UPDATE 21
5 October 2025
Dear Supporter
Welcome to the October update. Autumn is already upon us and there’s a lot to report in this month's edition:
Critical Therapy Antidote launches new training programme
What’s on at the Battle of Ideas 2025
College campuses “engineering a crisis in male development”
An activist ‘sermon’ from The British Psychological Society
Lukianoff & Haidt 10 years on: a sober reflection on our times
Critical Therapy Antidote launches new training programme
On Friday 24th October, Critical Therapy Antidote (CTA) launches the first of a programme of training workshops titled Filling the Gaps. These workshops are designed to meet the needs of psychotherapists and psychologists whose training has been compromised and curtailed due to political activism and ideology. CTA aims to preserve the traditional therapeutic approaches that are being distorted or dismantled by the process of decolonisation.
The first of a series of workshops is called The Second Therapist in the Room: Reclaiming Clinical Neutrality. This is a two-hour interactive workshop run by Karen King, a psychotherapist based in the US. While 'neutrality' has, until quite recently, been viewed as a necessary stance for all psychotherapists to take when working with clients, politicised training courses now reject the idea, seeing it as a 'Western' concept. This workshop is essential for students and recently qualified psychotherapists and psychologists. You can find full details of times and ticket prices in this link. We will keep you posted about future training workshops.
What’s on at the Battle of Ideas 2025?
This year's Battle of Ideas Festival is fast approaching, on the weekend of 18th & 19th October. Tickets are still available here. On Sunday 19th, Save Mental Health's Lucy Beney is speaking on a panel asking Should There be a Mental-Health Professional in Every School? Do please come and support Lucy in what should be a lively discussion.
Other speakers include James Esses, who is on a panel with Andrew Doyle discussing Will DEI ever DIE? and Stella O'Mally of Genspect who will be discussing Alastair Santhouse's book No More Normal – Mental Health in an age of Over-Diagnosis, and taking part in a panel discussion: Beyond Terf Island: Gender Identity Worldwide. Save Mental Health will have a stall promoting our Cancellation survey. We hope to see some of you there. Do come and say 'hello'. You can see the programme for both days here.
College campuses “engineering a crisis in male development”
Our thanks to John Barry at the Centre for Male Psychology, for drawing our attention to this troubling article by Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm, researchers at psychFORM in the US. They warn that “universities are constructing environments that punish authenticity and reward forced ideological performance” at a time when young men “require freedom to explore values and beliefs”. Research is cited that shows “male undergraduates were nearly twice as likely as female peers to report concealing beliefs in classroom discussions, especially in humanities and social science courses.”
The authors argue that college campuses are “manufacturing this crisis by compelling young men to falsify their political and personal beliefs in order to survive socially and academically” and cite a 2021 report revealing that “more than 80% of students self-censor their viewpoints at least some of the time”. The universities themselves are accused of “creating environments of fear and encouraging self-censorship among students” through ‘institutional mechanisms’ such as ideological workshops and ‘bias response teams’ that produce a “chilling effect” on campus speech. Converging and compelling evidence, from several different sources, suggests that "By forcing college men to perform ideological scripts they do not believe, universities are not fostering critical thought but suppressing the very trial and error required for authentic growth.” The authors warn that “we are engineering a crisis in male development” and that this crisis is “real, measurable, and unfolding on our campuses now”.
An activist ‘sermon’ from The British Psychological Society
The BPS has issued a response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidelines on the Supreme Court Judgement that ‘sex’ means biological sex in the context of the Equality Act 2010. Bruce Bowman on X describes the BPS response as a ‘sermon’ that “reads less like science and more like scripture”. In other words: “Biology is offensive, truth is cruel, and women asking for boundaries must be shamed into silence”. Bowman goes on to explain that the BPS “are furious because the Supreme Court said the unsayable: under the Equality Act, sex means sex. Not identity. Not ‘lived experience’. Sex as recorded at birth. It should never have taken a Supreme Court to remind them of this”. He concludes: “For years, institutions have been browbeaten into activist capture. The BPS is desperate to keep it that way. They prefer confusion over clarity, surrender over safeguarding, propaganda over truth. The EHRC has hopefully ignored them. The law is clear. Sex is real. And no amount of jargon-soaked pleading from the BPS can erase that fact”.
Well said that man. The BPS is a shameful mess of an organisation, dancing to the tune of powerful activists in its ranks. If any institution requires dismantling it’s this one.
Lukianoff & Haidt 10 years on: a sober reflection on our times
In a recent Substack article, Greg Lukianoff reflects on what he and Jonathan Haidt warned 10 years ago when ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ was first published. He also considers what has happened subsequently and what is still at stake. Lukianoff writes about the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk on campus and the culture of ‘vindictive protectiveness’ that he and Haidt decscribed in ‘the Coddling’ which was ‘designed to insulate some students from discomfort’ and ‘punish those who caused offense, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Lukianoff recalls warnings in the book that these patterns of thinking would be a ‘disaster for mental health, academic freedom, and free speech’ and regrets that they have proved to be right. He makes the point that these ‘distorted ways of thinking’ are not just the fault of higher education, but also emerge from “bad ideas being promulgated in education schools going back many decades, as discussed in The Canceling of the American Mind. He argues that schools made things worse by assuming that “promoting this distorted thinking would encourage students to achieve positive political ends” but that, in fact, it led them to become depressed and anxious. As he rightly points out “Activism separated from hope or agency leads to destructive lashing out, and we have seen a great deal of precisely that in the last decade”. He refers to “social justice fundamentalism” where speakers on campus have been labelled ‘Zionist’ and “routinely silenced, sometimes just for being Jewish professors”.
Lukianoff expresses frustration that “more people still haven’t got the point” of ‘the Coddling’. He explains: “We need to stop teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people. Whether it is meant to protect them or to prod them into taking what advocates see as pro-social action, these methods and tactics have clearly backfired”. He warns: “Until we address the fundamental mistake of teaching our young people these catastrophic ways of thinking, the trends we’re seeing are likely to continue”.
RECOMMENDATION
Supporters may recall an article by Dr. P, a clinical psychologist of 30 years’ experience, who is not afraid to speak her mind, in which she declared The British Psychological Society was “not fit for purpose”, with an accompanying image of its Chair of the Sexualities Section dressed in the most inappropriate attire for a health professional. Readers of that article will know that Dr. P openly and vociferously challenges the current ‘ideological’ turn in psychology, and as a result, is currently under threat of a Fitness to Practice Hearing, related to social media posts deemed to be ‘harmful’ to ‘trans people’.
Highly recommended is her recent interview with Benjamin Boyce on his podcast Calmversations: Gender Medicine: Public Health Crisis? with Dr P. They discuss a wide range of topics: her stance that ‘paediatric transition is child abuse’ and that ‘gender dysphoria’ is a false construct; the dangers that arise from corruption of language; the long-term damaging effects of medical interventions used in ‘gender affirming care’; insights gleaned from her time living and working in the Middle East; problems of immigration and cultural beliefs and practices that do not align with those in the West; and last but not least, ‘queer roses’. Dr. P brings her expertise in clinical psychology and child protection to bear on these subjects and presents convincing arguments to support her claims. Although she must protect her professional identity, this does not stop Dr. P pointing out some uncomfortable home truths that need airing. You can find out more about Dr. P and read more of her articles @Psychgirl211 on X.
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