Ideology or therapy?

Nov 14, 2022 by Jill

by Claire Foster and Juliet Harrison, The Critic:

Mental illness is on the rise. Feelings of anxiety, vulnerability, mistrust, fear and powerlessness are all increasing. Many feel overwhelmed and paralysed in an unfair and unjust world as passive victims of events that just happen to them. Unfortunately, many of those exhibiting these symptoms are the ones being employed to tell you how to improve your own mental health.

Aspiring clinical psychologists now routinely undergo training that builds upon the ideas of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to ensure they see themselves and their future patients through the prism of categorised binary societal divisions. These mandatory guidelines come with incentivised funding provided by such bodies as NHS Health Education England and the British Psychological Society (the BPS).

Critical Theory’s tenets assert that characteristics such as sex, sexuality, race and body size determine whether an individual is an “oppressor” or “oppressed”. This in turn fixes their status within society and therefore how they are treated.

This is, for example, the thinking that informs Exeter University’s doctorate in clinical psychology policy which is taking the “decolonisation opportunity” to “challenge other areas of privilege and dominance such as heterosexism”, Bangor University’s course is committed to the “deconstruction of whiteness” and the clinical psychology doctorate at Hertfordshire University requires its students to familiarise themselves on the “White Supremacy” and intersectionality materials sent them before commencing their studies.

Read here

See also:
Ideology: what it is and what it does … and doesn’t do, by Andrea Sau, Oxford House Research