy is obviously apposite.

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