BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
When a respected Canadian philosopher-psychoanalyst is blacklisted by his own professional body for questioning prevailing orthodoxies, it raises questions that should concern every Irish therapist, academic and parent. Dr Jon Mills joins Stella O'Malley to discuss the cancel campaign waged against him and the book it inspired — a sustained critique of social justice ideology. For Irish listeners watching professional bodies here adopt similar ideological stances, and for those in therapy training warned to self-censor, this conversation lands close to home.
Dr Jon Mills is a philosopher and psychoanalyst based in Canada, a practitioner whose career spans academic philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical work. He is also, as this conversation makes clear, someone who has paid a significant professional price for holding views that do not align with the ideological direction his field has taken in recent years. When he raised questions within a psychoanalytic organisation, he found himself the target of a coordinated campaign that labelled him a racist and a white supremacist. He was subsequently blacklisted. The experience prompted him to edit and contribute to a book examining the ideology behind such campaigns. That book, Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology, is the starting point for his conversation with Stella O'Malley. Mills traces the moment when woke thinking — broadly understood as a set of ideas rooted in critical theory and social justice activism — moved from the margins of academic life into the mainstream of professional institutions, including psychoanalytic and psychotherapy bodies. He draws a careful distinction between critical theory as a mode of rigorous intellectual inquiry and the activist programmes that have adopted its language while abandoning its commitment to genuine questioning. One of the most striking threads in the episode concerns what Mills describes as ideological compliance in training. For those studying to become therapists or psychoanalysts, he describes an environment in which trainees are expected not merely to engage with certain ideas but to affirm them — where dissent, or even careful scepticism, can result in professional consequences. The claims made under the heading of systemic racism come under particular scrutiny, with Mills arguing that some of these frameworks are being imposed on institutions and practitioners without adequate evidence or open debate. For Irish listeners, this episode speaks directly to pressures that are already visible here. Stella O'Malley, who is herself an Irish psychotherapist and has faced sustained criticism for her own questioning of gender-identity orthodoxy, understands the professional dynamics Mills describes from the inside. Irish counselling and psychotherapy training has not been immune to the ideological shifts Mills charts, and practitioners at various stages of their careers have found that certain questions — raised carefully, in good faith — are not always welcomed in supervisory or academic settings. The conversation also turns to universities and the condition of free inquiry within them. Irish third-level institutions have seen their own disputes over academic freedom, platform invitations and the boundaries of acceptable opinion. Mills argues that wherever genuine intellectual debate is suppressed, the people these institutions are supposed to serve are the ones who ultimately pay the price. In a therapy context, that means clients and patients. In a university context, it means students and the wider society that depends on honest scholarship. What makes this episode worth hearing is not that it delivers simple answers, but that it gives precise language to an experience many Irish professionals recognise and rarely discuss in public. The mechanics of cancellation — the labelling, the organisational exclusion, the reputational damage — are not unique to Canada or to psychoanalysis. Understanding how they work, and how they can be met with careful, evidence-based argument, is a conversation with real relevance on this side of the Atlantic.
