Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast.

I am your host, Rafael Menguall, and I am so excited to be joined by Andrew Hartz, who is the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, a clinical psychologist.

And the Open Therapy Institute is actually really cool because it publishes, as I understand it,

the very first peer-reviewed journal on Substack.

And I believe it's called the Open Inquiry in Mental Health Journal.

Is that right?

No, it's just Open Inquiry in Mental Health.

Open inquiry in mental health.

Well, that's amazing. You're also the co-host of the Open Therapy podcast with our colleague Rob Henderson and Megan Dawn. That's right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I want to start with just asking you about the Open Therapy Institute, what it is and why you felt the need to found an organization

like that?

Yeah, so the mental health fields like academia and a lot of other professions skews

pretty hard to the left.

About 90% of therapists lean left, and the research and training is even more.

So I think it's like 17 psychology professors are liberal for every conservative.

So it really shapes research and training a lot and practice.

Over the period, like from like 2014, 2015, going up to 2020,

I think that political bias really reached a fever pitch as it did

in a lot of professions. And I was just seeing really bad practices, patients being pathologized

for their views. I even wrote in Wall Street Journal about some incidents of patients being

turned away from therapy because because their views on issues and

they were labeled racist.

Meaning, like, told that they can't be treated or...

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