valjean

I think your question could be interpreted in multiple ways. Are there "aikido therapists" who claim to use aikido as a direct treatment modality for mental illness (however defined)? Haven't heard of this specifically. Are there therapists or psychologists who are interested in/ practicing aikido, who apply their martial arts background in some way to clinical work? There, the answer is surely yes, although that would mean different things to different people.

But perhaps the more interesting question to ask is, are there "aikido-like" principles embedded in some of the major therapeutic schools of intervention, even though those forms of psychotherapy have no direct connection to aikido? There, I think the answer is almost certainly yes. It's not hard to find echoes of aikido concepts in a range of clinical intervention types, including Rogerian therapy, humanistic psychology, systematic desensitization and relaxation therapy (for anxiety disorders), dialectical behavior therapy (for borderline personality), interpersonal therapy, various flavors of psychoanalytic theory... the list goes on and on.

Certainly, the idea of approaching a patient through some combination of irimi and tenkan verbal maneuvers, in order to achieve therapeutic gain in some form, seems to me to be implicit in lots of therapy situations. But in thinking about the relationship between therapy and aikido, a lot depends on how willing we are to reduce physical concepts like "irimi" and "tenkan" to abstractions, and whether the analogies to a clinical setting are particularly useful in adding to insight or effectiveness in psychotherapy.