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The consulting room is supposed to be the one place where a person in pain can expect to be heard without political litmus tests. Since October 7 that contract has been quietly shredded in parts of Australia’s mental health system. Jewish patients are being told, directly or by implication, that their trauma is suspect because of their identity and their connection to Israel.
One woman, T, had worked with her therapist for years through family crises. After October 7 the therapist emailed to say she had been “impressed” by pro-Palestinian activists and now felt troubled by T’s “very being”.
When asked what this meant, the therapist replied: “Your Jewishness.”
Another patient, N, spent a year doing trauma work only to be told by her therapist that she belonged to a cultural lineage “perpetrating the greatest violence of our time” and that he could not “leave my human self behind” when she spoke of Jewish safety in Australia, which, in fact, sounds precisely as if he had.
A third, S, returned after missing sessions in shock and was met with a debate about the causes of Palestinian suffering while her own anguish was minimised.
This is one of several accounts that have come to me in my role as a senior psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist since October 7, 2023. A small number of anecdotes, granted, but consistent and unsettling, pointing to a new form of clinical failure. How common it is, I cannot say.
We can take a pretty good guess. Even once is too common, but the sheer weight of evidence of the pervasiveness of antisemitism in the medical profession in this country is undeniable. These are not isolated outbursts.
Nor are they confined to psychotherapy. Two Muslim nurses in a Sydney hospital were recorded openly bragging that they would ‘kill Jews’ while on duty. Multiple Muslim doctors in both the UK and Australia have been suspended or investigated for antisemitic statements and behaviour. In one Sydney hospital a Bondi massacre victim had her name tag quietly altered to a ‘less Jewish’ version, supposedly for her own protection from the very staff meant to care for her.
These are not fringe anecdotes. They are symptoms of a health system that has imported attitudes it refuses to confront.
No official figures exist on the percentage of Muslims now working in Australia’s hospitals and clinics. What is clear from everyday observation is that the workforce has shifted dramatically through mass immigration. Many Australians will tell you that it’s almost impossible to find a clinic where many, if not most, of the clinicians have Middle Eastern names and hijabs are everywhere. This is because, for decades, policymakers and big business have shrugged.
The same politicians who dismantled assimilation in favour of multiculturalism now act surprised when the attitudes of the countries of origin, including raw antisemitism, arrive with the migrants. As one observer put it, the policy was naive and the demographics are now destiny. In 1970 there were roughly 50,000 people of Middle Eastern ancestry in Australia. By 2021 the figure had reached 800,000. That change did not come with a corresponding insistence on Australian values or rejection of imported hatreds.
The mental health professions have proven especially vulnerable. Therapists lean heavily left. When an ideological framework dominates, dissent or even simple attachment to Jewish identity gets reframed as moral failure. ‘Liberation psychology’ and ‘decolonising therapy’ movements explicitly tell practitioners to treat connection to Israel as suspect and to centre Palestinian narratives in the consulting room. The result is exactly what the cases show: patients in acute distress being lectured or abandoned because their suffering does not fit the approved hierarchy of victimhood.
The same pattern appears in institutional responses. Medical colleges expressed sympathy for Gaza but not for Jewish Australians or the victims of October 7. Hospitals and regulators have been slow to act on complaints from Jewish staff and patients. The message is consistent: Jewish pain is politically inconvenient and therefore optional.
History has a harsh lesson for us here: the medical professions were one of the most likely to join the NSDAP, and the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. But this is not old-fashioned Jew-hatred dressed in swastikas. It is the respectable, progressive version that treats Jews as collectively guilty for the actions of a country most have never lived in. It is the version that allows clinicians to believe they are acting with integrity while they pathologise their patients’ identity. And it is made possible by a political class that spent decades importing populations with ingrained and extreme vile views on Jews, Israel and Western values, then refused to demand assimilation.
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has the chance to name this clearly. When therapists and nurses start viewing Jewish patients as the enemy rather than people in need of care, the failure is not just clinical. It is civilisational. The politicians who created the conditions for this through naive multiculturalism and demographic transformation now owe the country an honest reckoning, not another round of platitudes about diversity.
