Blindspots: The anti-therapy movement has arrived!
It was bound to happen. Signs the Alt-Right is already taking it too far and some history to consider before joining them on this bandwagon.
The Left has a fetish for therapy. The Right has a revulsion towards therapy. The Right idealizes mental toughness. The Left idealizes mental fragility. The Alt-Left promotes indulgence in mental disorders. The Alt-Right advises denialism against mental disorders. The Left has made therapy into a religion. The Right makes religion into their therapy. The Hard Left has attempted to corrupt therapy. The Hard Right is attempting to abolish therapy. The Hard Left promotes a counterfeit therapy agenda. The Hard Right drives its counter-therapy agenda. The Hard Left nurses a narcissistic obsession with psychotherapy. The Hard Right harbors a paranoid phobia of psychotherapy.
It’s safe to say, both sides need help.
Obviously, a healthy relationship with therapy has been more elusive than we imagined. Psychotherapy was popularized during the pandemic, but in the wake of the Left’s epic failure to ‘do no harm,’ there is an opportunistic backlash that suggests Anti-Woke = Anti-Therapy.
A little more than a week ago, Matt Walsh and Jordan Peterson aired a performative re-education interview in what seems to be a gesture to appease Walsh’s fans who tried to set him straight after he made savage accusations at all things mental health. In the same week, Candace Owens posted on X, “The entire field of psychology was built by pedophiles and perverts…” - months after egging on Andrew Tate’s unhinged, narcissistic rant claiming “therapy is a scam.” Walsh’s What Is A Woman and Owens’ The Greatest Lie Ever Sold rightly poked holes in and dealt necessary blows to the credibility of BLM and “gender-affirming” care. But now that it’s blown over, they have begun swinging their sledgehammers at the entire mental health field.
In the same week, Abigail Shrier, author of the vital and courageous book Irreversible Damage began speaking about her new book, Bad Therapy. In her recent podcast interviews, Shrier makes valid points about the risks of over-pathologisation, over-medicalization, over-dependency, and incentivizing illness in therapy culture. And while Shrier doesn’t overtly advise against seeking therapy, the implicit message is the same as Andrew Tate’s.
I could probably write my own book of criticisms regarding therapy culture and the state of the field, but that’s not the point. (And I have more constructive things to do.) Discrediting and dismantling mental healthcare as a whole in spite of the advances and benefits to countless people is ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ or ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater.' It is a spectacle of hubris, stupidity, and cruelty. And it actually demonstrates why this field (and good therapists) are as important as ever.
I’ve been told that because so many people have experienced the benefits of therapy, the anti-therapy tirades will not go far. I hope so. My immediate concern is not so much that people will stop going to therapy, but that many who truly need it won’t start. It has always been the case that those who need therapy the most are the most averse to it (for reasons that should be common knowledge by now.) If psychotherapy becomes the new boogeyman, then those who already have a paranoia about therapy will suffer, decompensate, and in some cases, perpetrate abuse with greater impunity. And there are broader implications given the current political climate.
Just as the extreme Left tends to overcomplicate arguments (i.e. “it depends on the context”), the Right is prone to overly simplistic judgments. The Right's prejudicial overgeneralization and broad-stroke criticisms of psychotherapy have the potential to encourage political radicalism and even religious fanaticism. Professional influencers who use their status to dissuade the impressionable from seeking mental healthcare are as detrimental, misguided, and distasteful as Gabor Mate’s pseudo-therapeutic interview with Prince Harry of Sussex. It’s troubling (but understandable) that toxicity sometimes rubs off on those who have put in the most time and the most effort in fighting the fights that others can’t. I can personally attest that sometimes standing up to mobs of toxic therapists is kind of like prolonged exposure. It either breaks you or it hardens you. So no judgment here.
Nevertheless, it must be stated that Conservatives who have nothing better to do than anti-therapy scare-mongering are doing the Radical Left a favor. The subversion of therapy via ideological corruption is very on brand for the Radical Left. Their fetishization of therapy actually belies envy and hostility towards genuine psychotherapy. For years, Antiracist and Anti-Oppression activists called for the “decolonization of therapy" and the “de-centralizing” of “old, European White men” - in other words, the founders. And while the Left has recently turned its attention to damage control, an increasingly toxic Right is picking up the baton. Cynical Conservatives are positioning themselves on the moral high ground, ranting conspiracy theories about therapists, discrediting psychology’s founders, ignoring progress and reforms, and hinting that the whole system is corrupt and should be done away with. Sound familiar? Destructive criticism is just as foundational to the Alt-Right’s agenda as it is to the Alt-Left’s Critical Theories. So while Progressive ideologues are responsible for setbacks to mental healthcare, it is the Radical Right who is chomping at the bit to finish the job.
It is no coincidence that Adolf Hitler regarded psychotherapists with great unease and suspicion.1 Hitler viewed psychotherapists as a threat to his control unless they could be compromised and corrupted. Nazis targeted the entire mental health field with violence and book burnings - a fact that Candace Owens cited as validation of her own opinions towards psychology. (Think about that.) This is not to say that the founding fathers of psychotherapy are beyond reproach. As a whole, they were flawed as well as insightful, and a mixed bag in every sense. Some exploited the field for their perversions while others studied perversions so that we would do better. Psychoanalysts have navigated some of the deepest mysteries of human motivation in the darkest times of the twentieth century. European psychoanalysts who survived Nazism left us some keys to understanding societal madness, irrationality, and human cruelty - no doubt the direct result of personal and professional experience. Is it any wonder that the Alt-Left has tried to bury them? Is it any wonder that the Alt-Right has tried to burn their books? If the Right deposes the founding fathers of psychotherapy because of their mistakes, why shouldn’t the Left tear down statues of our nation’s founding fathers because of theirs?
I write this in the hope that the Right’s overt attack on psychotherapy is as much a red flag as the Left’s subversion of therapy. If their cynical and self-righteous voices are normalized, if reactionary aspersions cast on mental healthcare professionals are accepted as fact, we will certainly continue repeating history.
Thank you for reading. Share courageously.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/03/science/psychotherapy-and-the- nazis.html