Professional Biography

Information for professional reference purposes (Updated June 2021)

David Archer, MSW, MFT

is an anti-racist psychotherapist from Montreal, Canada who recognizes that the original name of this unceded territory is “Tiohtià:ke”.

Having worked for over a decade in the field of mental health services, he is keenly aware of the needs of underserved populations including members of the African diaspora (The Maafa), survivors of colonization, and those persons who have experienced intergenerational trauma.

David Archer is an EMDRIA approved EMDR Consultant and course provider. He maintains a full time private practice and he is often recruited to provide consulting services to other therapists and organizations throughout North America. He is a Master of Social Work graduate from McGill University, where he also subsequently graduated from their Couple and Family Therapy program. He is also a registered Marriage and Family Therapist.

His expertise has been influenced by the principles of mindfulness, intersectional feminism, and critical race theory. He is one of the few mental health professionals in Canada who can provide EMDR, Brainspotting, EFT, and other mind-body strategies utilizing memory re-consolidation and working memory taxation methods.

Additional areas of clinical interest include working with individuals who have suffered from PTSD, racial trauma, minority stress, addictions, relational conflict, and eating disorders.

He is also an advocate of LGBTQ, Black, Indigenous, and oppressed people of color around the world.

Mr. Archer is regularly invited to serve on number of panels, workshops, plenary discussions, and was on radio and television. He has a been a guest on several podcasts (you can see them here).

He is the author of Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Confronting Systemic Racism and Healing Racial Trauma , which explains the philosophy behind anti-racist practice and the mental health consequences of racial trauma. It is available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, e-book and audiobook versions.

His second book is called Black Meditation: Ten Practices for Self-Care, Mindfulness, and Self-Determination. Based on principles of mindfulness, it describes 10 practices designed to improve racial awareness and positive self-identity with Black people who may or may not connect with mainstream Eurocentric models of psychotherapy.

His third book is called Racial Trauma Recovery: Healing Our Past Using Rhythm and Processing. This is an integrative clinical framework that describes his primary means of helping clients to heal from social identity based forms of suffering using strategies from diverse modalities as well as the Rhythm and Processing Technique.

The goal? To find the most effective ways to transmute all forms of suffering into wisdom.

Thank you for reading this.