Jonathan Alpert Therapy’s Identity Politics Problem The field has embraced left-wing racialism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/therapy-psychology-wokeness-identity-politics

Psychotherapy used to be a refuge from politics, but it’s become another front in the culture war. Therapists once helped people face reality. Today, more and more, they urge patients to interpret it through a hierarchy of oppression.

As a psychotherapist with more than two decades of experience, I have observed this shift firsthand. Hundreds of patients have come to me after being frustrated or even harmed by previous therapists, who encouraged them to interpret their struggles through the lens of identity politics.

A black man, for example, came to me after a failed round of therapy with another provider. He wasn’t just anxious; he was disillusioned. “I went in for help managing anxiety,” he said. “But the therapist kept steering the conversation back to racism, even though I never brought it up. I left feeling like I was being treated as a black person first, and a human being second.”

A gay man told a similar story. “I wanted help managing stress at work,” he said. “But every session focused on supposed shame over being gay, even though that wasn’t why I was there. I felt pushed into a narrative that didn’t fit me.”

Graduate programs are no longer producing healers, but political activists with therapy licenses. Instead of teaching students to treat anxiety, depression, or relationship issues using evidence-based methods, many programs now encourage trainees to develop “critical consciousness.” That means guiding clients to interpret their distress through the lens of systemic oppression, rather than addressing individual agency, patterns, or choices.