“America’s mental health field is overrun with antisemitism. It’s dangerous.” —USA Today
The names—accompanied by links to the therapists’ homepages or clinic websites—eventually grew into a list of over two dozen, posted on the “Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists” Facebook page. The compiler posted that she had “put together a list of therapists/practices” that “we should avoid referring clients to.”
The response was enthusiastic: One user commented, “Thank you for taking the lead on this,” while another added, “I had planned on doing this soon on Excel! Thank you for getting it started.”
The psychiatrist remarked, “Oh, he’s Jewish. I don’t even need to interview him to write an evaluation.”
The director of counseling at Villanova University taught her students that Zionism is a mental illness of the frontal lobe, alongside fascism, “rape culture,” and “genocidal tendencies.” By treating Zionism—the belief in a homeland for Jews—as a mental disorder treatable by something dubbed “Decolonizing Therapy,” therapists stigmatize Jews, cloaking ethnic stereotypes and antisemitic tropes in clinician-speak.
It’s no secret that the mental health profession is steeped in anti-Jewish hate. This writer recalls a dear friend being ordered by a court to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrist remarked, “Oh, he’s Jewish. I don’t even need to interview him to write an evaluation. He’s got a weak chromosome because that’s what Jews are like—they inbreed.”
But accountability may have finally arrived for what the Anti-Defamation League has called “bigoted, unethical and clear antisemitism.”
The nation’s largest organization for psychologists is now under federal civil rights investigation amid allegations of antisemitic discrimination.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has launched a formal probe into the American Psychological Association (APA) following a complaint by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The complaint alleges that the APA spread discrimination through its programs, continuing education courses and professional platforms, exposing Jewish and Israeli psychologists to antisemitic or anti-Israel narratives.
In a June 2 letter, OCR said it had enough material to investigate whether the APA violated federal civil rights protections prohibiting discrimination based on race, color or national origin. And because the APA receives federal funding through grants, fellowships and research contracts, it is legally bound by federal nondiscrimination requirements.
The Brandeis Center called the investigation a major development in the fight against discrimination, noting that it is believed to be the first HHS civil rights investigation triggered by one of its complaints against a major healthcare association.
The mental health establishment has already confessed to a long record of hatred and bigotry. It even apologized for it on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2021, when it issued a statement of regret to “Black, Indigenous and People of Color for its support of structural racism in psychiatry.” The American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued its mea culpa for generations of “racist social/political policies.”
These “policies” range from the 19th-century practice of accepting slaves in payment for treatment, to the 20th-century routine of diagnosing a disproportionate number of minority patients as schizophrenic (the same behaviors are deemed “neuroticism” in white patients).
According to the APA’s apology, the latter model was based on racial stereotypes masquerading as scientific evidence, like psychiatric claims that people of color “were hostile, unmotivated for treatment, had primitive character structure and were childlike.”
The APA’s five-year-old MLK Day apology rings hollow in light of its industry’s continued stigmatization of Jews as patients or fellow practitioners.
But look under the hood of the mental health “sciences,” and one finds something even more sinister than canards, bias or blacklisting: genocide.
A century ago, psychiatrists enthusiastically backed eugenics, a pseudoscience founded on the notion that human heredity was fixed and immutable, and that social ills—criminality, mental illness, alcoholism and even poverty—all stemmed from hereditary factors.
Some people are simply born better than others—smarter, more skilled, more able to do things—according to eugenics. Those people were of Nordic or Aryan stock, preferably blonde with blue eyes. Others (Jews, Blacks and non-whites in general) were “feeble-minded,” “shiftless” and “a liability to the nation.”
The psychiatric solution was simple: Let the inferior races die off through mass sterilization. In America alone, between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in 29 states were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will.
Nazi Germany far surpassed that figure, forcibly sterilizing over 400,000 human beings. When that wasn’t eliminating non-Aryan races fast enough, the German Institute for Psychiatric Research supported ever more efficient mass sterilization, with grants to, among others, Josef Mengele.
We all know the inevitable end: the Holocaust. Psychiatrists pitched in with gusto, devising efficient systems of slaughtering the “mentally ill” and “racially and cognitively compromised” by the hundreds of thousands. Germany’s psychiatrists even provided six mental institutions to facilitate the assembly-line murder of innocents.
One psychiatrist, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, even ran a death camp, Treblinka, until he was fired for incompetence. (He didn’t properly destroy the corpses.)
Such is the blood-drenched heritage of the mental health “sciences.”
With hatred, bias, bigotry and violence so deeply embedded in the DNA of psychiatry and psychology, the wonder isn’t that the US government is finally saying no.
It’s that it took so long to say it.
