Are Therapists Crazy? Andrew Hartz's quest for sanity in clinical psychology

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Andrew Hartz is a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, an organization dedicated to overcoming sociopolitical bias in the mental health field. He was last here in 2023 and returns now to talk about what's changed—and what hasn't—in the mental-health landscape since then. We discuss the rise of "everyday dissociation," how screens and Zoom relationships dull presence and feeling, and why talk therapy can miss the mark when the problem is disconnection from the body. Andrew also explains how anxiety became a form of social currency (from dating to testing accommodations), the overuse of diagnostic labels online, and why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a saner path than endless self-rumination.

Guest Bio:
Andrew Hartz is the Founder, President, and Executive Director of the Open Therapy Institute. He's also a practicing clinical psychologist and was formerly a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University, where he also completed his Ph.D. He's been featured in the New York Times, on The Dr. Drew Podcast, on Dr. Phil Primetime, and in The Free Press and has written about political issues and mental health for outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Discourse, Heterodox Academy, the New York Post, and Quillette.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What used to happen was when people took abnormal psych in undergrad or they took their first clinical class in graduate school,
0:08.0	they would diagnose themselves with everything and they would diagnose their friends with everything.
0:11.0	And they would kind of go crazy with this.
0:13.0	And it would take, it was just such a cliche.
0:15.0	I mean, they would just say in the first day of class, everybody thinks they have everything.
0:18.0	You don't chill out. Just learn about this stuff.
0:22.1	And like, as you practice, you start to learn what they really are. But kind of what happened,
0:27.5	I think, with the internet is like abnormal psych is just online now. And there's nobody kind of
0:33.0	providing that check of like, no, you don't have everything.
0:40.2	Welcome to The Unpeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. It's a cliche to say that
0:46.3	all therapists are crazy. It's also pretty unfair, but is there a kernel of truth there?
0:53.2	My guest today is psychologist Andrew Hartz.
0:56.9	He's not crazy, as far as I can see, but he is the founder of the Open Therapy Institute.
1:02.7	That's an organization he started in 2023 to address what he saw as a growing monoculture in the
1:09.5	mental health profession. Now, this doesn't have to do with
1:12.3	therapists being crazy. I was kidding a little bit there. But, you know, I think a lot of us have
1:17.6	noticed that in the mental health field, there is a kind of pervasive ideology that is
1:23.6	notably left-wing, perhaps a little bit dismissive, if not discriminatory,
1:30.3	against more conservative views. We've talked about that a lot on this podcast, and it's a
1:36.2	question that I think is more out in the open and is quite dynamic. Andrew was last on the show
1:42.7	shortly after OTI launched, and two years later, it's grown
1:46.8	into a genuine alternative network for clinicians as well as patients. So in this conversation,
	...

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