Where Did Psychotherapy Go Wrong? | Ian Cox
Irish psychologist and lecturer Ian Cox joins Stella O'Malley to examine how postmodernist, activist-led thinking has taken hold inside psychology and counselling — undermining scientific foundations, silencing dissenting practitioners and reshaping clinical training. Cox paid a personal and professional price for raising these questions in an Irish academic setting, and his account speaks directly to anyone concerned about the state of mental health care in Ireland.
Ian Cox is not a polemicist. He is an Irish psychologist who has spent years in third-level education watching his discipline shift beneath his feet. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, he traces how postmodernist ideas moved from humanities departments into psychology and counselling training, bringing with them a deep suspicion of objective evidence and a tendency to prioritise ideological commitments over therapeutic ones. The result, he argues, is a profession that is increasingly ill-equipped to help the clients it is supposed to serve. The Irish dimension is impossible to ignore. Cox describes what it is actually like to teach psychology in an Irish academic institution when students arrive already shaped by activist-led frameworks. When he introduced material that challenged received orthodoxies — not aggressively, but as part of ordinary academic inquiry — he faced formal complaints and a campaign of online harassment that included being doxxed. For a country that speaks readily about academic freedom and professional independence, his account raises uncomfortable questions about whether those values still mean anything in practice. One of the most disturbing sections of the episode concerns counsellors appearing to celebrate the death of a prominent critic of gender-identity ideology. Cox and O'Malley examine what it means when trained therapists — professionals bound by ethical codes of care — express sentiments of that kind openly and without apparent professional consequence. For Irish clients who depend on the counselling sector, the notion that ideological capture can reach this depth is genuinely alarming. Cox also speaks to what is happening inside clinical settings. Clinics, he notes, have moved toward fully affirmative approaches, leaving psychologists and counsellors who wish to explore a client's distress with genuine open-mindedness working against institutional expectation. In Ireland, where access to gender-related clinical services is already limited and under-resourced, the narrowing of what counts as acceptable therapeutic practice has real consequences — particularly for young people in vulnerable periods of their lives. For Irish listeners who work in mental health, study psychology, or have a child navigating gender questions, this episode is a reminder that the pressures Cox describes are not abstract. They are shaping what is taught in Irish universities, what is practised in Irish clinics, and what kind of psychotherapist or counsellor Ireland will produce in the years ahead. Stella O'Malley, as both a practising Irish psychotherapist and a host with direct experience of professional pushback, brings an immediacy to the exchange that makes it essential listening for anyone with a stake in the future of mental health care on this island.
