How Activism Is Replacing Clinical Judgment in Psychology - JD Haltigan (#6)
27 March 2025
With J.D. Haltigan
Global
Developmental psychologist J.D. Haltigan examines how ideological capture has eroded scientific standards within psychology, from the weakening of diagnostic categories to the normalisation of pathology. His analysis intersects with findings from systematic reviews — including those underpinning the Cass Review and Scandinavian national reassessments — that have identified the displacement of clinical judgment by activist frameworks as a key driver of poor outcomes for vulnerable young patients.
J.D. Haltigan is a developmental psychologist who left academic institutions to pursue independent research. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman, he argues that psychology has undergone a profound ideological shift — accelerating around 2016 — in which empirical standards have been progressively displaced by frameworks that prioritise affirmation over clinical assessment. His account draws on direct professional experience and a body of scholarship examining how activist assumptions have embedded themselves within research methodology and clinical training. Haltigan describes what he terms the feminisation of psychology — a shift in professional culture that has elevated empathy and affirmation as clinical virtues at the expense of diagnostic rigour. This is not simply an observation about workforce demographics; it reflects a transformation in how practitioners are trained to respond to distress. Where clinical tradition once involved challenging a patient's self-understanding when evidence warranted it, the emerging norm — particularly in gender-related contexts — tends towards uncritical validation, making careful differential diagnosis harder to sustain. A substantive thread in the episode concerns what Haltigan calls pathology normalisation — the reframing of presentations that would previously have warranted careful diagnosis as simply variants of human experience. He contends this is being applied selectively and ideologically, removing clinical scrutiny from conditions that particularly affect young people. This concern echoes findings from systematic reviews underpinning the Cass Review in England and national reassessments in Scandinavia, both of which identified the weakening of diagnostic standards as a key factor in poor patient outcomes within paediatric gender medicine. The conversation also addresses the documented effects of social media on child development. Haltigan discusses how online environments encourage adolescents to construct multiple, shifting identities, complicating the clinical assessment of whether distress is stable and enduring. This concern has been raised in systematic reviews underlying recent European guideline revisions, which note the influence of peer networks and online communities on the clinical presentation of gender-related distress in young people. Haltigan reflects on why public trust in professional institutions has declined, connecting this to the same processes he documents within psychology. When standards-setting bodies are perceived to have adopted ideological commitments, the authority of their guidance weakens — a dynamic visible in the divergent responses of European health systems to the same body of evidence on paediatric gender medicine. His departure from academia, he suggests, was itself a precondition for the kind of open, evidence-led inquiry that the current situation demands. The episode's significance lies in its focus on mechanism: not just the outcomes of ideologically inflected clinical practice, but the institutional and professional processes through which clinical judgment comes to be replaced. Understanding those processes is essential for evaluating the reform efforts now underway across Europe, where health ministries, courts and professional bodies are attempting to re-establish evidence-based standards in a field that has, by Haltigan's account, drifted considerably from them.
