How Mental Health Therapy became Fluff and Wokeness
Leftist ideology is perverting the mental health fields
Ryan Rogers is currently a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a work background in addiction treatment. For obvious reasons, he is not naming the program he is currently training in. The views expressed below are his own reflections on the education and training he is currently receiving.
The way we train therapists is not only useless, but it can also exacerbate mental illness. I learned the true purpose of my graduate program in clinical mental health counseling early on. During my first semester, my professor for my Counseling the Culturally Diverse class said that our primary objective as therapists is to become political activists so that we can “burn it all to the ground.”
That objective might seem bizarre to outsiders, but in my program, questioning it would look morally and intellectually suspect. The theory goes that all mental anguish is caused by oppression, and if we can dismantle the systems of oppression then we can relieve the distress… except that isn’t the real goal. In my program and in academia more broadly, social justice is the objective, not simply a means to an end.
My professors frequently say that gender affirming care is the only appropriate way to treat gender confused minors. Never mind that most of them will probably grow out of these feelings. Never mind the damning evidence in the WPATH files or the Cass Report. Gender affirming care is the goal because it represents social justice. The broken bodies of detransitioners are considered a small price to pay for such a noble vision.
Both students and professors know that this is the “right” answer, but few even know what the question is. One of my professors went on a tirade about how terrible Texas is because the state limited gender affirming care. One woman in the class asked, “But what if a child changes their mind about transitioning later?” My professor responded, “Huh, I guess I’ve never thought about that.” This represents a theory of mind issue: those caught in the social justice worldview have a complete inability to imagine any perspective that is not their own.
In his book, Woke Racism, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter notes that among social justice activists, exaggeration passes as a form of authenticity. In other words, you can’t oversell how bad oppression is because it is all in favor of the cause. In one class, a professor said that microaggressions were “lethal and fatal.” I asked for clarification because it didn’t seem appropriate to place complimenting a Black woman’s hair in the same category as murder. His response was that you may compliment her hair, and someone else may hear that and notice that she is Black and call the police on her and then the police will shoot her. Everyone in the class looked like they were nodding along. This makes sense from the social justice worldview.
This tendency to exaggerate harm leads to hypersensitivity and walking on eggshells. I had a professor call me a racist because he heard me say the word “master” in the context of a “master’s degree,” which is my program. One student scolded another for using the term “bury the hatchet” because that is cultural appropriation of the Native Americans. Social capital is built by calling out others on such infractions, and there are so many potential pitfalls that no one could avoid them all. You can always score a point by interjecting into class discussion, “Well, what if the client was nonbinary or disabled?”
The worst part of the emphasis on diversity is that we don’t actually talk much about… diversity. You may hear the word dozens of times whenever you step foot on campus, but there is little interest in other cultures. In my diversity class (which even progressive students have dubbed “Wokeness 101”), we went over an example of a White male therapist bumbling a session with a Latina client with anxiety in an offensive way. I raised my hand, acknowledging that I likely would make many mistakes due to my inexperience, but asked if she could show us the appropriate way to counsel this woman. “We won’t be covering that today,” my professor replied. It is important to know that you are wrong, but we are not going to tell you how to do it right. Fortunately, there was one woman in my small group who was from Mexico and another whose parents were from Mexico. I asked them to explain to me the specific manifestations of anxiety in Latina women, and in that twenty-minute conversation, I learned more about multiculturalism than I have in two years in my graduate program that continuously shouts “diversity” from the rooftops.
Another downside of the diversity obsession is that “diverse” students often don’t enjoy it. For starters, Hispanic students generally don’t like to be called “Latinx.” Also, many of the social justice norms like pronouns are difficult for foreign students to pick up on. One woman from Nicaragua raised her hand and said,
“I know that English is not my first language, but you are saying the word ‘they’ is singular, but I always learned that it is a plural word. I don’t know how to translate that into Spanish.”
The professor responded, “Thank you for speaking your truth.” She couldn’t give a more accurate answer, which is that we are making all of this up as we go along.
The purpose of “diversity” is not diversity in any meaningful sense. The purpose of diversity is twofold: to acknowledge that as a White person you are doing it wrong, and for everyone to adopt far left-wing politics. Both of these need no explanation. They are just assumed.
In one of my classes, we were broken into small groups to discuss the question, “How are you going to be a social justice warrior for counseling?” A younger woman in my group responded quickly, “I will vote how my clients would want me to vote.” I responded, “How do you know how your clients want you to vote?” I could see the blood drain out of her face, replaced by a look of horror. “What if I get a Trump supporter as a client?” she asked in shock. We are taught to respect every conceivable identity, but the more than 70 million people who voted for Donald Trump are essentially viewed as subhuman.
In another class, my professor was discussing how to decorate your therapy office. He said that you should decorate the office with “inclusive” things but not “alienating” things. His example of something alienating was a Bible and something inclusive was a Pride Flag. “But what if you have a Muslim client who doesn’t like the Pride Flag,” one of my classmates asked. The professor was stumped. There is no clear winner between Muslims and LGBTQ+ in an intersectionality standoff. My professor assumed one of these things was good and the other bad, but he had no justification as to why. Such views are always assumed and rarely need to be defended.
Graduate school for counseling can be very infantilizing. It often feels more like an adult daycare than any rigorous academic study. I have spent hours of class time on activities like playing with Play Doh or using markers to color in a picture of a rainbow. Recently, my career counseling class spent an entire class period on arts and crafts. We used construction paper, markers, and stickers to represent how nonbinary therapists can experience microaggressions. For my group’s project, we had a big sticker in the center of our paper that read, “Make it GAY you cowards!” No one seemed to think this was out of place for a master’s level program.
An underrated part of social justice activism is how lazy it tends to be. One of my professors lectured for less than twenty minutes total the entire semester, instead choosing to break us up into small groups so we could “discuss the material amongst yourselves.” He went to multiple conferences to present on various topics that semester. Apparently, he enjoyed looking like an expert in his field, he just couldn’t be troubled to impart any of that knowledge to his students.
My professor for abnormal psychology never lectured either. All she did the entire semester was play YouTube videos. I learned about mental illness by watching videos of Kanye West or Britney Spears giving interviews. One day in class we watched a video that was more than an hour long which featured a woman applying make up while talking about serial killers. One of my classmates and I would calculate how much money in tuition we were spending per YouTube video.
There were several moments during grad school that broke my spirit. One such moment came when my professor put an example on the projector and asked us to write a three-sentence reflection on it for an assignment. It already seemed absurd to me to write a mere three sentences for a grad school assignment, but then he said to memorize the prompt because it would not be posted to Canvas. When I asked why, he responded, “Because I was too unmotivated to copy/paste it.” I had sacrificed a tremendous amount of time and money to go back to school, only to have a professor who was too lazy to copy/paste a single paragraph. It was demoralizing.
Perhaps laziness, boredom, and lack of meaning in one’s life are the biggest motivators for social justice activism. Therapy can be difficult and tedious. Helping someone make incremental changes on handling their anxiety sounds boring and not all that impressive but being part of a revolutionary vanguard attempting to overthrow an oppressive system and usher in utopia sounds exciting and can give a person’s life a sense of purpose. If the client’s mental health needs to take a backseat to that purpose, so be it.
Social justice ideology is built into every fabric of how we train therapists. The syllabus from one of my grad school classes said that students would learn skills required of a counselor such as, “Knows the roles that racism, discrimination, sexism, power, privilege and oppression have on one’s own life and that of the client(s)” and “Advocates for policies, programs and services that are equitable and responsive to the unique needs of couples and families.” Such requirements are often mandated in order to get accredited as a graduate level counseling program.
The idea that pushing for “equitable” policies and programs somehow pertains to therapy might seem odd, but this is a logical step in social justice ideology overtaking the counseling profession. The more nefarious aspect is that clients getting better is often not part of the equation. In fact, mentally healthy and stable clients contradict the social justice worldview.
Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse realized in the 1960s that happy people make poor revolutionaries. He saw Americans as prosperous and free, thus seeing no need for Marxism. That is a problem if you are a Marxist. The key, Marcuse understood, was to breed discontent. He called this “the power of negative thinking.” Rather than gratitude or appreciation for one’s life, it is essential that we view the faults in every situation in order to uncover hidden oppression.
In counseling, this looks like a tedious obsession with anything that might be deemed “problematic.” There is a hyperfocus on “microaggressions” and “interlocking systems of power.” Such a fixation often borders on paranoia. Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us to reality test our assumptions to see if they line up with the facts, but this is considered horribly offensive in the new therapy paradigm. Even if a client’s sense of oppression is not factually true, it represents a higher truth: it is building motivation to overthrow the system. And that is the real point. The client’s discontent is the means to that end.
If we are going to return to any semblance of usefulness or relevance for the therapy profession, we must place client well-being front and center. This would require us to ditch the commitment to social justice. Placing political goals ahead of the client’s well-being is unethical and irresponsible. With mental health on the decline in America and suicide and drug overdoses on the rise, it is time for therapists to be healers rather than pretending to be revolutionaries
Great article. Though I am not at all surprised, it is still stunning that intelligent and educated people can make arguments like that and act in this way.
This all makes it pretty obvious that Critical theory is designed to torment the disadvantaged (in this case those with mental disorders) so that they lash out at society in self-destructive and socially destructive ways. Your professors exhibit the behavior of those with anti-social personality disorder. This is pure medical malpractice being taught in the classroom.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/radical-ideologies-feast-on-mental
Who needs "reality" - when you have "ideology?" Its all quite surreal at this point. I retired as a clinical social worker in 2014 and it is rather sobering to think I'd be considered both transphobic for believing in the biological reality of "sex" - and racist for not submitting to the intellectual dictates of Critical Race Theory. It is truly amazing how stupid people can become when they really put their minds to it.