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"In psychoanalytic terms, the new neutrality requires what the psychoanalyst Wifrid Bion, following John Keats, called "negative capability," the ability not to know, to not search after knowing, but to tolerate multiple possible ideas all at once."

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A Marxist therapist treats a Trump-supporting client (2018) - Yourman

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A Marxist therapist treats a Trump-supporting client (2018) - Yourman

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Yourman - 2018 - A Marxist therapist treats a Trump-supporting client

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Neutrality revisited (2017) - Gelso and Kanninen

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Neutrality revisited (2017) - Gelso and Kanninen

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Gelso and Kanninen - 2017 - Neutrality revisited On the value of being neutral

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Social-Justice Shrinks: How Identity Politics Infected Therapy

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Social-Justice Shrinks: How Identity Politics Infected Therapy

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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."

If the client were black, Elliott was told to ask how it felt to sit with her, a white counselor. If the client felt at ease, "my job - regardless of what brought him to therapy - was to make him more aware of how being black compounded, or perhaps caused, his problems."

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the three-year program intensified its emphasis on race and oppression, making clear that counselors were to be foot soldiers in the culture wars. "Incredible as it sounds," says Elliott, "we were encouraged to see ourselves as activists and remake ourselves as social change agents."

"Critical social-justice therapists" is what Aaron Kindsvatter and others call this new breed of mental health professional graduating from programs across the country. Last year, Kindsvatter left his tenured position at the University of Vermont to pursue private practice in Burlington, where he has treated a handful of clients who were, in his words, "victims of indoctrination attempts" by their "authoritarian" therapists. To be clear, Elliott and Kindsvatter are not talking about a mismatch in sociopolitical views wherein, say, a client is conservative and the therapist is liberal or progressive. To be sure, such a discrepancy can - though by no means inevitably does - create tension. Studies have shown, in fact, that therapeutic relationships were stronger when clients felt comfortable disclosing their political views to the therapist and when the therapist was accepting of those views.

But even when sociopolitical discrepancies affect therapy, they do so within the confines of a time-honored framework that places primacy on the patient.

Social-justice therapy, SJT, however, overturns that framework. It endows therapists - who understand themselves as activists first, not healers - with the power to define the goals of therapy, overriding the client's needs and preferences.

"Most damning," Kindsvatter tells me, "is that the major governing entities in the field have turned a blind eye to blatant ethical breaches, because such breaches align with a preferred ideology."

The governing council of the American Counseling Association, or ACA, has endorsed "multicultural and social-justice counseling competencies." According to these competencies: "Multicultural and social-justice competent counselors assist privileged and marginalized clients in unlearning their privilege and oppression, [help] privileged and marginalized clients develop critical consciousness by understanding their situation in context of living in an oppressive society" and "initiate discussions with privileged and marginalized clients regarding how they shape and are shaped by local, state and federal laws and policies."

Another governing entity is the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. The council requires programs to include training on "the effects of power and privilege for counselors and clients" and "strategies for identifying and eliminating barriers, prejudices and processes of intentional and unintentional oppression and discrimination."

In 2017 the American Psychological Association published its "Multicultural Guidelines: An Ecological Approach to Context, Identity and Intersectionality." Guideline number five stipulates that "psychologists aspire [to] address institutional barriers and related inequities, disproportionalities, and disparities of law enforcement, administration of criminal justice, educational, mental health and other systems as they seek to promote justice [and] human rights." A common thread in all these directives is the total disregard for patients' agency, which assumes that social forces are the singularly important determinant of their problems.

Social-justice therapy grew out of a practice called multicultural counseling. Grounded in the idea that therapy with minority populations requires a distinct set of competencies, the first textbook on the subject, Counseling the Culturally Different, was published in 1981. By 1992, the ethics code of the APA held that a psychologist could be sanctioned if he or she is not behaving in a manner that could be considered "culturally sensitive." The APA's 2002 "Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research and Organizational Change for Psychologists" set a sensible standard for culturally sensitive practice, saying that "psychologists are urged to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the worldview and perspectives of those racially and ethnically different from themselves."

Psychologist Nina Silander studies the intersection of politics and psychotherapy. While critical of the brand of counseling taught to Elliott, Silander acknowledges that, as she explained to me, "taking [into] account broad variations in culture, such as individualist versus collectivist values, and variations in level of acculturation within immigrant groups, as well as variations in family-of-origin cultural differences, can be very valuable."

Some ethnic and racial groups, for example, are more likely to report emotional distress in the form of bodily sensations; sometimes culturally specific metaphors allow therapists to make a point more clearly. Such cultural adaptations have been incorporated with success into well-tested cognitive behavioral therapy strategies.

But social-justice therapy, in particular, takes things further. It calls attention to the fact that it is common for "marginalized counselors to work with privileged clients in today's world," a worthwhile observation. But then advocates go on to "set the expectation that counselors address issues of power, privilege and oppression that impact clients." You could argue that a client who knows what social-justice therapy is about should be free to enter into it. Perhaps. But I worry that the perspective of such therapists is so totalizing that they'd have no clinical flexibility to deploy another therapeutic approach when needed.

Today, multicultural therapy and social-justice therapy have bled into one another. Counseling the Culturally Different is now in its ninth edition (the word "different" now replaced with "diverse") and the leading textbook in its field. It combines pragmatism - the importance of "clinical humility"; the importance of merging the "universality of the human condition with the role of culture in the manifestation of both the presenting concern and the treatment approach" - with instruction to counselors to see patients first and foremost though an identitarian lens.

Val Thomas, a London psychotherapist and founder of Critical Therapy Antidote, a website devoted to "protecting the integrity of talking therapies," thinks of multicultural therapy and SJT as part of a "motte and bailey" dynamic through which "critical social justice" is making significant inroads.

As Thomas explains it, a perfectly reasonable, therapeutic goal - the safe motte - is set by the social-justice therapist. That goal is expressed as a tenet of multicultural therapy, namely that "counselors need to have frameworks and tools which help them talk about the difficult issues of racial/ethnic/cultural context with their clients." But then the therapist reaches further, introducing a new, controversial tenet. This wider "bailey defense" holds, as Thomas describes it, that "the counselor must consider how sociopolitical factors such as race influence the client's counseling concerns."

Thus, a completely defensible aim of multicultural counseling - to possess benign frameworks and tools to talk about issues of race, etc. - has morphed into a far more dubious proposition: importing the counselor's agenda. Thomas presents the strategy in action: "Any attempt to engage in critique... or participate in any kind of constructive criticism [of the ideological agenda] will be framed as an attack that triggers a withdrawal to the motte (the importance of helping counsellors develop ways of talking to their clients about the sociopolitical factors implicated in their issues). As a vehicle for importing social-justice praxis into mainstream therapy, especially therapy education, it has been very successful."

Social-justice therapy presents a vexing paradox. "It doesn't acknowledge universals, because groups are supposedly too distinct from one another," says psychologist Craig L. Frisby, "and it doesn't acknowledge individuals' uniqueness, because only group affiliation matters." Frisby is the editor, with psychologist William O'Donohue, of the 2019 textbook Cultural Competence in Applied Psychology, which explores challenges, strengths and limitations of current cultural competence practice. "Students come to learn that if they want to be a good psychologist, they are going to have to buy into an essentialist, stereotyped view of the person."

Students must also buy into other dubious practices. They are taught, for example, to impose an identity-driven narrative on the client. 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.

While responsible therapists help clients cultivate the power of self-observation and encourage them to experiment with new attitudes, perspectives and actions, social-justice therapists foment grievance. Good therapy helps clear a path to autonomy. Social-justice therapy inculcates victimhood by convincing patients that they have little choice or agency. That a therapist would explore the life-affecting consequences of a patient's poor choices would be anathema to a social-justice counselor.

It is impossible to imagine how a healthy therapeutic alliance between counselor and patient - a core bond of trust nurtured through caring neutrality and compassionate detachment - could thrive under these conditions. 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.

When I was a resident in psychiatry, learning how to become a skilled therapist was an all-consuming ambition for me and my colleagues. Trust me, it's harder than it looks.

We met weekly with seasoned experts to discuss our cases. We learned to keep our private passions, character flaws and blind spots from distorting the work. We were in therapy ourselves to understand those enthusiasms, flaws and blind spots. We were vigilant about "countertransference," Freud's term for psychiatrists' own emotional reaction to a patient, which could cloud our clinical judgment. Even experienced therapists pay trusted supervisors to help them manage complexities that arise in the course of their work with patients.

Leslie Elliott is a rare voice willing to go public while still in training. Last fall, she created YouTube videos and posted Substack commentary in order to expose what she calls "the ideological capture" of the counseling profession as a warning to both future graduate students and potential clients.

But resistance from within will be hard. The teaching institutions and regulatory institutions, such as the APA, 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. A psychologist colleague in New York City is about to launch an institute that will foster open inquiry in mental-health care and support individuals who have had adverse experiences at the hands of social-justice practitioners.

The most ambitious effort belongs to Brian S. Canfield, a professor of clinical mental health counseling at Florida Atlantic University and former president of the American Counseling Association. In July 2021, he launched the International Association of Psychology and Counseling. Its 500 members share the association's position that, as Canfield puts it, "advocacy should be the domain of individual conscience, not one's identity as a counselor."

Highly questionable practices can harden into professional orthodoxy and conflict with what is best for patients. This is especially troubling as people are seeking help for mental-health care in record numbers.

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.

In October, the dean of Antioch's counseling graduate program reacted to Elliott's online postings. In an email, he urged students and faculty not to watch her videos and to reach out to an ad hoc "crisis team" to help them handle their reactions to the "hate speech" she allegedly disseminated.

Elliott, who is unsure whether the school will ask her to leave, told its officials that she wants the option of finishing her remaining coursework and receiving her degree, as well as an apology for "false accusations." She also informed them that she will continue to speak out.
This article was originally published in The Spectator's March 2023 World edition.

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Social-justice shrinks: how identity politics infected therapy

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You could argue that a client who knows what social-justice therapy is about should be free to enter into it. Perhaps

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Social Justice Therapy offers a new guarantee of living the righteous middle-class dream, and risks, despite its intentions, involving therapists in a fraud.

Mental health training and practice has been increasingly co-opted by the corrosive hyper-partisan regime of social justice ideology. Titles of conferences, talks, and continuing education (CE) offerings reproduce a basic formula:

How to treat/evaluate/work with [chain of identity signifiers: (trans-male queer sex-workers, for instance)].

Or

How to eradicate/recognize/work through the whiteness/patriarchy/sexism that is affecting your therapeutic dyad.

The epistemic dominance of manualized treatment-intervention performed according to predetermined administrative guidelines-has begun to reformulate itself into the rise of the manualized patient. Unfortunately, rather than bucking this trend, social justice ideology participates in this depreciation of psychotherapy.

This trend is "political," but it is also straightforwardly economic: the industry requires constant compression of treatment to increase profit. The focus on identity, diversity, and representation has been developed as a means of simplifying and manualizing treatment to make it more "efficient," in line with the broader trends in the field toward acclimation to narrow reimbursement categories. The intertwining demands of industry and politicization on the field have created an economy in which ever-more specific identities require ever-more specific training, which in turn reduces therapeutic acumen to accordance with identitarian norms.

It should come as no surprise that a credentialed field like mental health would be a vehicle for disseminating the ideology that legitimizes the class interests of its PMC practitioners, but the ways that this dynamic has impacted clinical practice recently is troubling. As a new generation of therapists vies for dominance of the field, the function of the identity-based training industrial complex as a disciplinary battering ram for their own legitimacy becomes clear. New practitioners, as members of the PMC with aspirations towards roles in consultation, program development, and management, generally do not see themselves benefitting from redistributive politics. Instead, the politics of representation and diversity are circulated through the field of mental health to secure consultative and managerial roles for the elites of industry and academia.

Any well-meaning clinician would, of course, want to make sure not to replicate or re-enact biases that patients face outside of the consulting room. But a hyper-focus on a taxonomical model of patients being like this because they look or act like that, in addition to cynically serving career goals, begins to reproduce exactly the race- and gender-based classifications of people that social justice ideology ostensibly aims to transcend. Mapping prescriptive ideology onto our patients is inherently dehumanizing. The depravity of programming a patient is masked by a facade of social justice. Ambiguity or nuance is minimized and the patient becomes a product to be interacted with based on ascriptive attributes. The clinician listens only to what they would imagine the patient is speaking about in terms of their ascribed social position. Is this patient of color talking about her overbearing mother, or is she unconsciously referring to how my whiteness dominates the space we share? In embracing the all-importance of a patient's identity signifiers, a pernicious veneer of "fragility" permeates the dyad, obscuring the patient's speech behind their appearance.

One of the many screeds touting anti-racist therapy contains the following self-satisfied example of clinical practice:

Sitting with my white clients, I ponder, sometimes aloud with them, how race has shaped their lives, how it enters our therapy relationship, and notice how frequently when these reflections happen they move toward externalizing racial identity in people of color versus an exploration and understanding of white racial selves.

New trainings re-situate the therapeutic relationship: practitioners and patients alike suffer from the neurotic intangible symptom of "whiteness" (or "maleness" or "cisness"). Although you will never be free from the original sin of your privilege, you will be able to buy more of the correct books, CE credits, and attend identitarian conferences to attenuate it. You will never be free from the stain of your status, but you are able to assuage this guilt through making your patients aware of theirs. This identification matrix is precisely what Lacan railed against over 50 years ago when he warned against the goal of treatment being the patient's identification with the analyst.

A treatment based on identity validation and social justice can also leave certain questions out. Competence in working with the LGBT+ population, as one example of the identity/therapy merge, is conceptualized with some of the following interventions: "encouraging positive subjective experiences" (or being nice), "giving handouts listing character strengths," and (of course) "self-disclosure of same-sex attraction." A non-identity-indoctrinated therapist might work to analyze patterns in the patient's relationships regardless of the gender or sexuality of their love object, and maximize space for the patient to relate to their own projections instead of foreclosing on such understandings through too-quick self-disclosure. Therapy is work, and therapists should have the space to work free of the political injunction to validate and unconsciously condescend to people with marginalized identities. Asking what dynamics are being repeated and looking for what is being repressed conveys a level of respect that few of our patients, regardless of identity, have experienced before.

Of course, marginalized and vulnerable patients of any group may need validation and warmth to develop trust. But treatment dominated by a reductive and formulaic architecture may be in effect more "structurally homophobic" than an open-ended mode. A woke script deprives the LGBT+ patient of a relationship with a live other and substitutes the presence of a potentially flawed therapist with an oversaturated script that the therapist and patient must collude to call "comforting." People often come to therapy because they are having problems with behaviors or identity. To have the potentiality of articulating the complexity of these issues literally papered over by handouts is, for the therapist, to take the easy, phobic, and ultimately harmful way out.

In analyzing the trends in mental health education, it can be inferred that anyone practicing therapy in any capacity must be positioned as unquestionably subservient to social justice ideology. The dictums of anti-racism and other woke philosophies are seamlessly inculcated into the curricula of higher education in psychology PhDs, MSW programs, and even analytic institutes. Courses regarding internal racism, implicit bias, and the all-encompassing demonology of whiteness take the forefront in academic and post-graduate trainings and organizations (despite shoddy evidence of efficacy) at the expense of more traditional clinical skills. Regardless of modality or approach, the therapeutic relationship is the most curative factor in treatment. If practitioners are instrumentalized to be patronizing scolds to their patients, this could jeopardize precisely what helps patients change.

And there are straightforward material reasons for therapists to embrace a reductive approach. An LGBT+ graduate student interested in learning family therapy (for instance) at a family therapy institute placement may be pushed to intern at an LGBT+ therapy center instead, despite not having any drive to work with that population. The implicit message underlined by this phenomenon is that your success in the field will be contingent upon working with others who share your lived experience of oppression. The fantasy that competence is ensured or made more likely by shared identity markers serves a political function, moving therapy from being potentially curative to therapy becoming a space of recursive validation.

The mental health field is diverse, but the practitioner is always in a position of power in their relationship with the patient. The already-present guilt in practitioners caused by this power dynamic has enabled PROP (Power, Race, and Oppression Privilege) discourses to flourish. But the pedagogy of identity also undermines a therapist's confidence in working with difference. A black trans clinician may not have the right skillset to work with black trans patients who have the lived experience of being fat-bodied or working in the sex industry, for instance. This is an important recurrence in the social justice therapy industry: under the guise of justice, the actual complexity of "lived experience" is reduced to a set of reified identity characteristics whose "treatment" is manualized.

The trainings meant to address therapists' "lack of skill" should not be seen as addressing a therapeutic blindspot but as a kind of automation of personal interactions to accord with the official doctrines of an obscene societal superego. Their function is not to tangibly improve clinical practice; they are a form of top-down discourse that forcefully demands the therapeutic space become a reductive, and thus un therapeutic, one.

I do not mean to imply that progressive values are bad, or that white supremacy and sexism do not exist. But these concepts are being used to legitimize precisely what they attempt to decry. The more the mental health field has become aligned with counterproductive "progressive trends," the more it increases alienation and resentment.

Social justice ideology's expropriation of the field of mental health through its pervasive control on the academic sphere has created two new economies that practitioners are subsumed by: one psychological and discrete, the second politicized and ostentatious. In the first, the currently dominant cultural relations of shame, guilt, and identity fetishism are imparted onto the practitioner, transforming them into an agent compelled by anxiety to "do the work" whether or not the patient sitting in front of them has any interest in it. In the second, a scaffolding of diversity cartels and committees has circumscribed our institutions, diverting funding and attention to ever-more arcane trainings, talks, and an entire set of non-clinical consultation careers. The manifest purpose is (of course) to save face, while the latent purpose is to prevent lawsuit or liability. The unconscious consequence of both these trends is that the field loses further touch with its roots: direct therapeutic work.

Scrolling through Psychology Today, you will find the majority of profiles riddled with therapeutic progressive-identitarian jargon. It's important to remember the source of this trend: mental health workers have increasingly been deskilled and are eager to abide by the new professional standards of success for plainly material reasons. They have abandoned analytic neutrality for a kind of condescension at a moment when they feel themselves condescended to.

But what does the radlib echo chamber of Psychology Today profiles indicate to potential patients? In short, that we therapists only want to be available to those who think a certain way. As a result, only subjects already inclined to trust the ruling woke orthodoxy are provided mental health care services. There is a reason that working people have long had a distrust of therapists and social workers for imposing bourgeois lifestyle norms and criminalizing poverty. Despite the progressive language in education, mental health workers are still liable to fall into the trap of reproducing and transposing oppression onto their patients under the guise of altruism. Now, in addition to time, money, insurance, and all the other hazards of getting help, the identity polarization of the field of mental health is yet another barrier that working-class people (or those who distrust the PMC political project) may face when seeking services.

Patients I work with have admitted that they are afraid to tell me things as banal as the fact that they may have skeptical thoughts on the new COVID vaccines simply because I am in this line of work. If fear of a vaccine is something almost unbearably difficult to share with your therapist, what else is being censored and hidden from view in a field that has been made irremediably partisan? If there is any social justice victory to be had in mental health, shouldn't it be through unconditionally prioritizing the importance of therapy for all? For therapy to be in any way "radical," it must not become a hectoring chamber in which the legitimizing ideology of the imperialist neoliberal state is reproduced. What can really help patients from marginalized groups better their lives are competent and confident clinicians, not dithering therapists compulsively self-flagellating over alterity.

Evan Dunn is a psychotherapist in Los Angeles chasing the bourgeois dream.

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Social Justice Therapy offers a new guarantee of living the righteous middle-class dream, and risks, despite its intentions, involving therapists in a fraud.

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A platform for people (practitioners, academics, clients, supervisors, and members of allied professions) who were concerned about the rapid and uncontested encroachment of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) into talking therapies.

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Critical Therapy Antidote (CTA) was set up in 2020 to provide a platform for people (practitioners, academics, clients, supervisors, and members of allied professions) who were concerned about the rapid and uncontested encroachment of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) into talking therapies.

CTA has rapidly evolved into a broad-based collective whose members are committed to protecting the healing ethos of therapy and maintaining the clinical space as functionally apolitical.
What we do
Since its founding, CTA has established itself as a significant platform for critiquing the tenets of Critical Social Justice in relation to therapy. Our associated network of members has grown rapidly, and it has a global reach. We provide support, advocacy and resources for an increasingly beleaguered profession. CTA has its own podcast.

We collaborate with other organisations committed to a similar enterprise such as The Open Therapy Institute in New York.

CTA's book Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice is the first major publication to critique the tenets of Critical Social Justice in relation to therapy.
Aims

maintain and foster the integrity of counselling and psychotherapy, through championing the long-established apolitical and heterodox tradition in talking therapies;

support trainees and consolidate their understanding of traditional therapy approaches;

collaborate with like-minded institutions and organisations with whom we can work towards therapeutic practice that supports a healthy, balanced, and productive integration of the individual and collective dimensions of human existence;

support consumers of therapy in the UK, North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand who seek non-political/non-ideologically-based therapy;

support the therapy field in creating parallel non-political/non-ideological structures.

Objectives

publish timely articles and podcast episodes for the public (professional and non-professional alike) to serve as information about ideological threats such as Critical Social Justice, and offer better common-humanity alternatives for the practice of therapy;

create and maintain a directory of therapists who are committed to providing a functional apolitical clinical space;

develop a suite of trainings and webinars in traditional therapy approaches;

provide opportunities such as practice seminars to help qualified practitioners work with challenges relating to Critical Social Justice;

establish an independent scholarly non-partisan journal.

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Background Critical Therapy Antidote (CTA) was set up in 2020 to provide a platform for people (practitioners, academics, clients, supervisors, and members of allied professions) who were concerned about the rapid and uncontested encroachment of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) into talking therapies. CTA has rapidly evolved into a broad-based collective whose members are committed to...

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How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors

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‘They are training people who will not be able to see half the population as human beings who need compassionate treatment.’

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‘Social justice activism is replacing scientific enquiry’

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2nd November 2022
Carole Sherwood and Kirsty Miller

Scientific enquiry has been rejected in favour of social justice activism in the UK's clinical psychology training courses. This is the key finding of a new report published by Save Mental Health, an independent research group comprising academics, psychologists and health professionals concerned about mental health services in the UK and committed to protecting evidence-based mental health treatment.

In The Politicisation of Clinical Psychology Training Courses in the UK, Carole Sherwood and Kirsty Miller show, through the findings from freedom of information requests, that NHS Health Education England is providing substantial funding to training courses to promote critical race theory and decolonise their curricula of 'White' and 'Eurocentric' treatments. This is happening at a time when the UK is experiencing a significant mental health crisis,
following the Covid-19 pandemic. In adopting a politicised approach to training, these courses are encouraging unethical and discriminatory practices that contravene standards set by the Health and Care Professions Council which regulates health professionals in the UK.

The bigger picture

Few in the third decade of the 21st Century dispute the general perception that Western cultural, political and social systems are experiencing a period of tumultuous change. During a time of social turmoil, it is to be expected that individuals, no longer sure of their footing, might seek external sources of help and guidance. Historically, this role has been fulfilled by doctors, priests and respected elders. In recent times, it is more likely that people consult professional therapists such as clinical psychologists.

Over the last few decades, the services provided by those therapists have become increasingly regulated: professional associations and government regulatory bodies have performed the necessary functions required to maintain ethical standards within the professions.

Wider context

It is important to acknowledge that psychology does not operate in a vacuum: it is affected and shaped by larger social, cultural and political forces. For example, clinical psychologists are trained within universities and often work within the NHS and other statutory agencies: the policies operating in these wider contexts influence and place constraints on training and practice. This has, of course, been the case for decades. So why is it particularly important to consider this wider context now?

Mainly because a new world view - one that is collectivist, explicitly political and authoritarian - has increasing purchase on our cultural institutions. This world view identified as Critical Social Justice (CSJ) is shaping the wider health and social care professions, their institutions and their practices.

Social Justice v Critical Social Justice

Until very recently, CSJ and its radically different world view has been able to establish itself unchallenged in UK institutions. The reason this has happened so easily is due to confusion about definitions. The term Critical Social Justice does not mean the same as the term social justice. The latter is generally accepted to mean the pursuit of a fair and just society for everyone. While clinical psychologists might be expected to favour social justice in its generally accepted sense, it would be surprising to find them automatically accepting and advocating for Critical Social Justice which is an anti-scientific, postmodernist concept informed by Marxist Critical Theory.

In order to understand the context of the report, it is important to determine the differences in meaning of these two terms. In the recent past the term social justice would have been understood as a classic liberal notion of moving steadily and incrementally in the direction of a society that was fair and just for everyone. Although it sounds very similar to the classic liberal term, Critical Social Justice is radically different. (CSJ) is a political ideology, with utopian commitments, whose origins are in Marxist thought and postmodernist theory. CSJ is an umbrella term that includes critical race and gender ideologies that adopt a specific theoretical approach to addressing issues of prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of characteristics like race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, dis/ability and body size.

CSJ aims to disrupt and dismantle Western political and social systems which it regards as systematically oppressive. Its goal is continuous revolution. CSJ claims that knowledge is not objective but culturally constructed to maintain oppressive power systems. As such, it poses a serious threat to clinical psychology which conventionally draws on scientific knowledge to help people experiencing psychological distress.

What does CSJ look like in practice?

In the wider society, wherever CSJ gains control its key characteristics become very clear: it is authoritarian; dedicated to the dismantling of societal norms; hostile to any opposing viewpoint; hostile to evidence and reason; and its goal is the hijacking of everything for political ends.

The therapy professions have not been able to protect themselves from the encroachments of CSJ. Activists have been able to establish themselves in the professional bodies and activist scholars have been able to change the established narratives of therapy. Below are some examples:

● The adoption and normalisation of CSJ gender identity ideology has permeated all professional bodies and institutions. Those publicly holding different viewpoints have been silenced. For example, in 2021 James Esses was expelled from the Metanoia Institute, where he was training to be a counsellor, after raising concerns about safeguarding young people with gender dysphoria.

● Contested ideas such as microaggressions, intersectionality and decolonisation of curricula have been widely accepted and adopted without debate or discussion.

● Concerns raised about the lack of evidence-base and incompatibility of CSJ with standard clinical practice have been dismissed and those raising concerns subjected to twitterstorms of protest and denunciations by the British Psychological Society and its members.

● Acceptance of insulting pejorative characterisation of the majority population, for example the Moss, D., (2021) paper on whiteness as a form of parasitism and the use of terms such as toxic masculinity and white fragility.

● The NHS's adoption of 'anti-racist' policies based on Critical Race Theory, a major branch of CSJ. Those who express support for a colour-blind approach and raise concerns about patient safeguarding, such as trainee psychotherapist Amy Gallagher, are accused of racism.

What is happening in training?

It is important to establish whether these examples are indications of a short-term 'fad' or an indication of deeper and long-term change. Clinical psychology may be undergoing a process of transformation from a therapeutic practice into a political one. The best way to find out is to look at what is happening in clinical psychology training institutions as these hold the key to the future of the profession.

There is already considerable anecdotal evidence from training institutions in North America. Here CSJ is well-established and students are unhappy with the focus on advocacy and political activism in their counselling training programmes. There are also instances of professors speaking up who have then either been cancelled or forced to resign.

Clinical Psychology Courses in the UK

In view of these worrying developments, we believe that this report is timely and that its findings will help to clarify what is happening in clinical psychology training courses in the UK. We also hope that steps will be taken to halt the incursion of CSJ ideology into those courses before it causes damage to the profession, to the NHS more widely and to the many people in need of its services.

Dr Carole Sherwood is a clinical psychologist who has worked in the NHS specialising in sexual health, chronic pain, cancer and trauma. She was an independent practitioner until 2017 and is now semi-retired. Dr Sherwood has grown increasingly concerned about the incursion of Critical Social Justice into clinical psychology. These concerns prompted her to raise awareness about the potential for harm that this ideology poses to the profession, the NHS and, most importantly, to those who clinical psychologists serve.

Dr Kirsty Miller is an academic psychologist who has worked in a variety of roles within the education sector. She has acted as a consultant for a number of media programmes and been involved in outreach activities for several charitable and third-sector organisations. In recent years, Dr Miller has become very concerned about the encroachment of Critical Social Justice into health and education and is currently working to challenge its ideological takeover in our public institutions.

The Politicisation of Clinical Psychology Courses and associated FOI responses
are available to readhere.

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The politicisation of clinical psychology

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2nd November 2022 Carole Sherwood and Kirsty Miller Scientific enquiry has been rejected in favour of social justice activism in the UK's clinical psychology training courses. This is the key finding of a new report published by Save Mental Health, an independent research group comprising academics, psychologists and health professionals concerned about mental health services in the UK and committed to protecting evidence-based mental health treatment.

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It is clear that America's political polarization has eroded our ability to navigate complex issues. My own field of clinical psychology has failed to evade this problem, and now finds itself deeply steeped in a troubling narrative. The American Psychological Association (APA) recently published a special report on the topic of racism that states, "Pursuing anti-racism in psychology requires a critical examination of how the discipline structures opportunity in ways that uphold White supremacy."

The APA has been pressured to admit its "racist core" and apologize for missing the "lived experiences of people of color" throughout its long history. Part of the remedy for these supposed decades of racism, the APA says, is for psychologists with white skin to approach their "colleagues of color" with unquestioning support, affirmations, and displays of solidarity. In the same report, Mitch Prinstein, the APA's Chief Science Officer, stated that "science is the pursuit of truth, and until we can embark on scientific practices that are not dominated by White supremacy, we're only going to be getting part of the truth." Precisely which white supremacist scientific practices are to be banished was not specified.

As a psychologist, I could not point to another profession that is more sensitive to issues of diversity and cultural competence. It begins early during the course of one's education. All accredited programs in clinical psychology have detailed regulations for diversity education and training which continue to be updated and revised to reflect changes in the sociopolitical environment. The APA itself has for decades dedicated divisions comprised of psychologists working specifically on issues related to men and masculinity, women, and the study of culture, ethnicity, and race. There are also readily available and approved professional practice guidelines for multicultural practice that tend to issues of human diversity in all of its forms. The ethical principles and code of conduct for psychologists also spells out the need to be "aware of and respect cultural, individual, and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, and socioeconomic status." Once we become licensed healthcare providers, professional development programs and continuing education requirements further encourage clinicians to maintain their awareness of cultural issues.

A reasonably informed person might look at all this and wonder: where is the racist white supremacy and systemic ignorance?

However, despite decades of effort highlighting the importance of diversity, we are now being urged by leaders in our field to repudiate ideals of equal opportunity and equal treatment in its name. A recently published Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion framework reads more like a political document designed to appease an angry mob than something that would promote respect for all people regardless of their backgrounds. It begins with criticizing psychology for "perpetuating U.S. colonialism" and "systemically discounting" the efforts of "BIPOC scientists." It goes on to list several guiding principles that make grand claims about how "human rights, racial justice, and social change are never achieved, must continually be sought after" only to reveal "new areas of inequity and exclusion" that will "need to be addressed."

On the surface, the sentiment that psychologists should listen to and support people of different backgrounds is unobjectionable. Society would clearly be better with less racism and unfair discrimination. It is also true that racism remains a phenomenon to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, when focusing on fighting the invisible evils of white supremacy by pinning racial groups against one another for unending grievances, we ironically find more racist ideas that end up fueling our tribal instincts even further.

We are now told that we must deny our multifaceted nature as individuals and instead embrace the immutable characteristics bestowed upon us by group identity. All differences in any outcome of interest can only be understood through the explanation of racist bias and discrimination. A recent spotlight article on the psychology of American racism goes to extraordinary lengths to redefine the concept of racism as a "system of advantage" that only works in one direction (perpetuated by whites against non-whites). It is not that we all have an innate predisposition to favor members of our own group over others, or that we prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, but that there is a particular problem with a particular group of people and it is in urgent need of remediation.

The message we are given is that to understand the complexity of the world, we must first put on our ideological goggles and view one another as avatars of our racial groups. Even recent explanations of trends in demographic shifts regarding newcomers to the field, for example, are interpreted through the pre-determined and professionally sanctioned filter of racial oppression. Despite the fact that psychology is becoming more diverse, the field itself, we are told, has a prominent diversity problem. While it is a worthwhile effort to attract and encourage more minorities to pursue careers in psychology, it would require an objective analysis of differences in interest and opportunity across all variables, which may or may not neatly be accounted for by simplistic theories about oppressive groups dominating disenfranchised groups to produce unequal outcomes.

The directive that we must deconstruct white supremacist influences too often ends up deconstructing what was once sacred within the mental health profession: the sanctity of the individual. While treating people entirely based on the color of their skin is problematic anywhere, it is particularly dangerous in clinical psychology. Clinical psychologists are obligated to work with people from different cultures, races, religious traditions, and political beliefs. For us, the individuality of the person is essential. We believe in the agency of our patients even when they themselves do not. We recognize that a loss of confidence in one's ability to impact their own life is a symptom of psychological dysfunction as well as a contributing factor to poor mental health.

By focusing on the power and uniqueness of the individual, we help others realize that they have the resources within them to overcome their circumstances. The APA's official guidance on the topic of race is corroding this bedrock of mental health. In addition to urging psychologists to treat their non-white colleagues with near-condescending support, we are being told that "considerations of social justice are inherent to an understanding of race and ethnicity" in clinical psychology. And this is happening without any apparent awareness of how injecting politics into the urgent task of tending to a growing mental health crisis may be detrimental. It also happens to be at odds with the ethical principle of justice outlined in our code of conduct, which states that "fairness and justice entitle[s] all persons to access to and benefit from the contributions of psychology and to equal quality in the processes, procedures, and services conducted by psychologists."

Social scientists spend much of their career understanding the limitations of any single perspective. The nature of inequality and injustice in our country is among the most difficult social phenomena to fully understand. However, using an intersectional power analysis to address every statistical disparity will always lead to the conclusion that group identity is the only characteristic that matters-or exists. This conclusions-first analysis may leave the actual causes of inequality invisible to us, by coercing the problem-solvers of the world to subscribe to a single school of thought. At a time when innovation and creativity may be most needed, we are discouraged from critical thinking and alternative explanations.

While the consequences of this ideological capture may seem less dramatic in psychology than other areas that have recently come to light, it has already begun to undermine our core ethos of providing hope, healing, and personal freedom to people who are suffering. How might such strongly held convictions delivered in a top-down fashion drive the assumptions of a provider sitting across from an individual? The pursuit of knowledge within the profession should embrace a scientific process without becoming distracted by an agenda to dismantle the alleged effects of "white supremacist" influence. Clinical psychologists should stand against the APA's embrace of a single, unempirical framework and recognize the importance of incorporating a wide variety of perspectives to best serve their patients.

It is difficult to fully know why institutions that once protected and aided the discovery of important human phenomena have become beholden to political posturing, but it is worth admonishing them that they do so at their own peril-with great cost to the public they once set out to serve, and in direct violation of their ethical principles.

In psychotherapy, the deepest source of human empathy comes through the recognition that there is a shared and common experience that transcends our unique differences and binds us as a species. By helping our patients' accurately identify their internal experiences, we help them feel less isolated and broken. We help them come to the realization that we all feel pain and suffer unnecessarily, and that we all have the capacity for love and to feel moved by emotion. It is only by recognizing this common humanity that we can begin to take actions that promote our flourishing. Self-compassion often begins with developing compassion for others who may be different from us in important ways. Let us return to an era of promoting real acceptance, and not confuse it with fashionable denunciations of our most cherished ideals. Let us have the courage to look toward a better and more united future.
The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism or its employees. In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse. We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you'd like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.
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How ideological capture is hurting clinical psychology

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America's political polarization has eroded our ability to navigate complex issues. My own field of clinical psychology has failed to evade this problem, and now finds itself deeply steeped in a troubling narrative.

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I have found this book really interesting and most chapters useful in this debate for Against…found from article from Dr Val Thomas ‘Woke Therapy Weakens The Client’

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Popular forms of social justice activism are creeping into psychology training programs and therapist offices. Even if woke theory is your preferred path to social justice ( there are others), this creates a " buyer-beware " situation.

Unlike friendships, intimate partnerships, parenting or collegial teamwork, psychotherapy is a relationship that is all about one person-you, the client. The job of a therapist is to clarify your individual goals and then mirror back your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in ways that help you to change the ones that are getting in the way. To do this, the therapist has to set aside (as much as possible) their own developmental priorities and ideologies-their religion, their culture, their politics, and their own hang-ups or life goals.

The American Counseling Association Code of Ethics puts it this way: "Counselors [strive to be] aware of-and avoid imposing-their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees, and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor's values are inconsistent with the client's goals or are discriminatory in nature."

But this is very different from how political activism works, in particular contemporary woke or critical social justice activism. Woke theories and cultural norms encourage adherents to be in social/political activist mode all the time, even in their work as therapists. To be sure, some people may seek therapy specifically to process experiences of, say racism or sexual violation, and may want a therapist who helps them to frame these experiences through a historical-political lens. In this case, the client enters therapy with this as part of their goals. But others tell of poor care from therapists who imposed their own agenda-promoting a version of feminism, anti-racism, or " sloppy" gender care that made the client's marriage or mental health worse. In each case, trust was broken.

There is another way that a woke approach in the therapy office can undermine growth and healing. We know from decades of research that certain kinds of emotional regulation and habits of thought promote individual mental health and positive relationships. But some of the psychological and social dynamics in woke social justice activism encourage the very habits that psychotherapy seeks to undo. Here are some examples. In each of the pairs of statements below, the first represents a woke social justice activism approach. The second represents an approach from evidence-based therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavior therapy.
On Emotions and Reason

WOKE SOCIAL JUSTICE APPROACH: Feelings are reality. If a member of a traditionally oppressed tribe (someone female, queer, disabled, or black, for example) feels violated, they have been violated; if they feel unsafe, they must be protected; if a member of a traditionally powerful tribe feels guilty, they should own it. We shouldn't question another person's feelings if they are from a traditionally oppressed tribe.
EVIDENCE-BASED THERAPY APPROACH: I am not my feelings. My feelings are one indicator of what is real and important, and they are worthy of attention. But they can be wrong or simply out of proportion.

WSJ: If we are not white, straight, able-bodied and male, being asked to examine our assumptions is invalidation. People who genuinely respect us will accept what we say about ourselves or our tribe as truth. It's insulting to have people doubt or question our memories or interpretation of events.
EBT: People who respect me will listen to my experiences and self-perceptions but also will challenge me. They will validate my feelings but won't always assume those feelings and the story I am telling myself are the final word on reality. Being asked to examine my assumptions is a sign of respect for my strength, integrity and capacity for self-reflection.

WSJ: For those who have been wounded or who feel wounded, people and situations that trigger strong negative emotions are harmful. Classes, books, public art and such should provide trigger warnings. Schools should cancel speakers who make students feel triggered.
EBT: My sense of threat-even getting emotionally flooded-may or may not signal real danger because trauma causes people to overgeneralize and get triggered by superficial similarities. Staying away from triggers lets the past define me and may make me less resilient. One way to know I am getting healthy is that external people and situations lose their power to trigger me.
On Identity

WSJ: We are born into intersecting tribes of oppressors or oppressed, and these inherited memberships define us. We cannot get away from them regardless of how or where we live or which parts of ourselves we embrace.
EBT: I have the power and right to choose my tribes, my family, loves and loyalties-or to reject tribal ties in pursuit of something that better fits my nature. My own preferences and actions define me.

WSJ: When bad things have happened to our tribe; that is the key to who all tribe members are-victims.
EBT: Bad things have happened to my parents and grandparents and me; but they don't have to define me. I do best when I center on my strengths, successes and the ways that I can chart my own future.

WSJ: People who have victim identity shouldn't be seen as victimizers even when they harm others. Lashing out at members of oppressor tribes is justified, righteous punching-up. Collective guilt means this is true even if the oppressor is individually less powerful than the oppressed.
EBT: People who harm others very often have experienced similar harms themselves. Often a goal of therapy is to break the cycle. Being a victim doesn't prevent me from victimizing others.

WSJ: If our ancestors and other members of our inherited tribe did horrible things, we are guilty of the harm they caused and undue advantage accrued whether or not we personally participated or benefited. This guilt never goes away.
EBT: I am not responsible or guilty for my parent or ancestor-no matter how awful he or she may have been. Since power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin, if I didn't have the power to change what happened, I'm not guilty for it. I am responsible to examine where I might continue to play out hand-me-down patterns that harm me or others, and I am responsible to use my own power to correct old wrongs and break these dynamics where I can.

On Agency and Causal Attributions

WSJ: When members of traditionally oppressed tribes feel stuck, thwarted, violated, or pain, assume that somebody outside the tribe is to blame.
EBT: Causes are complicated. When I experience frustration, injury or pain, there may or may not be someone to blame. Getting rid of self-blame doesn't mean there has to be a guilty party. Sometimes seeking to pinpoint blame just severs relationships or distracts from solving problems.

WSJ: Since other people caused our injuries, our afflictions will be healed only when other people change. Our role is to call them out, stop them, and demand redress or punishment.
EBT: Even when a person or system has harmed me and needs to be stopped or served justice, they won't be the ones who make me healthy and whole again. Even when I have truly been violated, I can nurture myself. I have power to heal no matter what other people may do. My challenge is figuring out what parts of flourishing are in my power and how to move forward.

WSJ: If someone hurt or insulted us, they were aggressive or micro-aggressive and we are free to aggress back. Intentions are beside the point.
EBT: Whether someone hurt me deliberately, through a pattern of carelessness, or by accident matters. These differences can guide how I respond and process the experience. Understanding motives is crucial to moving me, them, or us forward.

WSJ: All interactions are competitions for power. Our injuries and anger and the collective guilt of other people are at the center of our power in relation to tribes that have hurt us.
EBT: I am much more than my scars and wounds. I can recognize the weight and severity of past injuries-even serious traumas-and still center my power in my strengths and accomplishments.
On Conflict and Disagreement

WSJ: Disagreement about social issues mean that someone is either ignorant or bad (i.e. sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or racist), and our only options are to educate, fight or shun them. Shouting down or publicly shaming people who refuse to see how wrong they are is virtuous.
EBT: People are complicated, misunderstanding is easy, and reality is rarely a forced choice between two all-or-nothing options. Instead of mindreading (assuming I know what another person thinks), I should ask enough questions to test my initial assumptions. Decent people won't always agree with me. It's OK to lean into the areas where our values and goals do align.

WSJ: Compromise is weakness or moral failure. "Agreeing to disagree is for things like what kind of pizza tastes best."-Facebook
EBT: "Remember, you can only be influential if you accept influence. Compromise never feels perfect. Everyone gains something and everyone loses something." -John Gottman, father of evidence-based marital therapy

WSJ: We should surround ourselves with like-minded people. "Viewpoint diversity" is just a right-wing excuse letting people with dangerous ideas get airtime.
EBT: Each of us carries only partial truths; other people represent different parts of reality. I can learn something from almost anyone. Listening carefully in the presence of disagreement is key to deepening my knowledge-and key to effecting change in my friendships and partnerships.
On Relating to Other People and Outside Tribes

WSJ: We can assume the worst interpretation in what people from certain groups say if it relates to race, gender, etc.
EBT: I should give people the benefit of the doubt, start with an assumption of good intentions, and not engage in mindreading.

WSJ: The ugliest things people say or do represent how they REALLY feel.
EBT: People are complicated and multidimensional. People say and do things all the time that are contradictory and what someone says or does in a worst moment may not represent how they think, feel and operate most of the time.

WSJ: The people and tribes around me are either good or bad, allies or enemies, for or against me. If they are on my side, they will support me no matter what.
EBT: Nobody can be counted on never to hurt or harm me, but many people can be counted on most of the time. It's healthy to start with an assumption that I am wanted and cared for.

WSJ: If people want to understand me and my tribe, they need to figure things out for themselves. I shouldn't have to tell them. That is doing their emotional labor.
EBT: If I want other people to understand my experiences, feelings and preferences, I need to take the risk of putting these into words.
Social activism and psychotherapy are two very different endeavors.
Liberal and progressive approaches to social activism differ in important ways, as I have discussed elsewhere, and not all promote the thought patterns described above. Woke theory creates more challenges than most when it seeps into the therapy office because the worldview it prescribes is all-encompassing and evangelistic, akin to some religions. This worldview encourages harm inflation and promotes habits of mind that can run counter to psychological and relationship health.

To learn more about these patterns, check out the now-iconic list developed by the father of cognitive psychotherapy- Aaron Beck's list of Cognitive Distortions. Beck's list includes all-or-nothing thinking, discounting the positive, emotional reasoning, labeling, overgeneralization, and more. Decades of research confirm the mental health benefits of challenging these patterns. If a therapist can't help you to do that, or-worse-if their own beliefs and passions lead them to actually implant or reinforce cognitive distortions or solidify a victim identity, your therapy may do more harm than good.

As a therapy client, you put yourself in a vulnerable position. Healing requires trust that the therapist is knowledgeable and prudent, and that during your sessions they have only your objectives at heart. You trust that your objectives will guide their questions, observations and suggestions. That is what makes therapy a safe place to open up about feelings and experiences that you keep under wraps elsewhere. Before entering a therapeutic contract, it's worth exploring whether your therapist can carve out this kind of space for your work together. And if they can't, it may be worth looking elsewhere.
(adapted for

CTA from An Excess of Woke Thinking May Harm Mental Health or Relationships at Valerietarico.com)
By Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. a psychologist in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light. Her articles can be found at ValerieTarico.com.

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Why Your Woke Therapist May Be Doing You More Harm Than Good

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Popular forms of social justice activism are creeping into psychology training programs and therapist offices. Even if woke theory is your preferred path to social justice (there are others), this creates a "buyer-beware" situation. Unlike friendships, intimate partnerships, parenting or collegial teamwork, psychotherapy is a relationship that is all about one person-you, the client.

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Discussing Critical Social Justice/traditional therapy/the individual…’the philosophical and political commitments of CSJ will inevitably drive its application to practice in an anti-therapeutic direction.’

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Critical Social Justice (CSJ)-driven therapy (aka ‘woke’ therapy) is a completely different practice to traditional counselling and psychotherapy. This point cannot be overstated. The mistake that …

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"Questioning the way that we know mental health doesn't involve rejecting all current knowledge or resisting the pursuit of knowledge in the first place rather it is about finding new ways to orientate ourselves towards knowledge"

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"Questioning the way that we know mental health doesn't involve rejecting all current knowledge or resisting the pursuit of knowledge in the first place rather it is about finding new ways to orientate ourselves towards knowledge"

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"It is important to be able to sit with multiple contradictory knowledges"

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"It is important to be able to sit with multiple contradictory knowledges"

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"A great portion of people across the globe still reject the theory of natural selection and evolution for religious reasons"

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"A great portion of people across the globe still reject the theory of natural selection and evolution for religious reasons"

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Social Action Art Therapy in a Time of Crisis outlines theories and models of social action art therapy, identifies its application in times of crisis, and explores the ways in which art therapy can work effectively for individuals and groups experiencing crisis.

Drawing upon various ecologies, climate psychology, and eco-art therapy, this book addresses various responses to climate change, including notions of belonging, the physicality of experience, and the role of imagination in creating alternative versions of the future. The author presents a social action approach to art therapy as a way of addressing the political and collective components of climate change as well as the individual and emotional components. To help explore what social action art therapy can offer in this time of crisis, the author illustrates examples that show how the ideas have been used in other moments of crisis, including asylum, refuge, and domestic abuse.

This innovative book contributes to the development of contemporary art therapy practice and will be of interest to arts therapists, arts psychotherapists, expressive therapists, ecotherapists, ecopsychologists, arts-based researchers, and many more.

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Social Action Art Therapy in a Time of Crisis

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Social Action Art Therapy in a Time of Crisis outlines theories and models of social action art therapy, identifies its application in times of crisis, and explores the ways in which art therapy can work effectively for individuals and groups experiencing crisis.

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"To argue that madness / mental illness is only caused by social factors also discounts the embodied experiences of many people. Sometimes suffering may feel more bodily internal random messy spontaneous or unknowable in ways that we cannot always neatly trace socially"

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"To argue that madness / mental illness is only caused by social factors also discounts the embodied experiences of many people. Sometimes suffering may feel more bodily internal random messy spontaneous or unknowable in ways that we cannot always neatly trace socially"

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This book explores how 'the hostile environment' of neoliberalism affects art therapy in Britain. It shows how ambiguity in art and in psychoanalytically understood relationships can enable art psychotherapy groups to engage with class dynamics and aspire to democracy.

The book argues that art therapy needs to become a political practice if it is to resist collusion with a system that marginalises collectivity and holds individuals responsible for both their suffering and their recovery. It provides accounts of the contradictions that are thrown up by neoliberalism in art therapists' workplaces as well as accounts of art therapy groups with those affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower, in an acute ward, a women's prison, a community art studio and in a refugee camp.

Written by art psychotherapists for arts therapists and other mental health workers, the book will bring political awareness and consideration of resistance into all art therapy relationships, whatever the context and client group.

Part 1. Resisting Capture; 1. The Hostile Environment, Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn; 2. Caught in Contradiction, Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn; 3. Art Therapy as Resistance, Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn; Part 2. Grenfell; 4. Latimer Community Art Therapy: Developing from the Grassroots after Grenfell, Susan Rudnik; 5. 'This is Our Group': Art Therapy with Adolescents in the Shadow of Grenfell, Beulah Lambert; 6. Don't go out that door: The pressure on a school to perform/conform whilst its community faces the aftermath of a disaster, Holly Caldecourt; Part 3. Against All Odds; 7. A place of safety or a hostile environment?: How enactment in an art psychotherapy group revealed impacts of immigration controls on the mental health of asylum seekers and migrants detained in a psychiatric unit, Annamaria Cavaliero; 8. Prison Cells: Transgenerational trauma and art psychotherapy groups with women in prison, Jessica Collier; 9. Protested Space: Artworks made in a therapeutic art studio under threat from cuts, Helen Omand; 10. Witnessing the Edge: Reflections on Co-Facilitating a Men's Art Therapy Group in a Refugee Camp in Greece, Emily Hollingsbee and Katie Miller; Epilogue: Politics in Action, Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn

Biography

Sally Skaife, PhD, is an art therapist and group analyst working in mental health. She was a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London; a chair of the British Association of Art Therapists; a member of the editorial board of Inscape and, currently, ATOL; and has numerous publications.

Jon Martyn is an art psychotherapist and clinical supervisor. He was a lecturer at Goldsmiths College and co-founded the New Art Studio, a therapeutic art studio for refugees and asylum seekers with Tania Kaczynski. He now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

'This book is at the vanguard of the political turn taking place in sections of the psychotherapy profession. Eloquent and accessible, it is a powerful, critical account of how art psychotherapy has been used on "the front line" in a range of settings, not only to ameliorate the psychological harm produced by neoliberal policies, but also to empower the citizen. Skaife and Martyn's work is a call to arms, challenging many of the taken-for-granted norms of the psychotherapy profession.'
Farhad Dalal, Psychotherapist and group analyst; Author of CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami: Managerialism, Politics and the Corruptions of Science

'Sally Skaife and Jon Martyn's book comes at a critical moment as art therapists grapple with the impact of the neoliberal "free market" policies that have contributed to the vast divide between the rich and the poor. This book questions the impact of capitalism and marketization on the epistemology of art psychotherapy. Practicing art psychotherapy necessitates that we question our complicity in colluding with privatization that values profit over wellness. As the world comes to grips with the inadequate distribution of health care during COVID-19, which has severely impacted communities of color, this book should be necessary reading for anyone working in mental health.'
Savneet Talwar, Professor; Chair, Department of Art Therapy, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

'Just the title alone is sufficient for me to add this book to my "must read" list for 2021. The book summary promises a critical examination of art therapy in the context of a corporate capitalism that commodifies therapy and individualises distress and dis-ease, overlooking how social and institutional norms that fundamentally unhealthy generate distress in the first place. Combining rigour with a fast and energetic polemical prose style, this book promises to be one of the most important (and I hope influential) art therapy texts of the decade.'
Susan Hogan, Professor of Arts & Health University of Derby, College of Arts, Humanities & Education; Professorial Fellow, Institute of Mental Health, Nottingham

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Art Psychotherapy Groups in The Hostile Environment of Neoliberalism: Collusion or Resistance?

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This book explores how 'the hostile environment' of neoliberalism affects art therapy in Britain. It shows how ambiguity in art and in psychoanalytically understood relationships can enable art psychotherapy groups to engage with class dynamics and aspire to democracy.

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'A radical antidote to the constraints of our current conceptualisation of mental health' - Dazed

Mental health is a political issue, but we often discuss it as a personal one. How is the current mental health crisis connected to capitalism, racism and other social issues? In a different world, how might we transform the ways that we think about mental health, diagnosis and treatment?

These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be an urgent political concern that needs deeper understanding beyond today's 'awareness-raising' campaigns.

Exploring the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability justice, queer liberation and mental health; art and creativity; prisons and abolition; and alternative models of care; Mad World is a radical and hopeful antidote to pathologisation, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination.

Micha Frazer-Carroll is a columnist at the Independent. She has previously edited for gal-dem, the Guardian and Blueprint, a mental health magazine that she founded. Micha has also written for Vogue, HuffPost, Huck and Dazed. She was nominated for the Comment Awards' Fresh New Voice of the Year Award, and the Observer/Anthony Burgess Award for Arts Criticism. She is invested in using journalism to challenge systems of power.

- 'gal dem' - 'Dazed' - Robert Chapman, Senior Lecturer in Education at Sheffield Hallam University - Hel Spandler, Editor, 'Asylum: the radical mental health magazine' - Aisha Mirza, founder of Misery mental health collective - Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author of 'Health Communism' - 'Ms. Magazine' - 'Huck' - Rhys Thomas, Woo - Adele Walton, journalist and Dazed book columnist - 'National Survivor User Network'

Introduction
1. Asylums
2. 'Knowing' Mental Health Today
3. Mental Health in a Maddening World
4. Why Work is Sickening
5. Disability / Possibility
6. Diagnosing Diagnosis
7. On Disavowal and Disorder
8. Art for Mental Health
9. Law and Disorder
10. Other Possibilities
Conclusion

Published by Pluto Press in Jul 2023

Paperback ISBN: 9780745346717
eBook ISBN: 9780745346724
Audiobook ISBN: 9780745348490

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'A radical antidote to the constraints of our current conceptualisation of mental health' - DazedMental health is a political issue, but we often discuss it ...

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The impact of political violence, war, civil war and acts of terrorism on the individuals involved can be extensive. Art therapy can provide an effective means of expressing the resulting experiences of fear, loss, separation, instability and disruption. Art Therapy and Political Violence brings together contributions from all over the world and from diverse theoretical backgrounds. With contributions from Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Israel and South Africa, the book includes numerous clinical examples to vividly illustrate the main issues affecting art therapy. The practical issues involved are also discussed, including subjects such as the importance of working with both the internal and external worlds of the individual and sensitivity to cultural issues. Art therapists, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals, particularly those working in the context of political violence or in countries of refuge, will find the experiences recounted in Art Therapy and Political Violence thought-provoking and will welcome the wealth of practical information provided.

Debra Kalmanowitz, Bobby Lloyd, With Art, Without Illusion: Art Therapy and Political Violence. Anna Kalin, Julie Murphy, 'The Moment In and Out of Time': Reflections on Context and Timing in Art Therapy Interventions in Kosovo. Miriam Nabarro, Feast of Colour: Creating Something Out of Very Little: Art Making as Psycho-social Intervention with Children of a Forgotten War, Sudan. Siobhan McElroy, A Soldier's Story: Art Therapy Intervention in Sri Lanka. Tamar Hazut, From Dark Black to Bright Pink: The Power of Art Expression and Creation in Coping with Life Under Threat, Israel 2001-2002. Imelda McGeehan, Creativity from Chaos: An Art Therapist's Account of Art Work Produced in the Aftermath of a Bombing in her Community, Omagh, Northern Ireland. Stephanie Wise, A Time for Healing: Art Therapy for Children, Post-September 11, New York. Rajia Abusway, Rana Nashashibi, Remal Salah, Reema Shweiki, Expressive Arts Therapy: Healing the Traumatised: The Palestinian Experience. Hayley Berman, Transforming Objects in a Transforming South Africa. Debra Kalmanowitz, Bobby Lloyd, Portable Studio: Towards Relocating Home in the Mind, Former Yugoslavia. Diana Brandeburger, Silence in Exile: A Case Study of an Adolescent Asylum Seeker in London. Geertuida Helena Wertheim-Cahen, Art Therapy and Trauma, a Different Context, a Different Approach: Interventions in the Netherlands and Former Yugoslavia.

Biography

Debra Kalmanowitz: Art therapist at Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in London.
Bobby Lloyd: Art therapist and supervisor, project manager and artist at On Site Arts, East London. Both are founders and co-directors of Art Therapy Initiative.

'Essential in this book is the role of art and art therapy to help individuals, families and communities to express and to shape their experiences with political violence and enable them to share these with others... this book is certainly recommended to art therapists, artists and psychotherapists and other professionals within or outside Mental Health Care, working with survivors of political violence.' - Karin Schouten, Tijdschrift voor Creatieve Therapie

'It is impossible to do justice to this book. As the art therapists are mostly breaking new ground, they write with freshness of style and content which takes the reader on a fascinating and multi-faceted journey.' - Marian Liebmann, International Journal of Art Therapy: Inscape

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Art Therapy and Political Violence: With Art, Without Illusion

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The impact of political violence, war, civil war and acts of terrorism on the individuals involved can be extensive. Art therapy can provide an effective means of expressing the resulting experiences of fear, loss, separation, instability and disruption. Art Therapy and Political Violence brings together contributions from all over the world and from diverse theoretical backgrounds.

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Environmental Arts Therapy: The Wild Frontiers of the Heart describes what happens when we take the creative arts therapies and the people whom we work with out of doors in order to provide safe, structured and accompanied creative therapeutic healing experiences. The theoretical themes are developed along with illustrated examples of clinical practice across a variety of settings and locations.

The work is introduced and co-edited by a pioneer in the field, Ian Siddons Heginworth, who describes the emergence of environmental arts therapy and its growth across the British Isles supported through the training course based in London. The following 12 chapters are written by contributing authors and creative arts therapy practitioners working with children, adults and elders in schools, adult mental health and private practice in Britain and Europe. A central focus of the book is the clinical populations and settings in which clinicians work, and it also describes the health benefits as well as the challenges faced when working out of doors.

This is a book about the emergence of a new creative therapy modality in the British Isles. It shows the value of working with the natural cycles and seasons, using an integrative arts approach including dramatic enactment, role-play, poetry, art-making with natural materials, storytelling, and the use of bodywork through movement, sound, rhythm and the voice, all held and reflected by our encounters with and in nature. It is about our relationship with nature, creativity and therapeutic healing and is written for trainers, trainees and practitioners in the creative arts, psychotherapy and ecotherapy.

Foreword
Mary-Jayne Rust
Acknowledgements

Introduction by the editors
Ian Siddons Heginworth and Gary Nash Part I Environmental arts therapy in context
Chapter 1. Turning: the emergence and growth of environmental arts therapy in the British Isles
Ian Siddons Heginworth
Chapter 2. Weaving the threads of theory and experience: a review of the literature

Part II Childhood, love and attachment: the heart of the matter

Chapter 3. The wild inside: offering children natural materials and an ecopsychological understanding of self within art therapy

Chapter 4. EarthWays: Environmental arts therapy for repairing insecure attachment and developing creative response-ability in an insecure world

Chapter 5. Bringing the outside in: reflecting upon mother within a pilot group in environmental arts therapy
Michelle Edinburgh
Part III Feminine and masculine: putting feeling first

Chapter 6. Meeting the wounded feminine: trauma-informed environmental arts therapy as an approach to working with physical illness
Susie Thompson
Chapter 7. The wood between the worlds: encountering the wounded healer in environmental arts therapy
William Secretan
Chapter 8. The tapping on the window: environmental arts therapy and the integrated self
Auriel Eagleton
Part IV The cycle of the year: working with the seasons

Chapter 9. Taking art therapy outdoors: a Circle of Trees

Chapter 10. Creating connections: introducing environmental arts therapy in to London's green spaces
Simon Woodward
Chapter 11. Space to move, explore and create: taking art therapy into the outdoor environment in adult mental health services
Pamela Stanley
Part V Elderhood and endings: the wild road on

Chapter 12. Trees of life and death: a journey into the heart of Transylvania to use environmental arts therapy with groups of adults and staff in palliative care
Hannah Monteiro
Chapter 13. Growing elders: the cultivation and collaboration of an elder women's group in the woods
Deborah Kelly and Vanessa Jones
Epilogue
Ian Siddons Heginworth

Biography

Ian Siddons Heginworth is the author of Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life, the book that has inspired the growth of the environmental arts therapy movement in the UK. He leads the postgraduate certificate course in environmental arts therapy at the London Art Therapy Centre and runs a private practice in Devon.

Gary Nash is an art therapist and educator in art and environmental arts therapy training. He co-founded the London Art Therapy Centre in 2009 where he is Clinical Co-Director providing individual art therapy, supervision and group environmental arts therapy.

"The deep connection with nature's capacity for healing is intrinsic to all life throughout history and across all cultures. In recent times there has been renewed interest from psychotherapists to work with clients in nature. In this exciting new book, arts therapists Ian Siddons Heginworth and Gary Nash have chosen a collection of essays on Environmental Arts Therapy introducing new fresh voices to the discipline. As the practice develops and each Environmental Arts therapist forges a way with diverse emerging perspectives, there is simultaneously a return to older traditions where the wise elders are taking people back into nature for healing and growth. Our flourishing community of Environmental Arts therapists describe and reflect on their various considered and creative approaches."

- Hephzibah Kaplan, Art Therapist and Director of the London Art Therapy Centre

"This book is an exciting addition to the growing literature on environmental arts therapies. The editors show how this movement has become an established form of arts therapy, drawing on previous work by others, and leading to their environmental arts therapy course, the first of its kind, based on the cycle of the year. The book also contains fresh voices taking environmental arts therapies into new contexts. At a time of global environmental crisis, this book paves the way to a new way of envisioning therapy, showing the benefits of taking people and therapy out into nature, or bringing nature into the therapy room. It reminds us of the importance of our environment - not an optional extra but the ground of our being."

- Dr Marian Liebmann, OBE, Art Therapist, teacher and author of art therapy books

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Environmental Arts Therapy: The Wild Frontiers of the Heart

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Environmental Arts Therapy: The Wild Frontiers of the Heart describes what happens when we take the creative arts therapies and the people whom we work with out of doors in order to provide safe, structured and accompanied creative therapeutic healing experiences.