This summer the American Psychological Association released its Racial Equity Action Plan. This plan dealt a blow to anyone who still nourished some faint hope that this professional body was slowing down in its enthusiastic embrace of Critical Social Justice. The ‘P’ in APA stands for ‘psychological’ in name only: this is a ‘P’ for ‘political’ instead.

It’s a challenge to pull out just one example from this document but here is one priority action point (in the training section) to illustrate the way in which psychology is being retooled:

‘ Reimagine graduate training curriculum to promote epistemological justice by centering
diverse, non-Western cultural perspectives in U.S. based training programs.’

So roughly translated this means that clinical training programs should now focus on a range of non-Western approaches (to healing?) and sideline classic Western theories/knowledge/empirical research with the express purpose of making some kind of reparation for historic neglect (?) of indigenous/nonWestern knowledge.

For an astute analysis of this action plan and its implications for the field and beyond see Mason Goad’s recent piece in the City Journal titled Color-Coded Mental Health .