Therapists Are Still Behaving Like Activists

Recent efforts to silence "Zionist" practitioners show how far we have to go.

Published in Persuasion on February 13, 2025.

Three years ago, I wrote an essay called “When Therapists Become Activists.” I described a deeply worrisome trend in which professionals were foregoing evidence-driven psychotherapeutics for ideologically motivated practice and activism.

Not only has the situation degenerated since then, but it has taken an explicitly anti-Semitic turn.

A few months ago, a fellow psychiatrist called from Boston, asking me to help her 26-year-old daughter (whom I’ll call Zoe) find another therapist. Zoe had recently returned from a stay in Israel to her home to Washington, D.C., where I also live.

A week before her mother called, Zoe had seen a therapist for her first session. She told the new therapist that she’d just been in Israel and was now eager to focus on her personal problems. “Wow. It’s good you were assigned to me,” the therapist said. “No one else in this practice will treat a Zionist.”

Zoe was aghast. What kind of therapist won’t treat someone who believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state? How was Zionism related to her problems? And who shares a practice with such colleagues? Hence, her mom’s request for me to find Zoe another therapist.

Zoe’s encounter with intolerance is not unique.

After October 7, 2023, the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists saying, as shared by the collective’s director Halina Brooke, that they were “sidelined or fired from their mental health workplaces due to being Jewish.” Jewish therapy trainees, according to Brooke, were “told that their presence is triggering to non-Jewish therapists.”

Likewise, Chicago-based psychologist Allison Resnick wrote in Kesher, the journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists, that she routinely reads about “therapists being told to conceal their Jewishness for fear of offending colleagues and clients.”

Last March, in Resnick’s backyard, a therapist with the Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists Facebook group organized a “blacklist” of local Zionist therapists. “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” wrote Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh to her colleagues. “I’m certain there are more out there.” (The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation is currently investigating Ibrahim-Joudeh for engaging in “dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct.”)

Last, consider the incident involving the director of Villanova University’s Counseling Center, a frequent leader of “mindful anti-racism and trauma trainings.” In a keynote address at a professional meeting of psychologists in November 2024, Nathalie Edmond showed a slide presentation in which “Zionism and fascism” were grouped together at the far end of a spectrum labeled “window of acceptable discourse.” She also depicted Zionism as one of several elements of “The Colonized Mind,” alongside “rape culture,” “homophobia,” and “internalized racism.”

Uproar followed. Physicians Against Antisemitism wrote to the president of Villanova. A dean responded, stating that the school “has taken appropriate action with [Edmond].” Edmond herself issued an apology video.

The portrayal of Zionism as a pathological mental state is reminiscent of the decades-long crusade to persuade the American Psychiatric Association, APA, to designate “extreme racism” as a mental illness. The effort began in 1969, when Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint explained, “If [a] person believes he has to kill black people, such ideation must be examined as an expression of a mental disorder.”

The APA refused the proposal. Yet, with each new edition of the APA’s authoritative diagnostic manual—in 1980, 1987, and 1994—Poussaint and his colleagues unsuccessfully renewed their bid. One cohort of black psychiatrists lobbied for a new diagnosis called pathological bias, while another promoted “intolerant personality disorder.” Those efforts also failed.

Rightly so. Medicalizing racism would inoculate bigots against societal stigmatization, and might allow racists who commit hate crimes against black Americans to cite their supposed medical condition as a mitigating factor or an excuse.

The analogy is imperfect—racism is abhorrent while Zionism is not. The point is that regarding a disfavored ideology as a mental defect is wholly unethical.

This is not to say that explorations of cultural psychology and politics have no place if a patient believes they are related to the problems for which they are seeking help. Likewise, therapists are permitted to decline—and should decline—a new patient if they believe they cannot serve them well. A therapist who lost a loved one on October 7, for example, might not want a patient who is a pro-Hamas activist. A therapist with relatives in Gaza could understandably pass up a potential patient who organizes pro-Israel marches.

But these are emotionally-driven individual circumstances, not matters of blanket policy. It is wholly inappropriate for therapists to promote their own commitment to “dismantling systems of oppression,” as Thema Bryant, former president of the American Psychological Association, directed them to do in an article about “decolonial psychology.”

What can be done? Administrative and legal steps can be taken, as in the case against the blacklisting therapist in Chicago. Kami Z. Barker, an attorney at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told me that she would like to see Medicare, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act plans withhold reimbursement for services offered by therapists or clinics that discriminate against Zionist patients.

Patients can file malpractice suits. They can point to the APA’s new Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, currently in a comment period, which rightly states that psychologists should “limit [their own] biases that may detract from the well-being of those with whom they professionally interact.”

Although there are many mature, competent therapists out there (they may even represent a silent majority), too many training programs in counseling, social work, psychology, and psychoanalysis are steeped in progressive dogma. Clinics are beginning to fill with a newer generation of therapists who are primed to place the mission of social justice over the needs of individually unique patients in their care. Seasoned and senior clinicians, the bulwark against eroding clinical standards, are silencing themselves or retiring early.

In psychiatric residency, my colleagues and I were taught to maintain a strict partition between our ideological commitments and the inner life of the patient, lest we badly distort the therapy. We must not allow that tradition to slip away.