About

Background

Critical Therapy Antidote (CTA) was set up in 2020 to provide a platform for people (practitioners, academics, clients, supervisors, and members of allied professions) who were concerned about the rapid and uncontested encroachment of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) into talking therapies.

CTA has rapidly evolved into a broad-based collective whose members are committed to protecting the healing ethos of therapy and maintaining the clinical space as functionally apolitical.

What we do

Since its founding, CTA has established itself as a significant platform for critiquing the tenets of Critical Social Justice in relation to therapy. Our associated network of members has grown rapidly, and it has a global reach. We provide support, advocacy and resources for an increasingly beleaguered profession.  CTA has its own podcast.

We collaborate with other organisations committed to a similar enterprise such as The Open Therapy Institute in New York. 

CTA’s book Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice is the first major publication to critique the tenets of Critical Social Justice in relation to therapy. 

Aims

  • maintain and foster the integrity of counselling and psychotherapy, through championing the long-established apolitical and heterodox tradition in talking therapies;
  • support trainees and consolidate their understanding of traditional therapy approaches;
  • collaborate with like-minded institutions and organisations with whom we can work towards therapeutic practice that supports a healthy, balanced, and productive integration of the individual and collective dimensions of human existence;
  • support consumers of therapy in the UK, North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand who seek non-political/non-ideologically-based therapy;
  • support the therapy field in creating parallel non-political/non-ideological structures.

Objectives

  • publish timely articles and podcast episodes for the public (professional and non-professional alike) to serve as information about ideological threats such as Critical Social Justice, and offer better common-humanity alternatives for the practice of therapy;
  • create and maintain a directory of therapists who are committed to providing a functional apolitical clinical space;
  • develop a suite of trainings and webinars in traditional therapy approaches;
  • provide opportunities such as practice seminars to help qualified practitioners work with challenges relating to Critical Social Justice;
  • establish an independent scholarly non-partisan journal.