Tag: psychology

Therapists Publish Article Claiming Woke Ideology in Psychology is Making Leftists Even Crazier

Two therapists have just published an academic article claiming that woke ideology in psychology is damaging the field and the minds of leftists.

In their writing, the two actually acknowledge that progressives have ‘poorer’ mental health than people on the right, something conservatives have known for years.

They suggest that the integration of wokeness with their field has worsened the problem.

The College Fix reports:

Therapists warn: ‘Woke’ ideology undermining cognitive-behavioral therapy

A new scholarly article describes the mechanisms of how leftist ideology has likely led to a worsening of mental health counseling and classroom curriculum on the subject.

Arnold Cantú and Nathan Gallo are the two social work professionals who authored the article in the latest special Issue of Current Opinion in Psychology.

In it, they attempt to provide “an alternative explanation for potential causes behind the rise in psychiatric diagnoses and poorer mental health outcomes for people who identify as liberal or left-leaning in the United States.”

“Research regularly suggests that left-leaning people have poorer mental health than conservatives,” the two said in an emailed statement to The College Fix, adding it’s a “notable finding that has become increasingly applicable to the younger generation.”

“This article argues that woke ideology—what we refer to as critical social justice ideology—has warped a well-established psychotherapy approach often used to treat various kinds of psychological distress, known as cognitive-behavioral therapy,” they added.

“This ideology’s main tenets are full of ‘cognitive distortions,’ which are faulty, automatic patterns of thinking that CBT attempts to treat. Instead, woke ideology intentionally promotes these patterns, resulting in poorer mental health for clients, families, and therapists who buy into it.”

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Christian Therapist Beats State of Oregon, Will Not Have to Pay Eye-Watering Fine for Standing By Christian Beliefs

A Roman Catholic therapist who refused to bow to the LGBT altar is no longer being threatened with a $90,000 fine for being true to his beliefs.

Frank Canepa ran afoul of Oregon’s rules when he refused to get all gushy over a client’s same-sex relationship, according to Just the News.

Oregon’s Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists decided that standing up instead of bowing down required a hefty dose of discipline, and whacked Canepa with a $90,000 fine. The penalty and the disciplinary notice that went with it have both been rescinded.

Then came a March ruling from the Supreme Court that cut the legs out from under Oregon by ruling in favor of a Colorado therapist, Kaley Chiles, who did not fall into line with state thinking by saying minor clients suffered from gender confusion.

During a counseling session with a client Canepa had seen for more than two years, he refused to support her same-sex relationship, as noted by a news release from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Canepa explained that his faith would not allow him to do what his client wanted.

“The government can’t target counselors for their views and force people to say things that go against their core convictions,” ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Litigation Strategy Jonathan Scruggs said.

“The Supreme Court recently took Colorado to task for censoring counselors and mandating orthodoxy in the counselor’s office, and Oregon should take notice. ADF will continue to ensure that free speech is protected in Oregon — and every state where it’s threatened — and halt states’ attempts to weaponize their licensure systems,” he said.

Although Canepa tried to avoid passing judgment on his client’s relationship, the client persisted until he finally told her what he believed was not compatible with what she was doing.

For that, the Oregon board said Canepa violated Oregon law and the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics. In addition to the fine, he was ordered to undergo six hours of education.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects counselors and that the government cannot then attempt to punish counselors for answering a client’s question about a counselor’s view on a subject,” Logan Spena, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Free Speech, said, according to the Statesman-Journal.

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The Nocebo Effect: The Real PsyOp Behind Fake Pandemics

When authorities tell you to be afraid of a virus, your mind can make symptoms real, even when no pathogen exists. This is not conspiracy theory; it’s documented science, and it has been weaponized against the public for decades. The nocebo effect — the evil twin of the placebo — is the key to understanding how pandemics are manufactured as psychological operations. The word “nocebo” means “I will harm” in Latin, and that’s exactly what this phenomenon does: it turns negative expectations into real physical harm.

The idea that a suggestion can make you sick is as old as medicine itself, yet it has been deliberately ignored by the scientific establishment because it threatens the entire foundation of the infectious disease model. Research on the nocebo effect in the context of COVID-19 shows that the pandemic produced a “nocebodemic effect” characterized by mass negative interpretation of health services and medical treatments. When combined with the fear narrative pumped out by governments and media, this creates a perfect storm of psychogenic illness that requires no actual virus to produce symptoms. The institutions that profit from sickness have learned to weaponize this effect on a scale never seen before.

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SCOTUS To Decide If Free Speech Applies To Biology-Affirming Therapists And Their Clients

n Oct. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar. This is the latest in a seemingly unending series of cases from Colorado that my colleagues at Alliance Defending Freedom have argued. The cases stem from the state’s apparent aversion to the First Amendment.

Not content with their failed attempts to coerce speech from artists like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop or Lorie Smith of 303 Creative, and not deterred by clear rebukes from the Supreme Court in those cases, the state of Colorado has set its sights on professional counselors.

The law in question bans specific, voluntary counseling conversations, silences the viewpoint disfavored by the government, and leaves struggling youth and their parents with only one government-approved option. Colorado’s law bans counselors like Kaley Chiles from helping minors realign their thoughts and feelings with their biological sex — even when that is the young person’s goal for counseling.

Counseling that affirms so-called “gender transition” is fine by Colorado. Counseling that affirms biological reality is fined by Colorado, up to $5,000 per offense, and could include the loss of licensure.

This is not just an esoteric debate for law school faculty lounges; children’s health and well-being are at stake. Colorado’s defense of this blatant viewpoint discrimination and government censorship hinges on the contention, without a hint of irony, that the state is regulating conduct, not speech. How do Kaley Chiles and her clients engage in the “conduct” of talk therapy without it being speech? Perhaps a high-stakes game of charades? The notion would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

If government places an authoritarian thumb on the scale, allowing only one viewpoint, invading the vulnerable space between counselor and client, and dictating one outcome, the victims are children and their families. If the Supreme Court does not protect the speech of counselors like Kaley Chiles and her clients, children in Colorado and more than 20 other states with similar censorship laws will be trapped on a one-way journey to the perils of “gender transition.”

The eventual destination is one of irreversible physical damage, potential sterilization, and a lifetime of being a patient. Our nation’s struggling youth deserve compassionate counseling directed by their goals with assistance from loving parents and professionals, not a government-sponsored pathway to chemicals and surgeries that can leave permanent mental and physical scars.

Adding rhetorical insult to injury is the fact that under Colorado’s law, counseling clients to align their feelings with their biology is deemed “conversion therapy,” while counseling a client to transition from his or her sex to the opposite sex is “gender affirming care.” The assault on common sense and the English language may pale in comparison to the harm suffered by Chiles and her clients, but the First Amendment protects speech because words matter, truth matters, and any attempt by government to silence citizens matters.

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‘Blatant Viewpoint Discrimination’: Alito Slams Colorado For Telling Therapists They Can’t Affirm Kids’ Natural Sex

Associate Justice Samuel Alito exposed the absurdity of a Colorado law prohibiting so-called “conversion therapy” for minors during a high-profile case before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The moment came during oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case focused on a legal challenge brought by Colorado resident Kaley Chiles. A licensed therapist who provides counseling to children struggling with issues related to sexual orientation and gender dysphoria, Chiles alleges that the Centennial State’s “conversion therapy” law infringes upon her First Amendment right to free speech by inhibiting the types of discussions she has with her minor clients.

When questioning Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson, Alito posed a pair of hypothetical scenarios undermining the state’s argument that the statute does not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.” Alito’s questioning exposed the state’s policy of permitting therapists to encourage a child’s homosexual- or transgenderism-related behaviors, while at the same time prohibiting therapists from offering counseling that could help a child overcome them.

“So in the first situation, an adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist and says he’s attracted to other males, but he feels uneasy and guilty with those feelings. He wants to end or lessen them, and he asks for the therapist’s help in doing so,” Alito said. “The other situation is a similar adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist, says he’s attracted to other males, feels uneasy and guilty about those feelings, and he wants the therapist’s help so he will feel comfortable as a gay young man.”

The Bush appointee went on to argue that Colorado’s interpretation of the statute “dictates opposite results in those two situations … based on the viewpoint expressed.” “One viewpoint,” he noted, “is the viewpoint that a minor should be able to obtain talk therapy to overcome same-sex attraction, if that’s what … he or she wants,” while “the other is the viewpoint that the minor should not be able to obtain talk therapy to overcome same-sex attraction, even if that is what he or she wants.”

This “[l]ooks like blatant viewpoint discrimination,” Alito said.

In response, Stevenson claimed that both examples would “be permissible” under Colorado’s law “because it didn’t sound like in either case the goal was to actually change sexual orientation.”

“And again, that’s the touchstone because that’s where the harms come from,” Stevenson said.

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Supreme Court to Decide If Colorado Ban on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Violates Free Speech

The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider on Oct. 7 a free speech case involving a Colorado law that bans therapists from providing so-called conversion therapy to minors experiencing same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.

A therapist challenging the law argues that it violates her First Amendment rights. On the other side of the debate, Colorado contends that it has the right to regulate mental health treatments for minors that it deems harmful and ineffective. It is among more than 20 states with such bans.

Colorado’s Prohibit Conversion Therapy for a Minor law, passed in 2019, prohibits licensed therapists from trying to “change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Therapists who violate the law could be stripped of their licenses and face fines of up to $5,000.

Colorado has stated that its regulation was enacted in response to “overwhelming” scientific evidence that conversion therapy for minors is unsafe and not effective in the long term.

A practitioner of such therapy told The Epoch Times that the therapist’s work focuses on mending psychological wounds and is not coercive or harmful.

Opponents of conversion therapy, including the American Medical Association, point to practices such as electric shock and negative feedback methods such as smelling salts or chemically induced nausea to create a psychological aversion to the unwanted behaviors or attractions.

However, according to licensed counselor Christopher Doyle of the Institute for Healthy Families, modern therapists avoid these methods and instead favor exploring clients’ attitudes on sexuality, trauma, self-perception, and relationships.

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You Can Trigger ‘Time Expansion’—Meaning You Can Stretch Seconds and Warp Reality, Scientists Say

Time isn’t nearly as immutable as it first seems. Ask any astrophysicist, and they’ll likely regale you with mind-bending descriptions of gravity’s effect on space-time (i.e. the more massive the object, the slower time appears to travel around it). Some cosmologists even wonder if entire pockets of the universe—whether filled with galaxies or endless nothing—experience time at different rates.

However, the perception of the speed at which time passes can also vary within our minds. And it’s this mental realm that Steve Taylor—a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University—is exploring in a new paper and a new book called Time Expansion Experiences.

Taylor’s interest in these altered temporal moments—which he calls “time expansion experiences,” or TEEs—began when he and his wife were involved in a car crash back in 2014. “Everything went into slow motion,” Taylor describes in a post on the Leeds Beckett University website. “I looked behind, and the other cars seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, almost as if they were frozen. I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car. I was surprised by how much detail I could perceive.”

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The Pandemic Of Fake Psychiatric Diagnoses

On 12 September, UK child and adolescent psychiatrist Sami Timimi published “When mental-health diagnoses become brands, the real drivers of our psychic pain are hidden” in the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper.

In his superb article, Sami carefully explains how he arrives at his painful conclusion:

You see there is a truth that we (in the mental-health business) hope no one will notice – we literally don’t know what we are talking about when it comes to mental health.

An obvious problem is that all definitions of psychiatric disorders are subjective. They are not objective facts such as a broken bone is. This means they can be expanded in a myriad of ways to capture a kaleidoscope of distress, alienation, and dissatisfaction, and that psychiatric diagnoses are consumer brands, not medical diseases. 

In medicine, a diagnosis is aimed at determining which disease explains a person’s symptoms and signs, which enables effective matching of a treatment to address specific disease processes. 

This is not the case in psychiatry. And all psychiatric drugs have nonspecific effects that are not directed against some cause of a disease. Their effects are similar to those of alcohol, narcotics, and other brain-active substances. 

But, as Sami explains, increasingly, youngsters are getting diagnosed with ADHD, trauma, depression, anxiety, PTSD, autism, and often several such diagnoses. Their conversations may address gender identity, neurodiversity, and “having” a mental health disorder such as ADHD. 

The facts are that virtually no one is in doubt about whether they are male or female; neurodiversity is a meaningless concept used by psychiatrists to impress the public about how knowledgeable they are but it just means that all people are not the same; and one cannot “have” ADHD, which is just a name for a subjective description of rather common behaviours and therefore cannot explain anything. 

What people should realise is that it is part of being human to have difficulties that can be handled better if we don’t give people psychiatric diagnoses and drugs. Difficulties often have a cause that has nothing to do with being ill, e.g. poverty, trauma, inadequate housing, social injustice, marital problems, discrimination, exclusion, bereavement, unemployment, and financial insecurity. Life is not easy, but if you have difficulty coping with its challenges, you can easily get one or more psychiatric diagnoses. 

There is a lot of misinformation that leads people astray, in scientific articles, newspapers, TV, radio, and social media. When youngsters look up descriptions of people who say they “have” ADHD on social media, they may be convinced they “have” it too and may even self-diagnose. There is an element of social contagion in this, and the criteria for ADHD are so vague and ludicrous that when I lecture and ask people to use the adult ADHD test on themselves, it never fails that one quarter to half the audience test positive. 

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The psychological and neurological parallels between sports fandom and religious devotion

An in-depth exploration of the psychology of sports fandom has revealed striking similarities between the neurological and psychological patterns of devoted sports fans and religious dedication.

These similarities are explored in a new book, “The Psychology of Sports Fans,” which demonstrates how, for nearly 5 billion people globally, sport fulfills fundamental psychological needs for belonging, identity, and meaning.

The comprehensive analysis shows that sports fandom stems from evolutionarily ingrained tendencies which enhance social unity and therefore survival.

Professor Aaron C. T. Smith explains, “Our minds possess an incredible ability to believe; an ability that has been crucial for survival throughout human history. Now, like a muscle that’s been trained to the extreme, we can’t resist flexing our beliefs. Investing in certain beliefs, particularly those associated sports and players, brings us significant personal and social rewards.”

From Japanese baseball to New Zealand rugby, the psychological phenomenon is not unique to any one culture or nation, Smith argues, but creates powerful emotional connections that bind communities together globally.

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New ‘Mind-Reading’ AI Predicts What Humans Will Do Next

An artificial intelligence system can now predict your next move before you make it. We’re not just talking about whether you’ll click “buy now” on that Amazon cart, but rather how you’ll navigate complex decisions, learn new skills, or explore uncharted territory.

Researchers have developed an AI called Centaur that accurately predicts human behavior across virtually any psychological experiment. It even outperforms the specialized computer models scientists have been using for decades. Trained on data from more than 60,000 people making over 10 million decisions, Centaur captures the underlying patterns of how we think, learn, and make choices.

“The human mind is remarkably general,” the researchers write in their paper, published in Nature. “Not only do we routinely make mundane decisions, such as choosing a breakfast cereal or selecting an outfit, but we also tackle complex challenges, such as figuring out how to cure cancer or explore outer space.”

An AI that truly understands human cognition could revolutionize marketing, education, mental health treatment, and product design. But it also raises uncomfortable questions about privacy and manipulation when our digital footprints reveal more about us than ever before.

How Scientists Built a Digital Mind Reader AI

The research team started with an ambitious goal: create a single AI model that could predict human behavior in any psychological experiment. Their approach was surprisingly straightforward but required massive scale.

Scientists assembled a dataset called Psych-101 containing 160 experiments covering memory tests, learning games, risk-taking scenarios, and moral dilemmas. Each experiment was converted into plain English descriptions that an AI could understand.

Rather than building from scratch, researchers took Meta’s Llama 3.1 language model (the same type powering ChatGPT) and gave it specialized training on human behavior. They used a technique that allows them to modify only a tiny fraction of the AI’s programming while keeping most of it unchanged. The entire training process took only five days on a high-end computer processor.

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