A leading academic has argued that the study of mental health and child development has been significantly weakened by the rise of progressive social justice ideology in research, calling for a fundamental reset in how the field approaches the causes of psychological disorders.
John Haltigan, PhD, a researcher at the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science, published the argument in the journal Theory and Society, contending that developmental psychopathology, a field that examines how mental health conditions emerge across the lifespan, has been steered away from rigorous science since 2020.
The field was formally established in the early 1980s and built a strong reputation for exploring both biological and social factors in mental illness. Landmark research from that era examined the genetic roots of antisocial behaviour and the evolutionary basis of stress responses in children, producing findings that shaped clinical practice for decades.
Haltigan argues that this balanced approach collapsed in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020, when a wave of activist scholarship took hold across the social and medical sciences. Research increasingly attributed mental health problems to systemic social forces while largely setting aside genetic and biological explanations, a shift he describes as politically motivated rather than scientifically justified.
The paper points to specific examples of this trend in prominent journals, including studies framing psychological disorders primarily through the lens of race and structural inequality. Haltigan contends that omitting biological variables from these models does not just weaken their findings but makes their conclusions scientifically invalid.
A further concern raised in the article is the movement to abandon established diagnostic concepts on ideological grounds. The journal formerly known as the Journal of Abnormal Psychology was renamed partly because the word “abnormal” was considered stigmatising, while other researchers have called for dropping terms such as the “dark triad”, a well-established grouping of personality traits linked to harmful behaviour. Haltigan warns that eroding the concept of normality undermines the very foundation upon which mental health research is built.
He also raises concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion mandates being embedded into academic training programmes, citing a university research methods course that introduced an entire new section on DEI between 2019 and 2022 without any corresponding increase in scientific content.
The article calls for what Haltigan terms a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology. This approach would restore the classical biopsychosocial model, which holds that mental health is shaped by biological, psychological and social factors working together. It would also ensure that researchers are free to investigate genetic and biological contributions to mental illness without institutional pressure to avoid those questions.
Haltigan acknowledges the challenge of pursuing such a reform in an academic environment he describes as dominated by progressive social constructivist thinking, but argues it is necessary if mental health research is to retain scientific credibility and genuinely serve patients.