Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of an article originally published on the author’s Substack Diogenes In Exile on January 13, 2025. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission.
Over the last few months, I embarked on a sobering project: examining the textbooks used to train future therapists. Specifically, I focused on materials assigned in multicultural counseling courses—classes at the heart of a growing ideological crisis in counselor education.
A Quick Recap
For newcomers, counseling has been ideologically overtaken, and one of the indicators that verify this is that the accreditation organization for counselor training programs, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), requires things like mission statements that reflect counseling in a diverse, multicultural and global society with marginalized populations.
CACREP also requires many other things, including a multicultural counseling class in every training program. In my training program, this class was infamous. Starting in orientation, our professors warned us to focus on lots of self-care because the program, especially the multicultural class, was extremely emotionally challenging.
I, like many, if not most people, figured this was because learning to help people with emotional issues would involve being exposed to stories of trauma, angry outbursts, and other challenging behavior from clients that you must learn to tolerate and, over time, appropriately confront.
Lucky for me, I never made it to that class. Being targeted for my Buddhist beliefs and being held to a different standard because of my race made for an experience so unpleasant it changed my life and my plans to become a counselor.
[RELATED: Psychology Has Been Overtaken by a Dangerous and Pervasive Ideology]
The Influence of CACREP and the Textbook Project Origin Story
My efforts to warn future clients, students, and the general public while also calling for reform is what landed me researching textbooks and accreditation standards.
In poking through CACREP standards applying to 472 colleges and universities encompassing 983 degree programs, I happened on the curriculum and pulled that thread. That led me to the textbook Counseling the Culturally Diverse by Derald Sue.
This book presents a manipulative bind for students at the outset, then goes on to present vile racist concepts as a singular truth that must be accepted. It does this while acknowledging that some students seem to delight in watching other classmates “squirm” as they are forced to regurgitate and internalize this material.
A profession that purports to heal mental illness and encounters people when they are emotionally very vulnerable yet is dominated by an ideology that tacitly condones sadism should terrify everyone.
That textbook is by far the most popular one used for the Multicultural Counseling class, turning up as the required text at over 100 different colleges and universities, nearly a quarter of all programs.
But what about the others?
I set out to find out just what books universities are using to satisfy the CACREP requirements, and given that CACREP has requirements for curriculum, just what textbooks CACREP was willing to condone.
So, over the latter half of the fall and most of the holiday break, I looked up the textbooks associated with multicultural counseling classes nationwide. I also pulled down other materials that further illustrate how the CACREP standard shows up in practice.
[RELATED: Federal Funding Shouldn’t Be Going to Woke University Programs]
Disturbing Trends and Surprising Insights in Higher Education
In this pursuit, I also noticed things I didn’t expect. From schools that have closed down to others that have moved, the state of higher education is striking. I’ve seen hundreds of university websites and hunted for class information and textbooks, just like any incoming student would. Some schools make this process much easier than others.
I was also struck by how many colleges and universities have turned to heavily marketing branded shirts, sweats, and tote bags. You name it, these houses of learning will slap a logo on it and sell it.
There were also other trends, like Inclusive Access for textbooks, an absence of Ivys, and an online cottage market for counseling degrees that has some schools rolling over 10 different versions of the same class simultaneously.
Were I ever to go back to higher education as a student, I have definitely learned a thing or two about how to evaluate degree programs, ways you can reveal a better picture of who you will be learning from, and questions you’d want to ask during a visit.
In the coming weeks, I am going dig into these observations. At the same time, I am also going over the meat of what I studied, textbooks for a required class for therapists acknowledged to inspire some students to take delight in watching other classmates “squirm.”
I’ll point this out one more time. This is a class taught by psychology professors and counseling to students who want to become therapists, a profession that extols the benefits of “unconditional positive regard.” To become a therapist, students must endure a class that even the assigned textbook acknowledges inspires some students to take delight in watching other classmates “squirm.” In a word, sadism.
This is a real-life horror show.
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Image: Atlas — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 308975840
