How Activism Is Replacing Clinical Judgment in Psychology - JD Haltigan (#6)
27 March 2025
With J.D. Haltigan
therapy-and-psychology
When a clinical profession abandons scientific standards in favour of ideological conformity, the consequences reach far beyond academic debate. Developmental psychologist J.D. Haltigan traces how psychology arrived at this point — through slow institutional drift, the erosion of diagnostic rigour, and a cultural shift that recast empathy as a substitute for evidence. The episode asks what it costs when the field responsible for understanding human distress stops being willing to name it accurately.
Psychology presents itself as a science of the mind, but J.D. Haltigan — a developmental psychologist who spent years inside academic institutions before stepping away from them — argues that the discipline has been quietly transformed into something closer to a moral advocacy project. He joined Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman to trace how that transformation happened, and why its consequences are most visible in the treatment of children. Haltigan identifies a decisive shift around 2016, when political and cultural pressures began accelerating changes that had been building for some time. What changed was not just the topics researchers were willing to study but the standards by which claims were evaluated. The logic of ideological commitment — in which reaching the right conclusions matters more than using the right methods — started to displace the slower, more demanding logic of scientific inquiry. Institutions that should have resisted this drift largely accommodated it instead. One of the sharpest concepts in the conversation is what Haltigan calls pathology normalisation: the process by which conditions that once warranted clinical attention are reframed as healthy variations requiring affirmation rather than treatment. This matters because diagnostic categories are not bureaucratic labels — they are tools for thinking clearly about distress. When those categories erode or collapse, clinicians lose the shared language needed to identify when something has gone wrong, and vulnerable people lose the clarity that a considered diagnosis can provide. The impulse behind destigmatisation is often genuine, but Haltigan argues it has been pushed well past the point where it serves patients. The episode also examines what Haltigan describes as the feminisation of psychology — not a demographic observation alone, but a cultural one. He suggests that an ethos of relational warmth and validation has come to outrank methodological rigour as the dominant value in the field. Empathy is indispensable in clinical work, but when it functions as a replacement for evidence rather than a complement to it, the discipline loses its capacity to say difficult things that patients sometimes need to hear. Children and adolescents are particularly exposed to the effects of these shifts. Haltigan points to the role of social media in allowing young people to construct and maintain multiple parallel identities, a phenomenon that intersects with broader questions about adolescent development and psychological coherence. When institutions designed to protect developmental wellbeing are themselves shaped by the same online dynamics that produce fragmented identity, the scaffolding that young people need is missing. Haltigan describes leaving academia as an act of intellectual recovery — a way of regaining the freedom to follow evidence where it leads rather than where it is professionally safe to go. That freedom has enabled him to engage in collaborations that would have been difficult or impossible from inside a captured institution. The broader implication is significant: when formal institutions stop performing their core function, the work of honest inquiry does not disappear but migrates, finding new forms outside the structures that were built to house it.
