Madison Park Research: Jordan Conrad published in The American Journal of Psychotherapy

Madison Park Psychotherapy’s founder and clinical director, Jordan Conrad, was published last week in the official psychotherapy journal of the American Psychiatric Association: The American Journal of Psychotherapy. The article, entitled “Psychotherapy, Politics, and the Limits of Professionalism,” discusses the worrying trend among psychotherapists who refuse to treat patients for of personal and political reasons.

Jordan acknowledges that psychotherapists, like all medical professionals, must make discriminations about who they treat, and that the reasons for doing so can sometimes be personal. Psychotherapists who are parents, Jordan writes, may feel uncomfortable working with those who have abused children, for example. However, he argues, that such discriminations are not based on “personal opprobrium” but rather an acknowledged “weakness in the clinician’s practice that may impede the delivery of treatment.”

For Jordan, the issue is about professionalism. Just as everyone in a free society is entitled to medical treatment for a physical illness or trauma, so too is everyone entitled to mental health treatment. Physicians cannot discriminate whether they will suture a wound or set a broken bone on the grounds of a patient’s values and neither should psychotherapists. Jordan writes that “Even, and perhaps especially, people with reviled  disorders or who engage in reprehensible behaviors—such as those with pedophilic disorder or who are physically abusive—are entitled to psychotherapeutic treatment” and so treatment cannot rest on whether one has the “right” values or not.

Jordan, who has written on the history of mental health treatment in the past, worries that refusing to treat people based on political views amounts to a form of social control of which the field has been guilty in the past. Bogus disorders such as drapetomania and homosexuality were once considered legitimate diagnoses worthy of treatment. “Although these practices are now recognized as obscene overreaches of medical authority,” Jordan writes, “the belief that psychotherapists ought to guard society from degenerate political beliefs has once again gained prominence.” Surely, it is time for that to end.