In just six months, the Trump administration did what most professionals in the mental health field were too afraid to ask for — told the truth.
This is not the fragile, politicized version of "truth" we've been spoon–fed for years. I'm talking about biological truth. Clinical truth. Objective truth. The kind you're not allowed to say out loud in board meetings, supervision groups, or licensing trainings without risking your reputation.
The reset has begun—and it started with the stroke of a pen.
Here are the five Executive Orders that put a dent in the ideological cult that's overtaken psychology:
1. Executive Order 14168—Pronouns Are Optional, Not Compulsory
Federal workplaces are no longer required to enforce "preferred pronouns." Therapists working under federal contracts—including VA clinics, correctional facilities, and school systems—are no longer expected to conform to "new normals." You cannot be punished for refusing to participate in someone else's fantasy. Common sense now has federal protection.
2. Executive Order 14168—Sex Means Male or Female. Period.
This same order reestablished the legal definition of "sex" in federal law as biological male or female, as determined at birth. No more circular definitions, no more open–ended nonsense. It's a clean break from the gender ideology that has infected everything from housing policy to clinical training. In legal terms, reality now has standing.
3. Executive Order 14183—The Military Is for Readiness, Not Identity Politics
The Department of Defense was ordered to remove individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria and reinstate fitness–for–service standards based on biological sex. This ended the military's use as an ideological lab—and reaffirmed that mental health diagnoses aren't blank checks for rewriting biology.
4. Executive Order 14187—No More Federal Funding for Child Mutilation
This one matters more than most. EO 14187 pulled all federal funding for chemical and surgical "gender transitions" for minors, including Medicaid, CHIP, TRICARE, and even insurance plans for federal employees. The era of funding trauma in the name of care is over. And the effects were immediate: in the wake of this order, major hospitals like Stanford and Children's Hospital Los Angeles shut down their pediatric gender clinics, citing loss of federal support. If you're a clinician who works with children, you no longer have to wonder if you'll be investigated for doing your job responsibly. This executive order gives you cover to protect, not affirm.
5. Executive Orders 14151 & 14173—DEI Is Dead (At Least Federally)
The federal government is no longer requiring DEI training, DEI contracts, or DEI compliance for agencies or contractors. The APA and licensing boards may still push it, but the precedent is set: ideological conformity is not a condition of employment or care. This opens the door for mental health professionals to practice based on ethics and evidence, not activist checklists.
These aren't just administrative tweaks—they're a gut punch to the ideology that's replaced reality in our field. For too long, clinicians have been forced to lie, affirm, and comply—not because science demanded it, but because the culture did.
These executive orders shift the conversation. They restore the legal backbone therapists need to do their job ethically with a baseline of reality.
These executive orders are a start, not a solution. To understand how we arrived at this point—how psychology became a mouthpiece for ideology and a sanctuary for delusion—we must revisit the roots of the field itself.
Psychology didn't suddenly lose its way. It was built on compromises, myths, and power plays; most professionals were never taught to question, and until we confront them, nothing we do in session will be honest.
What we're seeing today—the erasure of biological sex, the forced affirmation of delusion, the glorification of identity over responsibility—didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the result of a slow, deliberate transformation. Psychology, once a field concerned with the soul, has become a cult of affirmation, a factory of diagnoses, and a spiritual void dressed up as science.
To restore it, we need more than policy. We need truth, and that begins with exposing some foundational myths that have shaped psychology into what it is today.
Psychology is not physics. It's not chemistry. It's not a hard science governed by universal laws. From the beginning, psychology has been a blend of ideology, philosophy, and social engineering—selectively branded as "science" when it serves the interests of institutional power.
Psychology emerged in the 19th century alongside pseudoscientific fads, such as phrenology and mesmerism. While Wilhelm Wundt is credited with founding experimental psychology in 1879, his lab was more interested in reaction times than in the complexity of the human condition. He reduced people to stimulus–response machines. The soul was not measurable, so it was dismissed as unmeasurable.
Fast forward to B.F. Skinner, who believed that all behavior could be conditioned, viewed humans as programmable objects with no free will. No conscience. Just outcomes. Psychology was never spiritually neutral. It was always a tool.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault explained in Madness and Civilization, modern institutions didn't free the mentally ill—they redefined deviance as disorder, then claimed exclusive authority to manage it.
Sigmund Freud is still treated as the grandfather of modern therapy, but very few are willing to say what needs to be said: Freud wasn't a prophet. He was a man with unresolved obsessions, a shaky grasp on objectivity, and a long track record of intellectual dishonesty.
In his early work, Freud believed his patients' accounts of sexual abuse, which became known as the Seduction Theory. But when too many of these reports implicated respected men in society, Freud abandoned the theory. He decided the abuse hadn't happened at all—the women were fantasizing. The Oedipus complex was born. And with it, a culture of pathologizing the victim.
As Jeffrey Masson wrote in The Assault on Truth, Freud's decision wasn't scientific—it was political. He knew the consequences of accusing elite men of incest and chose to preserve his career over the truth.
This single move delayed public and professional recognition of child sexual abuse for decades.
Freud later broke his own rules by psychoanalyzing his daughter Anna over 300 times. While there's no concrete evidence of abuse, there's no question this was a grotesque boundary violation—one that modern ethics boards would rightly condemn. Yet Freud is still canonized; his theories are still taught as gospel in graduate schools.
The truth? Much of modern psychology was built on one man's compromises, projections, and unchecked power.
We've all heard it: "Mental illness is just like diabetes." It's the line fed to clients, clinicians, and the public—a convenient metaphor to reduce complex suffering into manageable, medical terms.
But it's not true.
There are no biological markers for most DSM diagnoses. No blood tests for borderline. No empirical evidence for depression. The DSM itself is a compilation of symptoms selected by committees. This isn't objective science—it's taxonomy built on consensus, not causation.
Thomas Szasz called this out decades ago in The Myth of Mental Illness, arguing that psychiatry pathologizes moral and existential problems to justify control and coercion.
And he was right.
So much of what happens in the therapy room isn't based on hard science—it's based on the therapist's own unresolved experiences. We're taught, over and over again, to monitor for countertransference and transference—but most of us don't do it. Hidden agendas creep in, shaped by past trauma, unmet needs, or unprocessed pain. And we project that onto our clients. All of it gets legitimized through the DSM—a book not built on objective science, but on clinical impressions and committee votes.
Enter MKUltra—the dirty secret no grad school professor wants to talk about.
From 1953 to 1973, the CIA, with help from psychiatrists and psychologists, conducted illegal mind control experiments on American citizens. LSD, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock—all tested on people without their consent.
Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, ran some of the most abusive programs at McGill University, aiming to "wipe" patients' identities clean and rebuild them from scratch.
This wasn't fringe. This was institutional. This was psychology willingly used as a weapon of the state.
And no one was held accountable.
Even now, psychology continues to partner with systems of control—from designing post–9/11 "enhanced interrogation" tactics to shaping corporate and campus "wellness" programs that function more like ideological reeducation. HR departments and university counseling centers now use therapy language to enforce compliance, punish dissent, and pathologize disagreement. The language has changed. The methods have been modernized. But the spirit of obedience remains.
Since the 1950s, pharmaceutical companies have had the psychiatric field on a leash. The "chemical imbalance" theory? Marketing. There is no solid evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin. But once the idea took hold, drugs like Prozac became bestsellers.
The DSM expanded accordingly, with new disorders created to match newly developed medications. ADHD. Bipolar II. Social anxiety. The problem isn't that these struggles don't exist; the problem is that they persist. The problem is that they've been monetized.
As Joanna Moncrieff points out in The Myth of the Chemical Cure, many psychiatric drugs don't correct imbalances—they create altered mental states that sometimes suppress symptoms, often at high cost.
At the same time, psychology has become a soft theocracy—a secular religion with its language, rituals, and dogmas. You must affirm identities. You must reject binary thinking. You must avoid "harm" by never questioning delusion. Those who refuse? Canceled, unlicensed, deplatformed.
These myths have shaped everything—from how therapists are trained to what clients believe about themselves to how our society determines what's real.
We now have a field that:
- Treats reality as offensive
- Confuses compassion with affirmation
- Replaces healing with obedience
Until we face these lies, no executive order will be enough. If we want to restore psychology, we need more than better laws. We need courage—we need to speak the truth in a profession that has been trained to whisper it, or not say it at all.
So here we are.
After decades of ideological drift, a six–month political course correction has pulled psychology, if only slightly, back toward solid ground. For those of us in this field, these executive orders weren't just policies. They were signals. Lifelines. Permission to speak what we've always known: this field has lost its mind.
The good news? We're not crazy for noticing.
The bad news? This isn't over.
Undoing the rot requires more than political will. It requires clinical courage, philosophical clarity, and spiritual spine. And that burden falls on us—the therapists, counselors, educators, and clinicians who still believe in truth.
Let's be honest. Psychology hasn't just been hijacked—it's been hollowed out. Once concerned with meaning, conscience, and moral transformation, it now functions as a bureaucratic machine. Feel something? Label it. Behave differently? Pathologize it. Struggle with delusion? Affirm it.
Therapists have been transformed from guides into validators, from witnesses into enforcers.
The message has shifted from "Let's understand your suffering" to "Let's reframe your identity to match your pain."
That isn't healing. That's affirming.
We don't need more theories. We don't need another diagnostic label. We don't need to run back to Freud, Skinner, or the DSM committee.
What we need is a reckoning and a return to fundamental questions:
- What are your values?
- What do you believe to be the objective reality?
- How do you take responsibility for your life?
- Does God play a role in your healing?
- Where do you develop your morals?
These aren't "clinical questions." These are moral, spiritual, and philosophical ones. And if your training told you otherwise, it lied.
You cannot treat the human person without a working theory of truth.
Psychology will not fix itself from the inside. It will double down, issue new codes of ethics, and pathologize anyone who challenges its sacred cows.
While they gatekeep access, we'll build the exit. We need new institutions. New directories. New platforms. New alliances.
Create your CEUs. Start your practice. Teach your students. Refer to your network. Whatever you decide to do, keep your baseline at objective reality.
As a therapist, I will not affirm lies. I will not replace reality with ideology. I will not silence my conscience for job security. And I will not abandon the people who come to me for help by feeding them a script that makes their pain more comfortable but keeps them stuck.
I will treat the human soul, not a diagnosis. And I will speak the truth—even when the field refuses to.
If you're reading this and it resonates with you, consider it your invitation. You're not the only one. The field isn't lost, but it is fractured. And the ones who still have clarity are being called to rebuild it from the ground up.
This is your call to make therapy sane again.
Not with slogans, but with courage. With truth. And with a deep, unapologetic return to the belief that reality still matters.
Truth is at the beginning of healing.
Soad Tabrizi is a licensed marriage and family therapist in eight states with a private practice based in Orange County, CA, www.soadtabrizi.com. Soad is also the founder of www.ConservativeCounselors.com.
