In March of this year, a therapist on a professional listserv in Chicago passed on a request by a potential patient seeking a therapist who was “a Zionist,” because the patient was dealing with feelings about the “current geopolitical climate.” Many mental health practitioners rely on such online groups to make and accept referrals for patients. It’s common for the request to indicate a preference for a therapist of a particular ethnicity, gender, religion, or age range.
But what happened after this request was made on the Facebook group Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists was not at all common. When therapists responded by putting their names forward on the listserv, one member took action. She announced to the group: “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to.” The listmaker, Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh, added: “Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.”
Contribute to this blacklist they did. The group administrator of Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists chimed in: “This list was made to be transparent about clinicians who promote and facilitate White supremacy via Zionism.” Enthusiasm was high. “Wow, this list grew very fast! Thank you for taking the lead on this,” one user said. Another noted, “I had planned on doing this soon on Excel! Thank you for getting it started.”
Some Jewish therapists, who had not even responded to the call for a Zionist therapist, found themselves on the blacklist anyway. Beth Rom-Rymer, who is running for president of the American Psychological Association, thinks these additional therapists were added simply because the listmakers thought they might be Jews. “It is abhorrent to know that certain of my colleagues have sought to ‘dox’ or ‘blacklist’ others because these colleagues have Jewish-sounding names,” she told me.
At the Chicago Area Mental Health Therapists Facebook group, a member celebrated the existence of the list, writing that Zionist clinicians “openly support and defend genocide as racism. . . we should never, ever refer to people who are unable to manage bias [or] understand privilege.”
A Chicago social worker, Manya Treece, wrote about the blacklist in The Times of Israel. She said the news of it spread quickly through the community of Jewish therapists in the area. A number of these therapists alerted the Midwest branch of the Anti-Defamation League and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which oversees professional licensing.
“This is bigoted, unethical, and clear antisemitism,” the ADL’s Midwest branch tweeted in response. “We are working with relevant [Illinois] state agencies, professional association & Meta [the owners of Facebook] to hold accountable those responsible.”
The blacklist grew to 26 names, each accompanied by a link to the therapist’s homepage or clinic website. One was Michelle Magida, who founded the private Chicagoland Jewish Therapist page on Facebook. She told me she was “shocked and scared, but not surprised” to find her name on the list given the spike in antisemitism in the mental health field after Hamas invaded Israel on October 7.
As Jewish Insider reported, Ibrahim-Joudeh, the instigator of the blacklist, was scheduled to appear before the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation for a preliminary hearing on June 17 to address the department’s charge that she had engaged in “dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct.” There will be another hearing on August 26. (Neither Ibrahim-Joudeh nor the department returned a request for comment.)
The events in Chicago have riven the therapeutic community and also exposed a dangerous new trend that threatens to undermine the very principles that should govern psychological treatment.
There are two stories here. The first, no less troubling for being obvious, is that trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel—or are Jewish, or have Jewish-sounding names—from treating patients constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics. Interfering with the work of colleagues for political reasons is unconscionable.
But the blacklist is also part of a larger drama unfolding within the world of psychotherapy as more and more clinicians insist that psychotherapy is, foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise. It is a trend that I, a psychiatrist, find alarming.
Unfortunately, instead of fighting back, the major professional organizations are embracing this malignant philosophy. The American Psychological Association has committed itself to “decolonial” psychology. The National Association of Social Workers states that “antiracism and other facets of diversity, equity, and inclusion must be a focal point for everyone within social work.” The American Counseling Association emphasizes “the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression that influence the counseling relationship.” Training programs for new therapists have injected these tenets into their curricula.
When Lisa Selin Davis wrote about this trend in The Free Press, many therapists described to her “their alarm at how the very people who are supposed to help ease trauma become the source of it, as therapy sessions transform into ideological struggle sessions.”
This vision—call it critical social justice therapy—assumes that both therapists and patients are fixated on resolving sociopolitical matters, when, in fact, few are interested in doing so. Most patients want to attain clarity of purpose, find relief from personal suffering, achieve more gratifying relationships, or gain freedom from self-sabotaging habits. And most therapists want to guide them in attaining those goals.
Under a social justice regime, therapists who have the “wrong” politics—they might, for example, believe that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself—must be kept away from vulnerable patients. If, conversely, it is the patient whose politics are perceived to be misbegotten, revising their viewpoint must become the focus of the treatment.
The central preoccupation of critical social justice therapy is that the patient is not a unique individual, but rather an avatar of race, gender, or ethnicity. The therapist will therefore diagnose each patient’s issues and determine a treatment plan based on whether they belong to an oppressed or oppressor group.
Thus, a black patient will be guided to view any difficulty as caused by systemic racism. A white patient will be exhorted to accept their complicity in perpetuating systems of oppression. Currently, Jewish patients (deemed to be members of a privileged group) are finding themselves subject to attempts by activist-therapists to morally reeducate them; no support of Israel can be condoned as it is declared a “settler-colonial” state.
These prescriptions are antithetical to the therapeutic project. According to the principles of responsible psychotherapy, a Zionist therapist should be able to treat a supporter of Palestine and vice versa, never moralizing, ever aware that failing to maintain a clear partition between one’s personal ideological commitments and one’s clinical work will inevitably distort the therapy and fail the patients they serve.
A skilled practitioner must assume a posture of neutrality, openness, and curiosity. Learning to maintain compassionate detachment lies at the heart of our training. There is, thankfully, some good news. The Therapists in Private Practice Facebook group has 25,000 members worldwide. It, too, has gotten caught up in accusations of removing members because they are, or are assumed to be, Jewish. But other therapists in the group are speaking out about how therapy should be conducted. “Even if [patients’] distress is over political matters, our role is not to play political arbiter,” wrote one. “Last time I checked, we provide a healthcare service, not a political science seminar,” said another.
And here is my favorite: “I have sat across many clients who fundamentally have different viewpoints in life than myself and provided care, compassion, and grace.”
This sentiment is the best that psychotherapists have to offer humanity, putting patients’ needs, not dogma and grievance, at the center of their practice.
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Follow her on Twitter @slsatel, and read her piece “Mass General Brigham Puts Antiracism Ahead of Their Patients’ Health.”
David Veldran helped with research for this story.
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