THE DISORDERED DO NOT NEED ACCEPTANCE, BUT CURING:

Despite the furious divisions and disagreements riving the mental-health industries, they do agree on one thing: Mental-health care can and should be ethically neutral. Moral transgressions, convictions, and decisions are none of the therapist's business; therapists should leave matters of conscience to the client. At most, therapists will "help" clients "clarify their values." A therapist must not try to "impose values," and certainly not evaluate, nor attempt to remedy, patients' moral shortcomings. The "nonjudgmental therapist" stands as an undisputed imperative of mental-health practice.

In one sense, this describes therapy fairly accurately: therapists generally refuse to pass moral judgment or take clients' moral deficiencies as objects of treatment. In another, it is blatantly false: all schools of thought and their therapists smuggle into care notions of what counts as proper thought and behavior--but they do it without moral argument or justification. In both senses, as we shall see, therapy has pursued ethical neutrality into a moral morass.

Given the near-panicked announcements of a mental-health crisis saturating the media, and clarion calls for more access to mental-health care, this is not a trivial matter. Meeting a mental-health crisis with yet more moral confusion cannot be good. Therapists cripple their own effectiveness, undermine patients' moral lives--hence their lives--and contribute to the unraveling of society rather than bringing the best resources of the scientific and scholarly disciplines to bear on wellbeing, all in pursuit of a confused ideal.

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