A therapist who refuses to treat Trump voters, a couples counselor who told a patient to volunteer for Kamala Harris as penance for posting an iconic Trump photograph, a woman who came in for help with a driving phobia and received a lecture about race and gender, and a licensed psychotherapist who published an article claiming Trump will kill more people than Hitler.
These are not isolated examples, according to Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist practicing in New York and Washington and author of the new book Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided. Alpert joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain how a profession designed to help individuals has been transformed into a vehicle for political indoctrination and grievance amplification.
He said the problem begins in graduate school, where therapists are no longer trained primarily in psychology but in a framework that divides the world into oppressors and the oppressed. Everything that follows flows from that foundational distortion. He told the story of a successful Black executive who went to a therapist for work-related stress and found that every session was redirected toward his race, with the therapist repeatedly telling him how he must feel as a Black man regardless of what he was actually experiencing. The patient left feeling disrespected. He told a parallel story of a gay man dealing with anxiety whose therapist similarly kept forcing his sexual orientation into every discussion with no connection to the presenting issue. Both patients were being reduced to identity categories rather than treated as individuals with specific challenges, and both left.
He said the driving phobia case illustrates how thoroughly the ideology has penetrated clinical practice. A woman with a genuine and treatable anxiety disorder rooted in a near-miss highway accident sought help for a specific, concrete problem. Her therapist responded by making it about race and gender and patriarchal society. The patient was baffled and offended, which Alpert said is the entirely rational response most ordinary people have when they discover that they paid for therapy and received political instruction instead.
On the broader cultural consequences, Alpert said his profession has been a significant contributor to what he called accommodation culture, the systematic erosion of personal accountability in favor of grievance-framing that blames everything on external forces and pathologizes the ordinary difficulties of human life. He said Luigi Mangione is the perfect poster boy for where that culture leads: someone with genuine grievances about an industry, who concluded that those grievances entitled him to murder a human being, and who has found a substantial fan base that endorses that conclusion. He said the therapy profession helped create the intellectual and emotional infrastructure that makes that kind of thinking not just possible but celebrated in certain quarters.
He applied the same critique to celebrity rehab culture, prompted by a discussion of Tiger Woods entering an intensive treatment program following a DUI. He said the framing of bad behavior and terrible judgment as psychological conditions requiring residential treatment rather than as choices requiring accountability is a pattern the therapy industry has actively promoted. He said these intensive programs, typically featuring yoga, meditation, and relaxation in a removed setting, may get someone away from the immediate stressors feeding their problem, but are not particularly effective treatments for addiction and function primarily as a narrative tool that converts responsibility into victimhood.
On the overmedication of children and adolescents, Alpert said the issue is worse than it was before COVID, not better. He said therapists are systematically pathologizing ordinary experiences, turning bad weeks into diagnoses of depression, turning forgetfulness and lateness into ADHD, and turning the normal difficulties of development into medical conditions requiring pharmaceutical intervention. He said having a hard week does not mean someone is depressed. It means they are having a hard week, which is how human beings build character and learn to persevere. The rush to label and medicate removes that developmental process and leaves people with a chronic identity as a patient rather than as a resilient person encountering life’s difficulties and getting through them.
He said the profession’s capture by identity politics and grievance culture is a self-reinforcing problem because the same graduate programs producing ideologically committed therapists are also producing the supervisors and program directors who will train the next generation. Until the training culture changes, the clinical culture will not, and the most likely consequence for ordinary people seeking help is that they will encounter a practitioner more interested in their political education than their psychological wellbeing.