Social Justice Therapy

Discussion

Against Social Justice Therapy

"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."

(https://damagemag.com/2021/06/30/against-social-justice-therapy/)