How Activism Is Replacing Clinical Judgment in Psychology - JD Haltigan (#6)
Developmental psychologist J.D. Haltigan sits down with Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman to examine something that rarely gets named plainly: the transformation of psychology from a science into an advocacy project. Haltigan traces how ideological pressure — accelerating sharply after 2016 — eroded diagnostic rigour, normalised pathology in the name of inclusion, and pushed clinicians who asked hard questions to the margins. As a practising psychologist who has watched his own field change around him, Bret Alderman brings pointed professional weight to a guest whose experience mirrors the very dynamic under discussion.
J.D. Haltigan is the kind of guest that makes a conversation like this work. A developmental psychologist who spent years inside academic institutions before choosing to work outside them, he comes to this discussion with both the expertise to read the clinical literature and the hard-won freedom to say plainly what it shows. Sitting across from Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman — themselves practitioners who have watched their respective fields shift beneath their feet — Haltigan describes a profession that has been quietly reshaped from within, and a professional culture that now treats certain questions as too dangerous to ask. The turning point, as Haltigan tells it, was not sudden. But somewhere around 2016, the ambient pressure inside academic psychology moved from manageable to overwhelming. What had previously been a field that prized methodological rigour and diagnostic precision began reorganising itself around different values: empathy as a professional virtue, inclusion as an institutional goal, and a growing suspicion of any framework that risked making patients feel pathologised. The problem, as Haltigan and Alderman work through together, is that diagnosing and treating mental health conditions requires exactly the kind of categorical thinking that the new institutional culture treats as stigmatising. The concept of pathology normalisation sits at the heart of the episode. Haltigan draws a careful line between the genuine, necessary work of destigmatising mental illness — helping people seek help without shame — and the more recent slide into treating all unusual presentations as simply part of natural human variation. When that line disappears, he argues, the clinician's ability to actually help vulnerable people disappears with it. Children bear the cost of this confusion most acutely: a generation growing up online, constructing multiple identities across digital platforms, arriving at clinics with presentations that a less ideologically constrained profession would examine far more carefully. The discussion of social media and child development is one of the most striking stretches of the episode. Haltigan describes how near-constant online immersion has fundamentally altered what childhood means, and how the multiple, shifting identities children perform in digital spaces interact with genuine psychological vulnerability in ways that are only beginning to be understood. For a podcast that takes seriously the medicalisation of distressed young people, this thread is essential context rather than a digression. What gives the conversation its particular texture is that both Haltigan and Alderman know this world from the inside. Alderman practises clinically; Haltigan spent his career in the academic infrastructure that trains and credentialled the next generation of clinicians. When Haltigan describes the intellectual freedom he found by stepping outside that system — and the unexpected collaborations that followed — it reads less as a career anecdote and more as a case study in what becomes possible once institutional loyalty is no longer the price of professional honesty. Stella O'Malley brings her characteristic directness to the parts of the conversation that touch on the feminisation of the field — the way a profession now predominantly female has, paradoxically, adopted a form of emotional reasoning that may not be serving the patients it is meant to help. It is the kind of uncomfortable observation that this podcast consistently makes room for, and that most professional forums do not.
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