Who Gets to Be a Therapist?

Weston Allen knew he wasn’t going to be popular with his professors before he even started his master’s in counseling at the University of Virginia. Weeks before the program began, Weston, who has bowel disease and dyslexia, had filed a civil rights complaint against the school about the lack of adequate disability accommodation in student housing. Two years later, he is now about to graduate from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, having left UVA, he says, because of the leadership at its counseling program. Weston, and other students like him across the United States, claim that such programs are using an official process of “gatekeeping” to weed out anyone who doesn’t match preconceived ideas about how a therapist should be.