The Political Bias Infiltrating Mental Health with Dr. Andrew Hartz

**Dr. Drew** (0:10)
Hey, buddy, welcome to the podcast. Appreciate you all being here, and do check it all out at drdrew.com. Everything is there. Don't forget the Rumble channel as well. Today, we're welcoming Dr. Andrew Hartz, founder and president of Open Therapy Institute, opentherapyinstitute.org. And I think you sent me something in social media, and I was like, well, I'm intrigued. Tell me more about this.

**Dr. Andrew Hartz** (0:32)
Yeah, was it the chart with overlooked issues on it?

**Dr. Drew** (0:36)
The whole idea that we're... Here's the thought bubble over my head. When I thought about the Open Therapy Institute, I thought, oh my God, taking care of brains and souls and spirits, it's an extremely complicated, extremely difficult process. We have to be sure everyone's getting their needs met this way. I mean, it was so shocking to me that this has to be said that you need an Open Therapy Institute. So tell me more about it.

**Dr. Andrew Hartz** (1:09)
Well, I mean, the level of extreme political bias that's emerged over the past decade in the field is just totally shocking. I can give you a couple examples. I mean, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Institute published an article that whiteness is an incurable parasitic condition that white people acquire at birth.
The president of the APA, American Psychological Association, Division of Psychoanalysis, said every therapy should center Palestinian liberation. How does that even work? It's totally unhinged stuff, but she was elected by the members and held her position till the end of her term. I know there's a...

**Dr. Drew** (1:59)
Both the Soviets and the Nazis have some parts of positions. Levkov, was that the guy's name in the Russian?

**Dr. Andrew Hartz** (2:07)
Right.

**Dr. Drew** (2:08)
Leadership that everything we've seen through those prisms. And that went so well. That really helped things. That made things better for people.

**Dr. Andrew Hartz** (2:18)
Well, it's actually getting into the therapy room. I mean, in Chicago, the Free Pass published this article that therapists made a list that if you're a Zionist therapist, they were not going to refer, you know, Zionist therapists, they weren't going to refer any patients to you under any circumstances.
There's another example. There's an inpatient psychiatric facility in New York, and they say on their website to this day, as far as I'm aware, that one of their goals is to queer the therapeutic space by breaking down the gender binary and centering queerness. And these are patients who've had a psychotic break, and they're in need of attention, and there's these totally non-evidence-based political agendas that are coming into the therapy room.

**Dr. Drew** (3:06)
It's one thing to be... I don't want to suggest that non-attention to these important issues for some people is the right way to approach this, but that to adulterate the process where you are focused on that as a primary issue, any different than if it were eye color or hair color or something, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, to be attuned and empathic to what the patient is experiencing and to have had maybe some personal experience, cultural experience, cultural sensitivity, language, all those things, good, yes, bring them to the room, for sure.

**Dr. Andrew Hartz** (3:45)
Right.

**Dr. Drew** (3:46)
You have them override the process. I can't even get my head around it.

**Dr. Andrew Hartz** (3:51)
Yeah. They're very rigid, preordained scripts that come into how the therapy sessions are often run. Where if you're in this category, you're a victim. If you're in this category, you're an oppressor and every therapy will start with, I'm a white male therapist and you're this patient and how do you feel about that? You know, and it's detracting from the ability to have a human relationship with someone that's focused on helping them.

**Dr. Drew** (4:20)
Speaking of which, you know, the addiction field has been, oh my God, so overrun by idiots. And I have talked to recently some young people that have made it off the streets and successfully into recovery from their opiate addiction. And this one guy told me that every, you know, there's a multi-billion dollar outreach program in Los Angeles where they give them the drugs and the needles and, you know, and also they can steal for whatever they need, you know, and there's, it's a ridiculous infrastructure. But he said that every helping person that he interacted with towards the end of his time there, which was now three or four years ago, on the street, he'd said, patted him on the back and said, well, you know, once we get communism in here, you won't have this problem.
You're a victim of capitalism, I'm sorry. But this will go away as soon as we get some socialism, communism in place. Right. That was it. That was their position on a brain disorder called opiate, life-threatening, complicated brain disorder.