Therapists Claim ‘Woke’ Ideology is Undermining Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Therapists Claim ‘Woke’ Ideology is Undermining Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

These folks are essentially saying that woke ideology in psychology is making the mental health of leftists even worse. Makes sense.

The College Fix reports:

Therapists warn: ‘Woke’ ideology undermining cognitive-behavioral therapy

A new scholarly article describes the mechanisms of how leftist ideology has likely led to a worsening of mental health counseling and classroom curriculum on the subject.

Arnold Cantú and Nathan Gallo are the two social work professionals who authored the article in the latest special Issue of Current Opinion in Psychology.

In it, they attempt to provide “an alternative explanation for potential causes behind the rise in psychiatric diagnoses and poorer mental health outcomes for people who identify as liberal or left-leaning in the United States.”

“Research regularly suggests that left-leaning people have poorer mental health than conservatives,” the two said in an emailed statement to The College Fix, adding it’s a “notable finding that has become increasingly applicable to the younger generation.”

“This article argues that woke ideology—what we refer to as critical social justice ideology—has warped a well-established psychotherapy approach often used to treat various kinds of psychological distress, known as cognitive-behavioral therapy,” they added.

“This ideology’s main tenets are full of ‘cognitive distortions,’ which are faulty, automatic patterns of thinking that CBT attempts to treat. Instead, woke ideology intentionally promotes these patterns, resulting in poorer mental health for clients, families, and therapists who buy into it.”

Their thesis, which builds off the work of scholars Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, is that critical social justice ideology has been effectively promoting “reverse cognitive-behavioral therapy,” an inversion of a well-known, well-established, and effective psychotherapy modality.

The paper argues that various aspects of critical social justice ideology, born out of the political Left, are prime motivators for numerous cognitive distortions, such as dichotomous thinking, emotional reasoning, overgeneralization, tunnel vision, and both magnification and minimization.

It defines critical social justice ideology as “the obsession ‘with power, language, knowledge, and the relationship between them,” which creates a worldview aiming to make everything a zero-sum political struggle around identity markers such as race, sex, gender, and others.

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