How Activism Is Replacing Clinical Judgment in Psychology - JD Haltigan (#6)
Developmental psychologist J.D. Haltigan joins Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman to examine how ideological pressure has eroded scientific standards within psychology. For Irish listeners, the conversation hits close to home: the same forces reshaping clinical judgment internationally are at work in Irish mental health services, schools and policy circles. Haltigan's account of pathology normalisation, diagnostic confusion and the chilling effect of activism on honest clinical work raises urgent questions about whether Irish psychologists and psychiatrists can still speak freely — or whether the profession here, too, has begun to prioritise ideology over evidence.
J.D. Haltigan is a developmental psychologist who spent years working within academic institutions before stepping away — a decision he discusses with Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman in terms not of defeat but of liberation. His vantage point is valuable precisely because he has worked both inside and outside the system, and what he describes from the inside is sobering: a field that has allowed political pressure to displace the kind of rigorous, evidence-led thinking that clinical psychology depends upon. The shift Haltigan identifies became acute around 2016, when the atmosphere within psychology departments changed markedly. What had once been a discipline oriented towards honest inquiry began to reorganise itself around ideological commitments. The consequences, he argues, are not merely academic. When clinicians are trained in an environment where certain conclusions are effectively forbidden, the damage flows directly into clinical practice — into the consulting rooms where vulnerable people, including children, seek help. One of the episode's most striking concepts is what Haltigan describes as pathology normalisation — a process in which the profession moves away from distinguishing between distress and disorder, and instead frames the task of therapy as one of validating rather than exploring. For Irish mental health professionals navigating a system already under enormous pressure, this framing matters. CAMHS waiting lists are long, resources are stretched, and clinicians working with young people who present with gender distress need the freedom to ask open questions rather than follow a prescribed ideological path. The conversation also takes up the profound effects of social media on child development. Haltigan points to the phenomenon of children constructing multiple online identities as something genuinely new in human experience — and something the psychological profession has been slow to reckon with honestly. For parents and teachers in Ireland, this is immediately recognisable territory. The school counsellor, the GP who sees a distressed teenager, the CAMHS clinician: none of them is well served by a professional literature that has softened its language to avoid controversy. Stella O'Malley, who has spent her career as a psychotherapist in Ireland, brings particular clarity to this conversation. She knows the local landscape — the referral pathways, the institutional pressures, the way professional bodies respond to public debate. When Haltigan describes how empathy, a genuine virtue, became a mechanism for closing down inquiry rather than opening it up, O'Malley recognises something she has seen in the Irish context too. The willingness to sit with uncertainty, to tolerate a patient's distress without rushing to resolve it through diagnosis or affirmation, is precisely the clinical skill that risks being trained out of the next generation of practitioners. Haltigan's decision to leave academia and work independently has, by his account, made real intellectual collaboration possible again. That kind of freedom is not always available to those working within Irish institutions, where professional and social risks remain real. But the conversation he, Stella and Bret are having here is the kind that needs to happen, openly and without self-censorship, if Irish psychology is to serve its patients rather than its politics.
