America's mental health field is overrun with antisemitism. It's dangerous. | Opinion
If Zionism is being treated as a mental disorder, how can Jews expect fair treatment? Worse still, this antisemitism is being taught to future clinicians, spreading bias even further.
Jewish clinicians “with Zionist affiliations” are being blacklisted on social media. An emergency room doctor who runs a Facebook group for Physician Moms removed Jews from the group. A doctor and untenured professor at University of California San Francisco Hospital tweeted that the university should investigate whether a new “Israeli” medical student – known to be a Persian American Jew – committed genocide before coming to USCF. And a professor and the director of counseling at Villanova University taught her students that the “colonized mind” and Zionism are mental illnesses of the frontal lobe alongside fascism, “rape culture” and “genocidal tendencies.”
This is what the mental health profession has become for the Jewish community – steeped in antisemitism.
At the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, clients have informed our legal advocates of antisemitic incidents that include a Washington, DC-based therapist who refused to see a Jewish patient who had recently moved to the United States from Israel; a psychologist who was doxxed and harassed online because she is a Jewish Zionist; and a major mental health organization denying a Jewish affinity group because its members were “privileged white supremacists.”
Antisemitism has escalated since Hamas terrorist attack
Antisemitism has grown rapidly and become mainstream in recent years. From workplaces to all levels of education, discrimination and vitriol have taken hold in many of our institutions.
In the health care system, research shows that antisemitism has escalated since the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. Now, 75% of Jewish medical professionals say they have experienced antisemitism at work. No form of hatred is acceptable within our mental health care system – one that is supposedly built on empathy, ethics and compassion.
The irony is appalling. Jews built much of our psychological and brain science, revolutionizing our understanding of mental processes and developing many of the therapeutic methods used today. Their ranks include Sigmund Freud; child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein; Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl; Alan Beck, the developer of cognitive therapy; and Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behavior therapy.
The Brandeis Center recently interviewed dozens of Jewish therapists and doctors, and we found that Jewish and Israeli patients and professionals are being ostracized, harassed and protested simply because of their identity. This is the definition of antisemitism, and we cannot let it stand.
Those who perpetuated these brazen acts were given minimal (if any) sanctions. And because of the personal nature of the perpetrators’ work, it feels like an even deeper violation.
What’s even more dangerous is when this xenophobic hatred is put into practice under the guise of therapy, as in the case with the new “Decolonizing Therapy.” Its founder, Dr. Jennifer Mullen, argues that the root of our mental health crisis is separation – “separation from land, our ancestry, community, and our innate joy” – so the goal of this framework is to challenge the psychological impact of colonialism, historical trauma and systemic oppression.
Therapists use Decolonizing Therapy when working with clients who experience intergenerational trauma or issues related to their cultural identity.
In practice, however, it promotes antisemitic narratives that stigmatize Jewish patients and providers and refers to Jews as oppressors in therapeutic settings – often on the taxpayers’ dime through programs funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Decolonizing Therapy is dangerous and misleading
Decolonizing Therapy dangerously and misleadingly identifies Zionism as a root cause of mental illness, despite Zionism’s obvious absence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the most comprehensive, internationally accepted manual on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.
It also equates Zionism – an integral component of Jewish identity for many Jewish Americans, it the core belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, Israel – with colonialism and oppression. This delegitimizes Jewish historical, cultural, ethnic and cultural connections to Israel, denying the Jewish people’s more than 3,000-year history with that land.
For obvious reasons, numerous experts, including psychologists and professors, agree that Decolonizing Therapy “lacks empirical support and rigorous scientific validation.” Instead it puts “ideology over evidence.”
By promoting false ethnic stereotypes founded on a binary worldview that casts Jews as oppressors, Decolonizing Therapy misrepresents Jewish identity and history. This ignorance creates hostile environments for Jewish patients and therapists, alienating them, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and ultimately compromising the integrity of mental health care.
If Zionism is being treated as a mental disorder, how can Jews expect fair treatment? Worse still, this antisemitism is being taught to future clinicians, spreading bias even further.
In recent years, federal and state lawmakers have resisted taxpayer support for other controversial, polarizing and racially divisive approaches, including what a recent executive order calls “Discriminatory Equity Ideology” – defined as “an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” Those states and agencies, including the White House, have ceased to fund other racially divisive ideologies. Why is Decolonizing Therapy any different?
The proliferation of antisemitism in any space is horrific. But its proliferation in health care – a sacred, professional space brimming with private and sometimes life-threatening information – is especially dangerous. We cannot allow these antisemitic and discriminatory practices and language to cultivate in our mental health spaces.
We must attack this threat from all sides. The federal government must defund Decolonizing Therapy. Mental health professionals and their patients must hold colleagues and providers accountable for their practices and condemn antisemitism in the health space. As human beings, we must all call out antisemitism wherever we see it. We can only eradicate antisemitism when we all get involved.
After all, “do no harm” is not a suggestion. We have to stop treating it as such.
Kenneth L. Marcus is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education under two administrations. He is the author of "The Definition of Anti-Semitism."