Decolonial Mental Health

Educational resources, articles, and opportunities to deepen a collective practice of mental health that challenges and resists all systems of oppression, including colonialism and imperialism

 

TRANSFORMATIVE MENTAL HEALTH AND COLLECTIVE Liberation

“By centering the most marginalized, we begin to craft antidotes to all the forms of ill-health made manifest in a society based on war, impoverishment, exploitation, racism, heterosexism, and colonialism. By supporting those most impacted in the healing process, our pain can be transformed into a powerful force for transforming our entire society.”  

– founding principles of IDHA

IDHA is in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand against decades of occupation, dispossession, and colonial violence by the Israeli government. The occupation attacks the bodies and minds of individuals, tears holes in the wider social fabric, and displaces the collective identity of the Palestinian diaspora. We uplift the call for life by the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, who share that “siege is not only a material and economic reality, it also carries a heavy psychological toll, perpetrating emotional hardships, devastation, anxieties, terrorization, and desperation, leaving our people with no possibilities for life.”

IDHA’s vision is one of collective healing and liberation. This is not possible without Palestinian healing and liberation. We reject binary notions that contend that the liberation of one group must come at the expense of another. We root in history, which teaches us that the way we all get free is by centering those most impacted by trauma and violence. As a transformative mental health training institute, our work is grounded in an understanding that healing requires a critical consciousness of multiple intersecting systems of oppression and the impact our society has on our bodies, minds, and communities. We cannot talk about “mental health,” “care,” or “healing” without explicitly naming – and actively working to dismantle – colonialism and imperialism. This work is not, and has never been, apolitical.

As care workers, we know trauma can be passed down between generations and echo through history. As survivors, we understand that everyone is capable of perpetuating oppression, even those of us who have been wounded. As activists, we analyze institutional power to identify and unpack the systems that create the internal lived realities for oppressed people daily. And as practitioners of radical imagination, we know that these cycles of harm can be interrupted and decolonial futures can be co-created.

Global solidarity is healing. We call on mental health providers and activists to speak, organize, and act against a genocide that poses major ethical concerns to the field, and undermines our collective humanity. The mental health professions are rooted in, and continue to uphold, racist and settler colonial ideologies, but it is possible to reimagine care work for what it is and always has been: an integral part of the struggle against political, legal, and social norms that create and maintain racial and ethnic supremacy; a commitment to elevating those most impacted; and a vision for a more just society. 

We mourn the loss of all life, and acknowledge the profound suffering experienced by Palestinian and Jewish people, and so many others around the world. With grief in our hearts, we remind our community: Another world is possible.

IDHA Resources

palestinian liberation panel

On Monday, December 11, 2023, IDHA, the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), and USA-Palestine Mental Health Network (USA-PMHN) hosted a virtual panel conversation with mental health providers creating opportunities for solidarity with Palestinian liberation through their roles. The panel was moderated by Brianna Suslovic and featured panelists Vivian Abouallol, Gina Ali, Roula Hajjar, Melody Li, Christine Schmidt, and Lara Sheehi.

You can access the recording on YouTube, as well as the closed caption transcript and follow-up document with resources.

Enroll in the self-paced course Grounding in Grief for free

As we witness ongoing state violence and oppression, IDHA is offering our self-paced course Grounding in Grief: Interrupting Overwhelm with Embodiment and Ritual for free to anyone who is looking to engage in politicized learning/unlearning, embodiment, and ritual. Click here to access the course.

To resist further disconnection from self and others, we must name and work with natural responses to immense and prolonged societal violence. Though Western frameworks seek to separate psychology from the realms of physiology and spirituality, this compartmentalization represses our most basic needs, leading to burn-out, overwhelm, and shame. This class explores how grief can serve as a teacher, an assertion of our collective humanity. It challenges the pressure to neglect these parts of self, moving through practices rooted in somatics and ritual that offer pathways to transmute grief and ground in deepened connection and choice. Participants will be guided through feeling into what has been lost, and what we might build into the future, if we can sit inside the generative power of grief — mourning this moment and resourcing ourselves to create space for liberation.

Histories of decolonial, liberatory mental health

We put together an educational resource on decolonial and liberatory approaches to mental health on Instagram, inspired by lessons within the recently-launched Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum, taught by Anjali Nath Upadhyay from Liberation Spring.

Mental health systems have a long history of reducing suffering to medical explanations, ignoring underlying and interconnected root causes. So much of what is labeled as “care” invisibilizes the harms of oppression, pathologizing its impacts. Oppression and violence contribute directly to mental health concerns. Only decolonial approaches can bring us closer to liberation and healing.

In times of disruption and crisis, we can look to luminaries within our movements who situated their analysis and practice within an explicitly politicized and economic context, offering critiques of imperialism and colonialism. This includes decolonial psychiatry and liberation psychology, and the work of Dr. Franz Fanon and Dr. Ignacio Martin Baro.

To learn more about these topics, check out our recent interview with Anjali Nath Upadhyay.

ONGOING educational series

As we push towards decolonial understandings of healing and pain, it's essential that we draw upon the ancestors, scholars, and healers who have paved a path for a more liberatory future. In an ongoing educational series via Instagram, we draw upon work from Black and decolonial psychology/psychiatry to bring more visibility to the unseen wounds of colonial violence among Palestinian and other occupied peoples.

This series is developed in collaboration with Dr. Evan Auguste, IDHA Board member, scholar, and professor whose work examines how the U.S.’s history of anti-Blackness has shaped psychological realities both in and outside of the country’s borders. He is the director of the A.S.I.L.I. Collective, a research group whose work focuses broadly on addressing the mental health consequences of structural anti-Blackness through the lens of Black liberation psychology.

The first post in the series honors the work of Dr. Frantz Fanon and Dr. Ibrahim Makkawi to help us name the wounds of colonial and racialized oppression and articulate how we can challenge our commitments as care workers and healers to further the material project of liberation. We close with resources and recommendations for further reading, including work by scholars Shawn Utsey, Mark Bolden, Andrae Brown, Helen Neville, Lou Turner, and the CURCUM Collective for those interested in incorporating these concepts into practice.

The second post draws upon the work of scholars Linda James Myers and Devin Atallah to frame Palestinian families' seeds of hope. We also highlight the brilliance of the CURCUM Collective, a grassroots collective of Palestinian community workers, healers, activists, researchers, psychologists, mental health professionals, and community health workers.

The third post draws upon the work of Black psychologist Bobby Wright to reveal the psychology of the genocidal state. The South African representatives to the International Court of Justice have presented well-documented evidence of genocide against the Palestinian peoples, in a case that harkens back to the “We Charge Genocide” case launched by the Civil Rights Congress. Both of these efforts necessarily name and resist the ongoing catastrophic harms perpetuated by Western states.

This fourth post draws upon Charlene Désir’s concept of Diasporic Grief to help Haitian people ground their emotional reactions in healing, history, and political movement. This post is adapted from a recent article by Evan Auguste in the Haitian Times, which reflects that “the field of psychology struggles to capture such shared suffering—suffering borne of a collective identity that extends beyond borders yet is materially scarred by external imposition.”

 

Additional Resources

Decolonial Psychiatry

Liberation Psychology

Postcolonial Theory

Mental Health and Palestinian Liberation

Mental Health, Disability, and Imperialism

Healing and Mutual Aid

Colonialism and Grief

Movement Building

Cross-Movement Organizing

This list is being updated on an ongoing basis. Please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org if you have recommended resources for us to add.