The American Psychological Association (APA) has lost its way in a fog of harmful, unscientific, radical theories and therapies, embracing antisemitism; “decolonizing therapy”; and “transgender,” homosexual, Marxist, and anti-God ideologies.
As a result, the APA’s Commission on Accreditation may lose its authority, granted by the Department of Education, to evaluate and accredit graduate-level psychology programs. That would be a good day if it happens.
University programs must be accredited by a group recognized by the department for students to receive federal aid, student loans, and military assistance. The APA says its accreditation “assures the public that a program has clearly defined training aims that meet professional and scientific standards that support the successful, ethical, and skillful delivery of psychological service.”
But if those seeking therapy knew what different APA divisions promote, they might feel less assured about the therapists graduating from those programs.
In an opinion piece at The Wall Street Journal, Colin Wright and Andrew Hartz write that the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity(NACIQI) met in September to evaluate the APA’s Commission on Accreditation.
NACIQI heard testimony from the Commission and from third-party commenters to decide if the Commission was “a reliable evaluator of the [psychology] programs” and advise the Secretary of Education about continued recognition of the APA as an accrediting agency.
Wright, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Hartz, founder and president of the Open Therapy Institute, explain the outcome: “Last month, a bipartisan advisory board to the Education Department voted 7-4 to recommend suspending recognition of the APA’s Commission on Accreditation. The vote followed testimony alleging the group tolerated a ‘pervasive culture of antisemitism’ in psychology programs and professional settings.”
NACIQI members first questioned APA Commission staff about the process when students file civil rights complaints against a university’s psychology program. It became clear that the Commission on Accreditation was not adequately monitoring complaints of antisemitism in accredited universities.
And if those complaints were found to be true, the Commission did not address them with university psychology departments.
For example, some programs teach “decolonial therapy,” which challenges all Western assumptions about psychology. Professor Dean McKay explained “fuses political ideology with therapeutic methods” and “is untested yet being practiced and available as part of training in accredited psychology training programs.”
McKay added: “Proper delivery of psychological treatment focuses on the client’s needs. It is not a place to platform and disseminate the therapist’s political viewpoints. Decolonial therapy improperly asserts that specific aspects of Jewish identity are associated with numerous social ills, such as white supremacy, fascism, and imperialism. In short, Jewish identity is pathologized in decolonial therapy.”
While antisemitism was the focus of much of the testimony at the NACIQI meeting, Wright and Hartz said that “the rot goes far deeper” than this bias: “A substantial part of organized psychology has ceased behaving like scientific and professional bodies and has become a vehicle for left-wing political activism.”
The APA has 54 Divisions, special interest groups that “represent subdisciplines of psychology” or “focus on topical areas such as aging, ethnic minorities or trauma.”
Wright and Hartz pointed to APA’s Division 39, the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic psychology, which held a conference earlier this year. They opined that the event did not “focus on patients, therapy and psychological treatments,” but conference workshops “sounded like a graduate seminar in radical politics.”
The authors describe some of those sessions: “The conference opened with workshops on ‘Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics,’ ‘opposing institutional oppression,’ and ‘loosening/abolishing gender assessment guidelines.’ Later sessions covered ‘Doctoral Student Narratives of Stress, Resilience and Identity in the Trump Era,’ ‘Fragments of a Queer Anarchist Psychoanalysis,’ and ‘White’ Analysis: Race, Institution, and the Limits of Psychoanalysis.”
“Cisteria?” They’re just making stuff up.
One workshop “concluded with a drag performance,” while others focused on “family abolition” and “queer and crip theorizations” about youth suicide.
Evidently, “queer and crip” bring together “queer theory” with “disability studies” to combat the idea that “heterosexuality and able-bodied identity” are the norm. “Crip” is a slur being reclaimed as an identity by disabled individuals – just as the slur “queer” became a badge of honor for radical gay-identified activists.
Wright and Hartz document the extent of radical ideologies at Division 39’s conference: “By our count, about 70 of the conference’s 90 panels had a clear ideological agenda, and every overtly political speaker came from the left. There were no comparable conservative, libertarian, centrist or heterodox perspectives.”
It’s not just APA Division 39 that’s gone off the rails. The Daily Citizen has previously reported on Division 44, the “Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity.” In 2018 the division launched a “Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM) Task Force” to promote “awareness and inclusivity” of “people who practice polyamory, open relationships, swinging, relationship anarchy and other types of ethical, non-monogamous relationships.”
In 2023, Division 44’s conference initiated a task force “dedicated to research, education, clinical work, and advocacy related to BDSM/kink.” And in 2025, its conference hosted a symposium titled “The Kink and Flourishing Study: Impact of Kink Involvement in People’s Personal Growth and Healing.”
Wright and Hartz write that the APA is doubling down on radicalism, with Division 39 calling for “work on capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, critical race theory and genocide.” They add: “Other topics include ‘proximity to whiteness,’ ‘colonial domination,’ and ‘carcerality’ [societal systems of control and punishment]. Most concepts essential to psychotherapy and psychoanalytic therapies are missing.”
“Carcerality?” Don’t you just love pretentious, unreadable academic jargon?
At the hearing, NACIQI member Adam Kissel, a visiting lecturer at Trinity College and a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, summed up his thoughts about the APA: “So you have a bunch of folks in the APA who are in the programs that you accredit, who have, frankly, crazy ideas, who think that decolonial therapy is the right way to teach or have crazy ideas about gender or a hundred other things that we might, on this side of the table think are crazy, … which is why we shouldn’t be the ones in charge.”
Indeed. The Education Department should remove the American Psychological Association from its list of Institutional Accrediting Agencies. It’s almost like they are asking for it.
