The Disturbing Factor Ruining The Crucial Doctor-Patient Relationship

I’ve spent years criticizing therapists who let their politics interfere with treatment. Now a congressional investigation suggests the problem may reach the leadership of my own profession.

According to the House Education and Workforce Committee, the American Psychological Association removed references to terrorism from its statement on Hamas’s October 7 massacre after objections from an affiliated organization. When Jewish psychologists raised concerns about antisemitism, the association’s then-chief diversity officer reportedly answered one complaint with a dismissive “Sigh!” Another official complained about “the Jews who are so angry at us.”

If the report is accurate, the hypocrisy is hard to miss. Therapists spend years learning to recognize bias, including their own. Yet some leaders in the profession seem comfortable making excuses for theirs.

The report also describes resistance to recognizing a Jewish ethnic psychological association, with some opponents arguing that Jews benefited from white privilege and didn’t face the same disadvantages as other minority groups. Apparently, some psychologists have become so attached to their ideas about privilege that they can’t recognize prejudice when it doesn’t fit their theory.

This is what happens when people become more committed to a worldview than to the people they’re supposed to understand. Rather than questioning their assumptions, they dismiss experiences that challenge them.

The APA disputes the report’s findings, saying it unequivocally condemns antisemitism and has held listening sessions with more than 120 Jewish psychologists and stakeholders. Those efforts are welcome. But listening sessions don’t explain why they dismissed the concerns in the first place.

I see the consequences of political bias in my own practice. A Jewish patient came to see me after leaving a therapist who made her uncomfortable discussing antisemitism. She had been anxious about its rise and wanted help managing her fears. Instead, when she brought up Israel, her therapist began criticizing the country’s military actions in Gaza. She left those sessions feeling that she had to justify why she was upset in the first place.

Other Jewish patients have told me similar stories. One described becoming reluctant to discuss her Jewish identity and family connections to Israel because she worried that doing so would lead to another political argument. She began avoiding subjects that mattered deeply to her, even though those were precisely the things she needed help working through.

I think of the pattern as selective empathy: People are quick to sympathize with suffering that fits their political beliefs and more skeptical when it doesn’t. Mental health professionals aren’t immune to this tendency, but they should be better at recognizing it.

In therapy, empathy doesn’t mean agreeing with everything a patient says. I’ve challenged plenty of patients when I thought their thinking was distorted or their conclusions were unsupported. That’s part of doing the job well. But if a therapist’s political opinions are getting in the way of understanding a patient, something has gone wrong. The therapist’s job is to help patients examine their thoughts and feelings, not steer them toward the therapist’s preferred political conclusions.

Patients shouldn’t have to calculate which subjects are safe to bring up or worry that expressing the wrong political opinion will change how their therapist sees them. Therapy depends on trust, and that trust is difficult to maintain when patients feel they’re being judged through a political lens.

And this isn’t limited to Jewish patients or disagreements about Israel. A black patient once described how his previous therapist repeatedly tried to connect his anxiety to experiences of racism, even though the patient didn’t believe racism was contributing to his problems. He wanted to discuss other pressures in his life, but his therapist kept returning to race. Instead of listening to the patient, the therapist seemed more interested in fitting him into a category than understanding what was troubling him.

A therapist who makes patients afraid to speak openly is failing at the most basic part of the job. Mental health professionals spend years studying bias and how people justify their own behavior. You’d think they’d be especially good at recognizing their own prejudices. But understanding bias doesn’t make someone immune to it. Sometimes it just makes them better at explaining it away.

In fact, therapists who see themselves as particularly enlightened about discrimination may be the least inclined to question their own assumptions. They can become so confident in their sensitivity to prejudice that they overlook it when it appears in an unfamiliar form.

The APA isn’t just another professional association. It accredits psychology training programs and helps shape the standards psychologists are expected to follow. Its influence extends to how future psychologists are trained. The people setting standards for psychologists ought to be held to those standards themselves. If the profession’s leadership treats certain forms of prejudice as less deserving of attention, that attitude risks influencing the next generation of clinicians.

The congressional report doesn’t establish how widespread political bias is among therapists. Criticizing Israel isn’t inherently antisemitic, and Jewish patients shouldn’t expect therapists to agree with their political views any more than anyone else should. But they have every right to expect their concerns to be taken seriously. The APA’s own ethical principles require psychologists to recognize their biases and avoid unfair discrimination.

Judging from the congressional report, some APA leaders could stand to reread their own ethics code. An organization that can’t confront prejudice within its own ranks has little standing to lecture anyone else about bias.

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Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, D.C., and author of the book “Therapy Nation.” Find him on X @JonathanAlpert.

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