Mental Health’s Blind Spot

In recent years, mental health in America has been a growing concern. But even as awareness has grown, many practitioners overlook important issues. Much of this is related to the field’s political bias, which leads researchers and therapists to ignore entire clinical populations. One example involves race. Left-leaning researchers have spent decades focusing on racial bias as a contributing factor to mental illness, but their research has ignored bias and belligerence directed toward whites.

Our culture is uncomfortable talking about antiwhite aggression. {snip}

Antiwhite behavior manifests in many ways—violent attacks (including assault and rape) motivated by racial animus, bullying at school, insults, harassment, discrimination, and racially demeaning trainings at the workplace. Other examples include university courses that malign whites, and sometimes the news media’s rush to judge white people accused of racism, without sufficient evidence.

My experience as a therapist tells me that these are not isolated anecdotes. A few years ago, I provided therapy for a young heterosexual white man that focused on anxiety, anger, and relationship issues. We talked about his family history and his current life. Then, more than a year into the treatment, he told me that he had experienced pervasive racially charged bullying at both his elementary school and his high school. The bullying included insults, harassment, and some fights. Much of it was explicitly racial, including comments like “white faggot” and “white bitch.” It’s unclear why no one at the schools did anything. He said that he had held back from telling me about it in part because he worried that I would frame him as privileged or “just not get it”—reactions he had experienced in the past from his friends.

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Unfortunately, DEI ideology provides a rationale for antiwhite hatred (and for ignoring it), with its insistence that racial aggression directed at white people “isn’t racism.” This leaves targets of these attacks unsupported and isolated. Like my client, many fear talking about their experience because they assume others will invalidate their concerns or side with their attackers.

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Most researchers seem to insist that antiwhite hate matters less than other forms of racial aggression. They argue that the victims of these attacks “have privilege,” so their suffering is less important. Some privilege: an inability to get support and a widespread refusal to acknowledge their experience or address the dynamics that created it.

In my clinical work, I’ve found that targets of antiwhite hate seem to lack a kind of psychological immune system to respond effectively. {snip}

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On top of this, too many therapists have become DEI-style activists, eager to accuse their clients of racism and sexism. {snip}

How bad is the bias against addressing this issue? Look at the Racial Trauma Scale, published in an American Psychological Association journal in 2022. It’s a questionnaire for assessing racial trauma, designed explicitly for nonwhite victims. Item 38 of the questionnaire asks participants how much they are “avoiding white people” in response to their attack. This question seems to presuppose that the attacker is always white. {snip}

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