Viewpoint: Therapy and activism
Therapy Today, November 2026

It was late on a Friday evening in August when I found out that Professor Jason Arday had died. Like many, I spent much of that weekend reading articles and heartbroken reflections online. By Monday morning I had a knot in my throat, a stone on my chest and I was exhausted. Opening my laptop and starting my working day felt impossible, but I knew I had to take action to avoid descending into hopelessness.

For me activism is the practice of taking values-led action to refuse and resist present conditions, as imperfect or inconsequential as this may seem. This meant that I prioritised reaching out to colleagues and my wider community and expressing words of care, solidarity and rage while at the same time letting them know that I was available to offer practical support. I continued to take action over the coming weeks and months, using the limited resources I had, to organise community-wide grief gatherings and fundraising to offer ongoing therapeutic groups and to deliver one-to-one crisis counselling.

While I recognised that my actions would never be enough to meet the overwhelming need of the moment, being silent and doing nothing would have felt like being complicit in the tragedy. Despite feeling unsure and afraid, I took incremental steps and mobilised with others, reconciling myself to the grief of not being able to do more. This work took place alongside seeing my clients and supervisees, many of whom wanted to explore their own heartbreak concerning what had happened. While I centred their experiences and their individual responses to the death of Professor Arday, it was also important to acknowledge that I was not standing outside these events as a neutral or unaffected observer. Some clients and supervisees offered me words of support and encouragement, and I received them as a recognition of our common humanity and as an acknowledgment of the impact of navigating a shared world.

Understanding activism

Activists are often stereotyped as those who organise strikes, attend rallies or participate in civil acts of disobedience. While these can be important and effective forms of activism they are reductive interpretations of what is a wide and complex field. When definitions of activism become narrow or policed, and hierarchies define what is politically meaningful work, this undermines the justice that activism is striving to achieve.

In social contexts where there are multiple forms of oppression, activism is often more effective when it can take on many forms to counteract inequality. Everyone holds intersecting identities and dimensions of power and privilege, which shape the kind of activism that is possible. Some cannot protest because they experience chronic pain, while others risk deportation if they are arrested. Others may be more likely to encounter police brutality because they inhabit darker-skinned Black bodies.¹ As activist work can carry consequences, assessing personal capacity and working in complementary ways with others, to distribute the risk, support change work to move forward with greater power and momentum.

Therapists can become activists at any stage of their training or practice and many enter the profession with a history of activism behind them. Some therapists have organised within their communities, participated in trade unions, challenged discrimination in workplaces or campaigned around issues that have affected their own lives. For marginalised trainees, experiencing racism, ableism, homophobia and other forms of oppression during their training can at times lead to engaging in unforeseen activism to resist the unjust conditions that threaten both their learning and wellbeing.

While therapists are often depicted as apolitical and neutral, having the ability to hold the suffering of others is a uniquely transferable skill that underscores both activism and therapeutic work. Supporting others with their mental health, whether in private practice or within services, can also lead to confronting the realities of health inequalities caused by systemic oppression, and becoming politicised may be a natural response to doing therapeutic work.

Understanding lineage

Connecting psychological life with political action is not a novel idea, and there is a long lineage of practitioner-activists, both past and present, working in the UK and internationally. While this lineage is often missed from counselling and psychotherapy curricula, it can be helpful to find others doing this work, to reduce feelings of isolation and to locate therapeutic activism within a broader historical context.

Contemporary examples of activists include Professor Gail Lewis, who trained as a psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapist and is now Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. Professor Lewis describes being ‘schooled by activism’ as a past member of Brixton Black Women’s Group and a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. With a political lens, situated within the Black feminist, socialist and anti-imperialist struggle, Professor Lewis describes this education as generating a ‘practice against the grain’.²

Psychotherapist and Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels is another contemporary activist who has spent much of his career challenging the division between psychotherapy and politics. His concept of the ‘political psyche’ connects the internal therapeutic process with politics and the conditions of the external world. Samuels believes that psychological ideas can deepen our understanding of political life, and his work asks therapists to consider themselves as citizens whose professional practice and values influence wider social structures.³

Helen Bamber’s dual role as psychotherapist and activist, specialising in human rights, left behind a significant legacy. Since her death in 2014 the Helen Bamber Foundation has continued to support and advocate for survivors of trafficking, torture and extreme human cruelty. Bamber’s work was based on the premise that psychological recovery could not be separated from safety, housing, legal protection and fundamental human rights. She built organisations that combined therapeutic care with medical evidence, legal advocacy, welfare support and community building.

Ethical considerations

When considering activism and therapy as relational encounters, power dynamics need to be understood and deconstructed to reduce the possibility of harm. When activism feels personal, urgent and all-encompassing, care needs to be taken to avoid pressuring clients either to share the same commitment to activism or to expect that their politicised action will look the same. In addition, having shared identities does not necessarily equate to shared politics. Even when values might be aligned initially there may be differences of opinion that emerge over time. Part of ethical practice includes assessing where practice boundaries lie, holding in mind the dimensions of self-care, client care and community care.

In this digital age politically engaged practitioners might need to consider how their public activism affects their therapeutic relationships, as writing, social media activity, campaigning or participation in public events could become information that is easily accessible and in the public domain. Exploring the implications of visibility and communicating candidly about them can be helpful to support clients to make informed choices. Working to cultivate trust and safety within the therapeutic relationship also matters to be able to meaningfully navigate these conversations. Even with awareness and the implementation of the necessary precautions, visible activism may inadvertently lead clients to compare themselves or fear that they are not doing enough. Therapists have a responsibility to find appropriate and supportive ways to address this.

On a macro level activism unsettles unjust systems by questioning and resisting dominant culture. In an interpersonal context relational activism behaves in similar ways, resisting the silencing and violence that can take place when uncomfortable topics are not addressed. This kind of activism requires therapists to develop a capacity for discomfort and, where appropriate, to support our clients to do the same. It takes courage to engage in system change, and these relational aspects are an integral part of building a new world. When harm or mistakes have taken place, being willing to acknowledge and address them, and to meet any feelings of shame or fear that might arise, sustain and fortify client relationships as well as any relationships within activist movements.

Politicised practice can bring additional layers of complexity that may be less common in those who practise with a more neutral stance, yet the lineage of activist-therapists illustrates that working in this way is not only possible, it can positively impact the lives of many.

Getting support

Supervision is vital for activist-therapists who might be facing specific challenges due to the personal, relational and ethical tensions of therapy, activism and the places where they intersect. While supervisors, like clients, don’t need to be engaged in activism themselves, or be involved in the same kind of activism as their supervisee, a supervisory space where politicised perspectives are welcome can still be supportive and affirming.

When supervisors understand the lived reality of activism and are willing to interrogate power (both systemically and interpersonally), including within the supervisory context, the supervisory relationship is better able to respond to the social context within which it is situated. Without this, supervision may reproduce the silencing or marginalisation the therapist is attempting to challenge. Supervisors might also need to attune and respond to fluctuating levels of risk and safeguarding complexities, especially in cases where the supervisee and the client are both experiencing systemic harm because of their marginalised identities. Navigating the supervisory relationship shares many parallels with client work, such as leaning into courage and having uncomfortable conversations. As activism can be integral to someone’s identity, compassionate and non-judgmental supervision can be reparative, supporting a therapist to reflect critically, sustain their activism and practise ethically.

Sustaining work

There is extensive evidence that therapists are vulnerable to burnout and compassion fatigue, characterised by emotional exhaustion, reduced empathy, intrusive thoughts, depersonalisation, psychological distress and sleep disturbances.⁴ A growing body of research has documented burnout among activists, where these symptoms overlap with feelings of intense guilt and loss of purpose, which can make stepping away from this meaningful work difficult.⁵

There are relatively few studies of the experiences of those in both activist and therapist roles, but research on therapists engaged in social justice work suggests that resistance and advocacy can be both energising and emotionally and physically demanding. These practitioners may therefore experience both the sustaining and depleting effects of politicised practice alongside the cumulative emotional, political and relational demands associated with therapeutic work and social justice.⁶ As stopping either therapeutic or activist work might not be feasible or desirable in times of financial and social precarity, politicised practitioners, and those in their communities, need to develop ways to sustain these workstreams. Considering lessons from Black feminist activists, self-preservation is a political act and finding ways to rest and access collective care is an act of resistance in itself.

Understanding risk

Therapists who are also activists work within a complex landscape of risk. Political action may lead to a practitioner being arrested, injured, publicly identified or required to attend court, and they may be unable to see clients, protect continuity of care or maintain their income. These possibilities require ongoing reflection and contingency planning, including clear arrangements for unexpected absence, secure communication, appropriate clinical cover and honest discussions in supervision. However, avoiding activism is not an entirely risk-free position either because for some practitioners remaining silent in the face of injustice may create moral distress, erode their sense of integrity and produce a painful separation between their professional identity and values. Concealing an understanding of power, suffering and injustice may also leave some feeling inauthentic and affect the quality of their work.

There are community-wide risks as well. When therapists present their work as neutral or detached from social conditions they may inadvertently individualise distress and deny the effects of racism, poverty, displacement, state violence or other forms of oppression on mental health. Managing and making sense of these tensions invites practitioners to increase risk-awareness without avoiding or minimising the effect of their actions. This means identifying the possible harm of acting, not acting and acting without adequate preparation.

In politically unstable times therapists may need to increase their tolerance for uncertainty and calculated risk while remaining accountable to clients, colleagues and communities. Risk tolerance does not mean recklessness, martyrdom or assuming that everyone should participate in a visible protest. Activism takes many forms, including teaching, mutual aid, advocacy, writing, funding, witnessing, institutional challenges and beyond. Considering whether activism is nourishing or depleting, and whether politicised work preserves clients’ autonomy, privacy, trust and emotional safety, remain key questions.

The weeks following the death of Professor Arday continued to be full of grief for me and those around me. I had many more encounters with hopelessness and exhaustion, and moments where I worried that my work wasn’t even scratching the surface. Feeling the magnitude of this loss was overwhelming at times, along with the global anti-Blackness within which this loss was situated. The risks and reprisals in response to this activism continued as internet trolls stormed our virtual grief gatherings, causing additional trauma to those who had attended to mourn and to be heard by others. Among all of this is the memory of all the practitioner-activists who have dedicated their lives to their community, and on whose shoulders we stand, with appreciation for everything they have done and continue to do for our collective freedoms.