Where Did Psychotherapy Go Wrong? | Ian Cox
Ian Cox, an Irish psychologist and lecturer, tells Stella O'Malley how postmodern ideology has infiltrated psychology and counselling training — and what happened when he pushed back. His account of student complaints, online harassment and an increasingly affirmation-only clinic landscape resonates far beyond Ireland. For European clinicians navigating similar pressures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Stockholm, his experience offers both a warning and a reference point: the same ideological currents shaping Irish training programmes are flowing through continental Europe's universities, professional bodies and gender services.
Ian Cox is an Irish psychologist and university lecturer who has been watching, with growing unease, the transformation of his own discipline. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, he traces how postmodern thinking — sceptical of objective truth, hostile to empirical research and increasingly aligned with gender-identity activism — has worked its way into the training of counsellors and psychotherapists. The result, he argues, is a profession that is quietly abandoning its own scientific and ethical foundations. Cox does not describe this as a sudden rupture. He presents it as a long-running drift, one that has accelerated as activist frameworks entered academic curricula and professional codes of conduct. He discusses what he calls the assault on science — the way evidence-based reasoning is reframed in some training environments as politically suspect, while ideologically driven formulations acquire the language of care and inclusion. Students, he observes, absorb this not only from course materials but from an atmosphere in which dissent carries real professional risk. He knows that risk personally. When Cox expressed views that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, he found himself the target of a coordinated online campaign, publicly named and subjected to a wave of hostile messaging. A student filed a complaint. The episode he describes — a Facebook pile-on that spilled into professional and institutional consequences — will be familiar to many clinicians across Europe who have hesitated to voice reservations in supervision groups or at conference tables. One of the most striking sections of the conversation concerns gender clinics. Cox describes services that have moved to an entirely affirmative model, in which the therapeutic relationship is subordinated to identity validation. This is not an exclusively Irish phenomenon. The clinical cultures he describes echo developments that prompted Sweden, Finland and several other European countries to commission independent reviews and, in some cases, substantially restrict their gender medicine pathways for minors — a corrective that is still being resisted in other parts of the continent. For European mental health professionals — whether in the Netherlands, where the original Dutch protocol was developed, or in France and Germany, where national debates about standards of care are ongoing — Cox's account is useful precisely because it locates the problem upstream, in training. If the clinicians entering practice have been formed in environments where gender-critical questioning is treated as inherently harmful, the consequences will be felt in consulting rooms for a generation. The conversation also touches on what is at stake for therapy as a discipline. When colleagues celebrate rather than mourn the deaths of critics — something Cox recounts with evident distress — and when students face professional exile for heterodox views, the conditions for honest, boundaried therapeutic work are corroded at the root. Stella O'Malley and Ian Cox leave little doubt that the question is not only what happened to one lecturer in Ireland, but what kind of psychology Europe is now training into existence.
