On a crisp November morning in Philadelphia last year, clinicians from across the U.S. gathered for the annual conference of the International Society for the Improvement and Teaching of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (ISITDBT). It is an event typically devoted to evidence-based approaches for treating suicidal ideation, emotional dysregulation, and trauma.
Instead one workshop, delivered by Dr Nathalie Edmond, a clinical psychologist and diversity consultant, opened with a slide pairing “Zionism” with “fascism” on a continuum labelled Acceptable Discourse. Another slide—drawing on visual materials produced by the activist organization Slow Factory—displayed “The Colonized Mind,” placing Zionism alongside “rape culture,” “genocidal tendencies”, “internalized racism,” and “homophobia”. This was not framed as personal political opinion, but as part of a therapeutic worldview, one in which a certain political identity was implicitly medicalized.
The reaction was swift. Critics accused Edmond of importing antisemitic tropes into a clinical setting. In a subsequent video response, she defended her approach as aligned with anti-racist practice, characterizing the backlash as a “modern-day digital lynching” and describing Zionism, across its religious and political forms, as an expression of colonialism.
Edmond defended her approach as aligned with anti-racist practice, characterizing the backlash as a “modern-day digital lynching”.
These events raise an important question for our cultural moment: what happens when therapy ceases to be a space of open-ended exploration and becomes a vehicle for ideological interpretation?
“Decolonizing therapy” sits within a broader Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement that applies an oppressed/oppressor framework—drawing on postcolonial theory and critical race theory—to psychological practice. Dr. Jennifer Mullan, founder of the Decolonizing Therapy movement and author of a book of the same name, argues that therapy is inherently political and that it operates within a “colonial, outdated, Eurocentric, misogynistic, ableist, heterosexist and classist paradigm”.
At its best, this movement emerges from legitimate concerns. Historically, aspects of psychology have reflected cultural bias, pathologized minority experiences, and insufficiently accounted for systemic inequality. Efforts to expand cultural competence, acknowledge systemic contributors to distress, and make therapy more inclusive are both necessary and overdue.
However, when this corrective becomes totalizing, a new problem emerges. If therapy is understood primarily as a political project, the risk is that we no longer have simply critique, but replacement: one overarching framework substituted for another. In such models, the complexity of individual experience can be flattened into predefined narratives of oppression and privilege.
The complexity of individual experience can be flattened into predefined narratives of oppression and privilege.
It is important to acknowledge that all therapeutic approaches operate within some form of conceptual framework. Psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioural therapy, and humanistic models each carry assumptions about how the mind works and how change occurs. Therapy has never been entirely neutral in the sense of being framework-free. The question, therefore, is not whether interpretation occurs, but how it functions.
Across professional codes (such as those of the American Psychological Association, British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and Australian Psychological Society), therapists are not expected to be value-free. But they are expected to avoid imposing their personal beliefs onto clients. In practice, this means maintaining a form of procedural neutrality: working within the client’s values and their own creation of meaning, rather than directing them toward predetermined conclusions.
When activism is imported wholesale into therapy, this balance can shift. The clinical lens may move from understanding distress to evaluating beliefs through an ideological framework. In this model, some political alignments risk becoming informal diagnostic categories.
Across professional codes, therapists are not expected to be value-free. But they are expected to avoid imposing their personal beliefs onto clients.
A client is no longer simply anxious, grieving, or traumatized; they may instead be interpreted as embodying “internalized oppression”, “colonized thinking”, or “privileged identity”. The focus subtly moves from what the client is experiencing to what the therapist believes those experiences represent
