Decolonizing Mental Health
- NOTOC**
Decolonizing Mental Health
Decolonizing mental health is an effort to examine and transform the colonial assumptions, institutions, power relationships, and systems of knowledge that influence how psychological distress is defined and treated. It challenges the idea that Western psychiatric theories and clinical practices are universally applicable to every society, culture, and community.
The movement does not necessarily call for the rejection of all psychiatric medicine, psychotherapy, or psychological research. Instead, it asks whose knowledge is recognized, whose experiences are ignored, who controls mental health institutions, and whether services address the historical and social conditions that contribute to distress.
Decolonizing mental health may involve restoring Indigenous healing traditions, supporting community-led services, recognizing historical and racial trauma, reforming professional education, redistributing research power, and treating people with lived experience as producers of knowledge rather than passive patients.
Colonialism and the Development of Psychiatry
Modern psychiatry developed partly within European colonial systems. Colonial governments established asylums, classifications, and medical institutions that frequently portrayed colonized peoples as irrational, primitive, dangerous, or incapable of governing themselves.
Psychiatric theories were sometimes used to justify racial hierarchy, forced confinement, political control, cultural suppression, and the removal of people from their families and communities. African, Asian, Caribbean, Indigenous, and other non-European understandings of the mind were often dismissed as superstition or evidence of backwardness.
These histories continue to influence mental health systems. Diagnostic standards, professional hierarchies, research methods, and treatment models developed in Europe and North America are still frequently exported to other societies. Decolonial scholars argue that these models can reproduce colonial relationships when they are introduced without sufficient attention to local histories, languages, beliefs, and systems of healing.
The work of psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon remains central to this discussion. Fanon argued that colonialism affects both social institutions and the inner lives of colonized people. Racism, domination, displacement, and cultural alienation cannot be understood solely as individual psychological problems because they are produced through political and historical conditions.
Indigenous Mental Health and Sovereignty
Indigenous approaches to wellness commonly understand mental health as inseparable from relationships with family, community, ancestors, spirituality, language, culture, land, and the natural world. This differs from clinical models that primarily locate distress within an individual mind or brain.
Colonization disrupted these relationships through land dispossession, forced assimilation, residential and boarding schools, child removal, religious suppression, criminalization of traditional practices, and restrictions on Indigenous governance. These experiences contributed to collective and intergenerational trauma.
Historical trauma describes the continuing effects of large-scale violence and cultural disruption across generations. Its consequences may appear in family relationships, grief, depression, substance use, suicide, distrust of institutions, and the loss of cultural identity. Historical-trauma frameworks place these experiences within their political and historical context rather than treating them only as individual disorders.
Decolonizing Indigenous mental health therefore involves more than making conventional services culturally sensitive. It may require Indigenous ownership of programs, data sovereignty, support for traditional healers, protection of language and ceremony, reconnection with land, community governance, and recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.
First Nations, Native American, Alaska Native, Māori, Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander frameworks emphasize concepts such as hope, belonging, meaning, purpose, kinship, Country, whānau, cultural identity, and collective responsibility.
Global Mental Health and Humanitarian Systems
The global mental health movement has expanded access to mental health services and drawn attention to severe inequalities in care. However, critics argue that international programs can reproduce colonial power when organizations from wealthy countries control funding, research priorities, program design, and definitions of legitimate knowledge.
A decolonial approach asks whether local communities have meaningful authority or are simply consulted after important decisions have already been made. It also examines whether researchers and institutions in the Global North receive disproportionate funding, authorship, professional recognition, and decision-making power.
In humanitarian emergencies, distress is often connected to war, occupation, displacement, poverty, environmental destruction, political violence, and the loss of community. Treating these experiences only as individual trauma can obscure the conditions that continue to cause suffering.
Decolonizing humanitarian mental health and psychosocial support requires locally led programs, equitable partnerships, long-term investment, language accessibility, community participation, and recognition of collective and political forms of trauma. Mental health intervention should not substitute for safety, justice, housing, food, political rights, or protection from violence.
People with lived experience are also increasingly demanding roles as researchers, educators, policymakers, and program leaders. Their participation can challenge professional systems in which patients are treated primarily as objects of diagnosis and research.
African, Black, and Ubuntu-Centred Approaches
Colonial psychiatry in Africa frequently pathologized African cultures, resistance movements, spirituality, and social practices. Apartheid, racial segregation, economic exclusion, and colonial medical institutions also shaped unequal access to care.
African-centred approaches often draw on Ubuntu, a philosophy emphasizing that personhood and wellbeing are created through relationships with others. From this perspective, mental health is connected to family, community, spirituality, responsibility, belonging, and social harmony.
Ubuntu-centred psychology challenges highly individualistic models that treat independence and personal achievement as universal measures of wellness. It encourages collective care, community responsibility, cultural knowledge, and healing practices grounded in local relationships.
Black communities in Africa and the diaspora have also developed approaches to racial trauma that connect psychological suffering with slavery, colonialism, segregation, police violence, discrimination, economic inequality, and cultural erasure. Healing may involve culturally responsive therapy, political action, community organizing, spirituality, ancestral connection, music, storytelling, rest, mutual support, and collective resistance.
Māori, Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing
Māori models of health commonly emphasize connections among physical wellbeing, mental and emotional wellbeing, spirituality, land, family, ancestry, and community. Colonization, land loss, racism, cultural alienation, and the suppression of Māori institutions continue to influence health outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing similarly includes relationships with body, mind, family, kin, community, culture, Country, spirituality, and ancestors. It is broader than a clinical definition of mental illness.
Research on Indigenous wellbeing in Australia and New Zealand emphasizes community control, cultural strengthening, trusted relationships, Indigenous leadership, flexible services, and the importance of connection to Country and cultural identity.
Decolonizing psychology in these contexts requires changes to professional education, research governance, service delivery, workforce development, and institutional accountability. Indigenous communities must be able to define wellness and determine how programs are designed, evaluated, and funded.
Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean Perspectives
Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean societies have their own histories of colonial psychiatry, institutionalization, religious healing, community care, and resistance. Decolonial approaches reject the assumption that these diverse regions can be understood through a single Western model.
In many Asian societies, distress may be expressed through family relationships, physical symptoms, spiritual experiences, social obligations, or culturally specific metaphors. Language differences can affect diagnosis when clinicians interpret unfamiliar expressions through dominant psychiatric categories.
Latin American and Caribbean approaches often emphasize colonialism, slavery, migration, racial hierarchy, political violence, economic inequality, and collective struggle. Concepts drawn from liberation psychology and the cosmovisions of Indigenous peoples of the Americas understand wellbeing as connected to community, territory, culture, and justice.
Caribbean traditions such as Obeah and other African-derived spiritual practices survived colonial criminalization and religious suppression. Their persistence demonstrates how communities preserve healing knowledge despite institutional efforts to portray it as dangerous or irrational.
Community-based programs across these regions often combine professional services with family support, faith traditions, cultural practices, peer networks, political education, and collective action.
Decolonizing Therapy and Trauma Care
Decolonizing therapy examines how race, colonialism, gender, class, disability, sexuality, migration, and political conditions affect both clients and therapeutic institutions. It asks therapists to recognize that the clinical relationship is not separate from wider systems of power.
Conventional therapy may focus on helping individuals adapt to their circumstances. Liberation-oriented approaches instead ask whether those circumstances are oppressive and whether healing should include resistance, advocacy, cultural restoration, or collective action.
Decolonial trauma care recognizes that trauma can be historical, racial, cultural, intergenerational, environmental, and political. It challenges models that locate trauma only within an individual nervous system while ignoring continuing violence or inequality.
Practices may include culturally grounded counselling, traditional healing, ceremony, storytelling, embodied practices, family participation, community gatherings, spiritual support, land-based healing, political education, and mutual aid.
Cultural humility is especially important. Practitioners cannot master another culture through brief training. They must remain accountable, examine their own assumptions, respect community authority, and avoid appropriating traditions detached from their cultural and political context.
Diagnosis, Research, and Professional Education
Psychiatric diagnostic systems are often presented as scientifically neutral, but decolonial critics argue that they are shaped by particular histories, institutions, cultural values, and definitions of normality.
Behaviors or experiences considered symptoms in one system may have spiritual, relational, cultural, or political meanings in another. Diagnosis can provide access to care and legal protections, but it can also stigmatize people, obscure social causes, and impose categories that do not reflect local experience.
Mad Studies challenges the authority of institutions that define people as mentally ill without adequately valuing their knowledge. It centres the histories, cultures, activism, and lived experiences of people who have been diagnosed, institutionalized, or subjected to coercive treatment.
Decolonizing research requires more than recruiting diverse participants. Communities should help determine research questions, methods, interpretation, ownership, publication, and use of the findings. Researchers must also address unequal funding, authorship, language barriers, extractive data collection, and the concentration of institutional power.
Psychology, counselling, social work, and medical curricula can be transformed by including colonial history, Indigenous knowledge, critical race theory, disability perspectives, liberation psychology, and scholarship from outside Europe and North America. Curriculum reform must be accompanied by institutional change rather than limited to symbolic additions to reading lists.
Community Healing and Social Conditions
Decolonizing mental health places greater emphasis on the social and material conditions that shape wellbeing. Poverty, housing insecurity, racism, war, displacement, environmental destruction, gender violence, criminalization, and unequal access to education and healthcare can produce distress that cannot be resolved through therapy alone.
Community healing recognizes that people often recover through relationships, shared identity, cultural participation, political action, spiritual life, and collective support. Mutual-aid networks, peer groups, cultural organizations, community health workers, elders, traditional healers, and local advocates may all contribute to mental wellness.
This perspective also challenges the commercialization of wellness. Indigenous and non-Western healing traditions are sometimes removed from their communities, repackaged as consumer products, and sold without acknowledging their cultural origins or supporting the people who preserved them.
Community-led mental health initiatives seek to restore collective knowledge while ensuring that care remains accessible, culturally meaningful, and connected to struggles for justice.
Challenges and Continuing Debates
There is no single model of decolonized mental health. Communities differ in their histories, needs, beliefs, and relationships with psychiatric care. Traditional practices should not be romanticized, and Western practices should not automatically be rejected simply because of their origins.
Decolonization can also become a symbolic institutional slogan without changing funding, leadership, governance, or professional power. Adding culturally diverse materials to a curriculum does not by itself redistribute authority or repair harmful systems.
Meaningful change requires sustained accountability, community ownership, equitable resources, protection of cultural knowledge, and willingness to transform institutions. Programs should be evaluated according to the priorities of the communities they serve rather than only through standards imposed by outside organizations.
Conclusion
Decolonizing mental health is a broad movement to rethink how distress, healing, knowledge, and professional authority are understood. It exposes the historical relationship between psychiatry and colonial power while creating space for Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, survivor-led, and community-based approaches.
Its central principles include cultural and political self-determination, recognition of historical trauma, respect for multiple knowledge systems, community leadership, equitable research partnerships, and attention to the social conditions that influence wellbeing.
A decolonized mental health system would not impose one universal model of the mind. It would support communities in defining wellness for themselves while making clinical knowledge available through relationships based on consent, dignity, cultural safety, reciprocity, and justice.
- TOC**
Foundational Approaches to Decolonizing Mental Health
Innovative Approaches to Decolonizing and Trauma-Informed Child Welfare Practice
| Authors listed by publisher | Families in Society | February 8, 2026
Presents principles for centering ancestral wisdom, historical trauma, collective healing, cultural coping strategies, and structural advocacy in child and family services.
Decolonizing Counselling Psychology
| Ada L. Sinacore, Anusha Kassan, and contributors | Counselling Psychology Quarterly | 2026
Examines how counselling psychology can move beyond culturally adapted Western therapy toward approaches grounded in Indigenous knowledge, embodiment, relationships, and social justice.
Decolonizing Mental Health: Rethinking Implementation Science from the Ground Up
| Felipe Agudelo-Hernández and contributors | Global Mental Health | 2025
Argues that implementation frameworks imported from the Global North can reproduce colonial power unless local knowledge, community sovereignty, and genuine co-creation guide mental health programs.
Decolonizing Mental Health Practice Through Traditional Indigenous Healing
| Rachel S. K. Ting and contributors | American Psychologist | 2025
Compares Indigenous healing traditions from Canada, China, Singapore, and the United States and highlights communal, spiritual, ecological, ancestral, and relational approaches to wellness.
Radical Healing in Communities: A Decolonial Reading
| Nick Malherbe and contributors | Journal of Social and Political Psychology | 2025
Describes radical healing as a collective response to colonial wounds that extends beyond individualized biomedical and biopsychosocial models.
Decolonizing Global Health: A Scoping Review of Its Key Components, Proposed Actions, and Contributors
Maps major definitions and proposed actions in decolonization debates, including redistribution of power, equitable partnerships, institutional reform, and epistemic justice.
Decolonizing Mental Health and Moving Towards Harmony and Balance
| Jesse Valentin | Center for Victims of Torture | November 15, 2023
Explains an Indigenous relational worldview in which spirituality, ceremony, ancestors, community, kinship, and the natural world are integral to mental wellness.
Grounding Wellness: Coloniality, Placeism, Land, and a Critique of Social Determinants of Indigenous Mental Health
Reframes Indigenous mental health through land, place, kinship, culture, sovereignty, and the continuing effects of settler colonialism.
Decolonising Global Mental Health: The Role of Mad Studies
| Peter Beresford and Diana Rose | BJPsych International | 2023
Uses Mad Studies, survivor knowledge, and disability activism to challenge Western psychiatric expansion and rethink how distress is understood globally.
What Does It Mean to Decolonize Mental Health?
| I Don’t Mind contributors | I Don’t Mind | December 19, 2022
Introduces collective care, historical trauma, interdependence, cultural identity, ancestral knowledge, and community healing as alternatives to exclusively individualistic models.
“Decolonizing Mental Health”: Exploring Insights from the Racial Trauma and Healing Literature
| Shantel D. Crosby and contributors | Practice Innovations | 2022
Emphasizes that race-based trauma and systemic racism must be explicitly recognized rather than treated as peripheral issues in mental health care.
Decolonization and Mental Health
| Nicole Kimber | Decolonization and Justice | 2022
Connects mental health decolonization with culturally relevant treatment, Indigenous justice, healing lodges, foster care, and trauma-informed community programs.
Decolonizing Mental Health: The Healing Power of Community
| Shawna Murray-Browne | Kindred Wellness | November 1, 2021
Argues that Black healing is often relational and community-based and cannot be reduced to therapy that isolates individuals from their social environments.
Decolonising Psychiatry and Global Mental Health
| Ana Antić and project contributors | University of Copenhagen | August 6, 2021
Discusses how psychiatry’s colonial history and Eurocentric assumptions continue to marginalize non-Western understandings of distress and healing.
Hope for a Better Future Is Possible Through Decolonization
| Chelsea Twiss | Psychology Today | April 27, 2021
Explores how colonial hierarchies, white supremacy, patriarchy, scarcity, and domination affect mental health and interpersonal relationships.
Should Global Mental Health Decolonize?
| Stevan Weine | Psychology Today | January 1, 2021
Reviews disagreements over colonial legacies, structural violence, local knowledge, equitable partnerships, and the practical meaning of decolonizing global mental health.
Decolonizing Global Mental Health Through Jamaican Psychiatry
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | February 19, 2020
Summarizes Jamaican psychiatric reforms that challenged institutionalization, colonial oppression, and imported models through culturally grounded community interventions.
Decolonizing Mental Health
| Cash Ahenakew and contributors | University of British Columbia | n.d.
Introduces neuro-decolonization as a way to interrupt inherited separation, hierarchy, and supremacy while restoring responsibility to human and more-than-human relationships.
Decolonizing Mental Health: Transforming Care for BIPOC Communities
| WORLD Channel | WORLD Channel | n.d.
Introduces a documentary series examining racism in mental health institutions and the work of practitioners and communities creating alternatives.
Global Mental Health, Development, and Humanitarian Systems
Bridging Humanitarian and Social Action Through Mental Health and Psychosocial Support
| Authors listed by publisher | Humanitarian Alternatives | March 31, 2026
Argues that humanitarian mental health work must redistribute power, confront colonial hierarchies, and connect psychosocial intervention with political and social action.
Gaza: Rethinking and Decolonizing Mental Health Responses in Humanitarian Emergencies
| A. McMahon and contributors | Academic Psychiatry | 2026
Reframes Palestinian distress as a rational response to occupation, displacement, systemic violence, and continuing insecurity rather than an isolated individual disorder.
From Subjects to Co-Researchers: A Lived-Experience Model for Decolonizing Mental Health
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | July 3, 2025
Describes participatory research that treats people with lived experience as knowledge producers and decision-makers rather than passive research subjects.
A Response to Criticism of the Global Mental Health Movement
| Michael Huppertz and contributors | Global Mental Health | 2025
Responds to accusations of psychiatric colonialism by proposing a flexible global network shaped by patients, families, practitioners, communities, and local practices.
Understanding and Addressing Inequalities in Mental Health
| Fernanda V. Lopes and contributors | OECD | 2025
Reviews socioeconomic, racial, gender, regional, and healthcare inequalities and identifies policies that can address their effects on mental health.
Researchers’ Agency and the Boundaries of Global Mental Health
| Cristian Montenegro and contributors | BMJ Global Health | 2024
Examines how Global South researchers negotiate funding structures, institutional boundaries, local responsibilities, and dominant definitions of legitimate mental health research.
Transforming Global Health: Decoloniality and the Human Condition
| Raphael Lencucha and contributors | BMJ Global Health | 2024
Identifies paternalism, extractive research, unequal resources, and Northern institutional power as barriers to a genuinely decolonial global health field.
Contesting Global Mental Health
| Mariwala Health Initiative | ReFrame | 2024
Critiques psychiatric normality, neoliberal productivity, structural violence, and the colonial roots of efforts to standardize mental health globally.
Rethinking Culture and Colonialism in the History of Global Mental Health
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | October 20, 2023
Summarizes research showing how historical understandings of culture and colonialism can expose biases embedded in global mental health programs.
Breaking Down Power Imbalances in Global Mental Health
| Mad in South Asia contributors | Mad in South Asia | September 3, 2023
Examines why local experience, language, relationships, and community knowledge should carry greater authority in mental health research and service design.
Decolonising Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Interventions in the Humanitarian System
| Rachel S. Hillel and contributors | The Humanitarian Leader | 2023
Evaluates whether localization commitments have meaningfully transferred resources, authority, and program design to communities receiving humanitarian mental health assistance.
Global Mental Health: Where We Are and Where We Are Going
| M. Moitra and contributors | Current Psychiatry Reports | 2023
Reviews global inequities in funding, services, research representation, social determinants, and the inclusion of people with lived experience.
Global Mental Health Research and Practice: A Decolonial Approach
| Eliut Rivera-Segarra and contributors | The Lancet Psychiatry | 2022
Proposes a decolonial framework addressing intertwined hierarchies of race, gender, capitalism, language, knowledge, and institutional power.
Establishing Political Priority for Global Mental Health
| Valentina Iemmi | Health Policy and Planning | 2022
Investigates how organizations, evidence, advocacy networks, funding structures, and political narratives shaped global mental health as an international policy issue.
Review: Decolonizing Global Mental Health
| Leticia Da Costa Paes | Race & Class | January 26, 2021
Reviews China Mills’s critique of efforts to export psychiatric diagnoses, treatments, and pharmaceutical citizenship to the Majority World.
Tackling Social Inequalities to Reduce Mental Health Problems
| Mental Health Foundation | Mental Health Foundation | 2020
Argues that prevention must confront unequal income, housing, education, discrimination, employment conditions, social power, and access to resources.
Global Mental Health and Its Critics: Moving Beyond the Impasse
| Sara Cooper | Critical Public Health | 2016
Reviews anthropological and transcultural critiques of global mental health and calls for more productive engagement between competing perspectives.
Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Humanitarian Settings
| Wietse A. Tol and contributors | Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences | 2015
Explores public-health approaches to psychosocial support while stressing community participation, layered services, local context, and attention to social conditions.
Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World
| China Mills | Routledge | 2014
Questions whether Western psychiatric categories should be universalized and asks whose knowledge, evidence, institutions, and commercial interests drive global programs.
Why Global Mental Health Matters Locally
| Global Mental Health and Addiction Program | GMAP | n.d.
Promotes reciprocal learning rather than one-way knowledge transfer from wealthy countries to lower-income communities.
Indigenous Mental Health, Historical Trauma, and Sovereignty
Cherokee Nation Integrates Culture into New Treatment Center
| Associated Press | AP News | May 19, 2026
Describes a Cherokee-operated treatment center combining addiction services with language, traditional foods, community knowledge, spirituality, and culturally meaningful activities.
Historical Impact of Colonization Lingers in Indigenous Mental Health
| Tim D’Arrigo | Psychiatric News | 2026
Reviews how dispossession, forced assimilation, boarding schools, racism, cultural destruction, and historical trauma continue to affect Indigenous mental health.
An Introduction to Traditional Healing in American Indian and Alaska Native Communities
| Authors listed by publisher | MedEdPORTAL | March 7, 2025
Provides clinicians with instruction on traditional healers, spirituality, ceremony, relationships, and culturally respectful collaboration with Native communities.
Intergenerational Impacts of Historical Trauma on Depression Symptoms
| A. B. Cole and contributors | Peer-reviewed research article | 2025
Examines how exposure to historical trauma can influence depressive symptoms across generations within Indigenous families and communities.
Orientation to the First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework
| Assembly of First Nations and partners | Assembly of First Nations | 2024
Explains a culture-based continuum addressing wellness across the life course and emphasizing hope, belonging, meaning, purpose, and community responsibility.
Survivors Say Trauma from Abusive Native American Boarding Schools Stretches Across Generations
| Matthew Brown | AP News | November 5, 2023
Documents survivors’ experiences of cultural suppression, punishment, family separation, abuse, addiction, grief, and intergenerational trauma.
Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities
| Joseph P. Gone | Daedalus | 2023
Presents historical trauma as an Indigenous alternative to psychiatric explanations that individualize addiction, suicide, grief, and community distress.
Native American Communities Seek Traditional Healing to Treat Mental Illness
| Kaiser Health News contributors | Sahan Journal | October 4, 2022
Examines Native-led efforts to combine professional care with elders, ceremony, cultural identity, traditional healers, and community trust.
The Postcolonial Predicament in Community Mental Health Services
| Joseph P. Gone | American Psychologist | 2021
Describes an Indigenous framework for community mental health that differs from dominant psychiatric models of illness and professional intervention.
Decolonization as Methodological Innovation in Counseling Psychology
| Joseph P. Gone | Journal of Counseling Psychology | 2021
Explains how research can help reclaim American Indian therapeutic traditions when Indigenous authority, power, methods, and community priorities guide the work.
Mental Health Issues from Historical Trauma Plague Native Americans
| Native Hope | Native Hope | 2021
Connects forced assimilation, cultural loss, violence, poverty, family disruption, and discrimination with present-day psychological distress.
Sacred Medicine: Indigenous Healing and Mental Health
| Authors listed in article | The Qualitative Report | December 21, 2020
Explores generational trauma, Indigenous worldviews, cultural identity, traditional medicine, spirituality, and respectful collaboration in mental health care.
Mental Health Effects of Racism on Indigenous Communities
| Kendra Cherry | Verywell Mind | December 1, 2020
Reviews the psychological effects of continuing racism and identifies cultural connection, family, community, tradition, and identity as protective factors.
A Community-Driven and Evidence-Based Approach to Developing Mental Wellness Strategies
| Marisa M. Ninomiya and contributors | International Journal of Mental Health Systems | 2020
Describes First Nations communities gathering and controlling local data to design wellness strategies responsive to their own circumstances.
The Impact of Historical Trauma on Health Outcomes for Indigenous Populations
| Joseph P. Gone and contributors | Annual Review of Clinical Psychology | 2019
Reviews historical oppression and collective trauma as explanations for persistent health and mental health inequities among Indigenous peoples.
Decolonizing Mental Health Services for Indigenous Clients
| Megan E. Lewis and contributors | American Journal of Community Psychology | 2018
Evaluates professional training intended to improve knowledge, empathy, cultural understanding, and mental health services for Indigenous clients.
First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework
Presents a culturally rooted model connecting mental wellness to hope, belonging, meaning, purpose, social determinants, community development, and systems change.
Aboriginal Peoples and Historic Trauma
| William Aguiar and Regine Halseth | National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health | 2015
Explains pathways through which colonial violence and collective trauma affect individuals, families, communities, social structures, and later generations.
Indigenous Native American Healing Traditions
| Mary Koithan and Cynthia Farrell | Journal of Nurse Practitioners | 2010
Introduces Native healing traditions involving ceremony, prayer, herbs, relationships, spirituality, community roles, and holistic understandings of health.
Understanding Native American Mental Health
| McLean Hospital contributors | Deconstructing Stigma | n.d.
Explains why many Native-led programs prioritize elders, ceremony, prayer, cultural reconnection, community relationships, and traditional healing.
Māori, Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing
Social and Emotional Wellbeing
Presents evidence on psychological distress while placing Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing within broader cultural, historical, and socioeconomic contexts.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Perspectives on What Works in Social and Emotional Wellbeing Programs
| Australian Institute of Family Studies | AIFS | March 20, 2025
Summarizes Indigenous participants’ views about effective programs, including cultural connection, trusted relationships, community control, flexibility, and holistic support.
Decolonising Psychology
| Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing | TIMHWB | January 31, 2025
Describes Aboriginal-led efforts to transform psychology education, research, professional practice, and services by centering Indigenous knowledge and healing.
Decolonising Mental Health Through an Indigenous Māori Lens
| Jon Keller Muñoz | University of Groningen | 2024
Reviews colonization, institutional racism, Māori models of health, traditional healing, and the limitations of monocultural Western mental health systems.
Healing Through Culture: Aboriginal Young People’s Experiences of Cultural Strengthening Programs
| C. Black and contributors | Child Abuse & Neglect | 2024
Reports that cultural identity, Country, relationships, community, and participation can promote resilience and healing among Aboriginal young people.
Decolonisation, Indigenous Health Research, and Indigenous Wellbeing
| Pat Dudgeon and contributors | Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health | 2024
Calls for Indigenous leadership, governance, methodologies, data sovereignty, workforce development, and accountability in health and wellbeing research.
Decolonising Mental Health Systems: Global Experiences of Wellbeing
Features Indigenous leaders discussing self-determination, walking in two worlds, cultural knowledge, community leadership, and institutional transformation.
Intergenerational Trauma and Mental Health
| Australian Institute of Health and Welfare | AIHW | 2023
Summarizes how Stolen Generations policies and continuing disadvantage can transmit trauma and affect family relationships, substance use, self-harm, and mental health.
Colonisation, Racism, and Wellbeing
| New Zealand Productivity Commission | New Zealand Government | 2022
Examines how colonization, land loss, racism, exclusion, cultural alienation, and economic inequality shape Māori health and wellbeing.
Creating an Indigenous Māori-Centred Model of Relational Health
| Denise Wilson and contributors | Health Expectations | 2021
Develops a relational health model emphasizing whānau, respectful engagement, cultural identity, reciprocal relationships, and Māori ways of understanding wellness.
Healing Journeys: Indigenous Men’s Reflections on Resources and Barriers to Mental Wellness
| Colleen M. Waddell and contributors | Social Science & Medicine | 2021
Shows how ceremony, identity, resistance, sharing circles, cultural reconnection, and community engagement support Indigenous men’s wellness.
Social and Emotional Well-Being: Aboriginal Health in Aboriginal Hands
| Authors listed by publisher | Springer Nature | December 4, 2020
Explains Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing as a holistic framework grounded in culture, community, family, spirituality, Country, body, and mind.
A Scoping Review of Social and Emotional Wellbeing Programs and Services
| Himanshu Gupta and contributors | BMC Health Services Research | 2020
Identifies practices aligned with Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing principles, including community governance and connections to culture and Country.
Colonisation, Hauora and Whenua in Aotearoa
| Helen Moewaka Barnes and contributors | Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand | 2019
Links Māori health and wellbeing to land, relationships, collective identity, environmental justice, and the historical consequences of colonization.
Māori Health and Wellbeing
| New Zealand Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction | He Ara Oranga | December 5, 2018
Records testimony identifying colonization, institutional racism, unconscious bias, and Western service models as fundamental contributors to Māori distress.
Decolonising Australian Psychology
| Pat Dudgeon and Roz Walker | Journal of Social and Political Psychology | 2015
Outlines strategies for interrupting psychological theories, institutions, and practices that undermine Aboriginal identity, wellbeing, and self-determination.
Positioning Historical Trauma Theory Within Aotearoa New Zealand
Adapts historical-trauma theory to Māori experiences of colonization affecting whānau, hapū, iwi, land, knowledge, and intergenerational wellbeing.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing
| Graham Gee, Pat Dudgeon, Clinton Schultz, Amanda Hart, and Kerrie Kelly | Working Together | 2014
Defines social and emotional wellbeing and distinguishes its holistic cultural framework from narrower clinical definitions of mental illness.
Historical Trauma, Healing and Well-Being in Māori Communities
| Raquel Wirihana and Cherryl Smith | MAI Journal | 2014
Examines colonial trauma and describes cultural identity, whānau, community knowledge, and collective healing as sources of Māori resilience.
Colonial Norms as Determinants of Aboriginal Mental Health
| Sarah Nelson | National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health | n.d.
Shows how Canadian mental health discourse and services continue to reflect colonial assumptions, stereotypes, displacement, and marginalization.
African, Black, and Ubuntu-Centred Mental Health
Colonial Psychiatry and the Pathologizing of the African Mind in Kenya
| Author listed by publication | Hektoen International | May 14, 2026
Traces how colonial psychiatry displaced East African healing systems and interpreted African resistance and difference through racialized diagnoses.
Returning Home to “Self”: Intentional Living as Decolonial Practice
| Author listed by publication | Psych Discourse | March 27, 2026
Uses Ubuntu to describe wellbeing as relational harmony rather than merely the absence of individually defined symptoms.
An Ubuntu-Guided Large Language Model Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Mental Health Dialogue
Reinterprets cognitive behavioral techniques through Ubuntu principles of relational identity, communal wellbeing, spirituality, and interconnectedness.
Decolonizing Counseling Psychology to Address Racial Trauma on Black and Racialized Bodies
| S. Dixon and contributors | Counselling Psychology Quarterly | 2026
Connects psychology’s racist history with contemporary disparities and proposes healing-centred care for Black and racialized communities.
Understanding Trauma in Black, Indigenous, and Diverse Ethnic Communities
| APA Division 56 contributors | APA Division of Trauma Psychology | 2026
Explains why colonialism, medical marginalization, spiritual worldviews, community trust, and collective experience must inform trauma treatment.
Mental Health, Racism and Psychosocial Well-Being in South Africa
| Psychological Society of South Africa | PsySSA | October 30, 2025
Discusses racial trauma and argues that decolonial healing must address South Africa’s broader political, economic, social, and historical conditions.
Decolonizing Counselling Psychology: An Ubuntu-Centred Framework
Proposes moving African counselling psychology beyond imported pathology models through Ubuntu, African epistemologies, community responsibility, and culturally grounded practice.
Treating Racial Trauma: Methodology of a Randomized Controlled Trial
| M. Osman and contributors | Peer-reviewed research article | 2025
Describes research evaluating treatment for racial trauma while recognizing its psychological, social, physical, and structural dimensions.
Position Statement on Decolonising Mental Health in Northern Africa
| Global Mental Health Peer Network | GMHPN | 2025
Calls for culturally relevant services, Indigenous practices, community empowerment, rights-based care, and reform of colonial mental health systems.
History and Politics of Mental Health Policy and Care in South Africa
| Sharon Kleintjes and contributors | SSM–Mental Health | 2023
Connects contemporary services and inequalities with colonial rule, apartheid, racialized institutions, economic exclusion, and post-apartheid policy development.
Decolonizing Mental Health and Social Work Practice in Uganda
| H. Kamya and contributors | Social Work | 2023
Examines coloniality in Ugandan service provision and proposes locally grounded, culturally meaningful, community-responsive social work.
Leveraging Ubuntu Values as Cultural Strength for Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing
| F. Kagola and contributors | African Journal of Social Work | 2023
Reviews how Ubuntu values can support identity, belonging, relationships, resilience, and mental wellbeing among African young people in Australia.
The Network Approach: A Path to Decolonize Mental Health Care
| R. E. G. Alemu and contributors | Frontiers in Psychiatry | 2023
Proposes network-based understandings of distress as alternatives to rigid diagnoses and discusses Africa’s violent history with colonial psychiatry.
Six Groups Making Mental Health Care More Accessible to People of Color
| Chantelle Pattemore | Time | 2022
Profiles organizations addressing cost, representation, cultural understanding, stigma, and accessibility for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, queer, and trans communities.
The Impact of Racial Trauma and How to Cope
| Toketemu Ohwovoriole | Verywell Mind | November 30, 2021
Explains the cumulative psychological effects of racism and the importance of community support, culturally responsive therapy, boundaries, and collective coping.
How a Black Therapist Is Treating Protest Trauma
| Wesley Lowery | GQ | June 9, 2020
Profiles Jennifer Mullan’s work connecting police violence, systemic racism, historical trauma, intergenerational grief, and Black mental health.
Three Black Therapists Share Their Coping, Healing, and Grounding Techniques
| Nykia Spradley | Allure | June 9, 2020
Presents culturally resonant practices involving ancestors, music, food, breathing, boundaries, sound, emotional expression, and communal care.
How to Cope with Race-Based Trauma
| Brittney McNamara | Teen Vogue | 2020
Discusses rest, action, community support, media boundaries, emotional processing, and therapy as responses to repeated racial violence.
Fourteen Organizations Supporting BIPOC Mental Health
Lists community-led organizations expanding culturally responsive care, therapy funds, peer support, rest, advocacy, and mental health education.
Why I See a Black Queer Therapist
| Steven W. Thrasher | Them | 2018
Describes how shared racial and queer understanding can help therapy address oppression, violence, grief, shame, anxiety, and institutional marginalization.
Latin American, Asian, and Caribbean Perspectives
The Mental Health Help-Seeking Process for Asian Youth
| R. Ball and contributors | Children and Youth Services Review | 2026
Reviews help-seeking research and argues that Asian mental health must be examined through systemic oppression rather than primarily cultural deficit models.
Faith in Mind Healers: Ludhiana Villages Trade Belief for Therapy
| Times of India staff | Times of India | 2026
Examines changing relationships among rural communities, faith healers, public awareness, psychiatric services, stigma, and grassroots mental health care.
RINPAS at 100: How a Colonial Asylum Became a Leading Mental Institute
| Times of India staff | Times of India | August 30, 2025
Traces an Indian institution’s development from a colonial asylum toward community psychiatry, education, rehabilitation, outreach, and multidisciplinary care.
Community-Based Healing in Latin America
| Authors listed by publication | ReVista, Harvard University | May 22, 2025
Profiles collective and community-based responses to youth distress, inequality, violence, displacement, and limited access to formal mental health services.
Integrating Non-Western Perspectives in Mental Health Counselling
| Girishwar Misra and contributors | Culture & Psychology | 2025
Critiques Eurocentric counselling and emphasizes relational, ecological, spiritual, and culturally specific understandings of identity and wellbeing in India.
Madness, Medicine, and Empire: Rethinking Colonial Psychiatry in Asia Through Hong Kong
| Author listed by publication | International Institute for Asian Studies | 2025
Uses Hong Kong to show how psychiatric ideas were interpreted, contested, modified, and institutionalized within specific Asian colonial conditions.
Cross-Cultural Differences in Mental Health Expressions on Social Media
| Sunny Rai, Khushi Shelat, Devansh R. Jain, and contributors | arXiv | February 18, 2024
Finds important differences between Indian and Western online expressions of distress, emphasizing the need for culturally appropriate digital interventions.
Undoing Colonialism in Psychology
| Ayushi Jolly | Mad in South Asia | January 19, 2024
Discusses dialectical and critical-cultural approaches to dismantling colonial assumptions in psychological knowledge and professional practice.
Decolonizing Psychiatry in Pakistan: A Reckoning with Our Colonial Past
| Yousaf Raza | Mad in America | December 2, 2023
Examines Pakistan’s inherited psychiatric institutions, biomedical assumptions, professional hierarchies, and possibilities for locally relevant reform.
Decolonising Psychology: Back to the Future
| Hasan Waheed and Rasjid Skinner | The Psychologist | August 10, 2022
Challenges psychology’s selective history and explores Islamic and other non-Western intellectual and therapeutic traditions marginalized by dominant curricula.
Decolonizing Mental Health Practice: Reconstructing an Asian-Centric Framework
| Authors listed in article | Academic research paper | 2022
Calls for an Asian-centred mental health framework attentive to family, community, social justice, culture, local subjectivities, and historical context.
Andean Decoloniality and Mental Health
Introduces Andean perspectives on coloniality, knowledge, identity, social relations, wellbeing, and resistance to universal psychiatric frameworks.
Decolonizing Psychology Through a Study of the Indian Girl
| Author listed by publisher | Theory & Psychology | May 21, 2020
Argues against exporting Northern psychological interventions to India without considering different cultural, social, and subjective formations.
Reimagining “Mental Health” from the Cosmovision of Abya Yala
| M. Castro Romero and contributors | International Review of Psychiatry | 2020
Seeks to shift the centre of mental health knowledge toward Latin American and Caribbean cosmovisions of wellbeing.
Coloniality and Perspectivism in Psychology
| Gustavo A. Souza Prado and contributors | International Review of Psychiatry | 2020
Critiques psychology’s coloniality and considers how perspectivism can challenge universalist claims about persons, knowledge, and mental health.
Colonialism, Gender and Mental Health in Psychology
| A. Torralbas Fernández and contributors | International Review of Psychiatry | 2020
Applies a decolonial gender analysis to mental health and questions categories produced through colonial and patriarchal institutions.
Historical and Socio-Political Perspectives on Mental Health in the Caribbean Region
| Guerda Nicolas and contributors | Caribbean Journal of Psychology | 2013
Reviews how slavery, colonization, migration, racism, poverty, cultural identity, and political history shape Caribbean mental health.
Caribbean Contributions to Contemporary Psychiatric Theory and Practice
| Frederick W. Hickling | Transcultural Psychiatry | 2012
Examines Caribbean innovations in psychiatry and critiques interpretations of psychosis and migration that overlook racism and colonial history.
Madness, Vice and Tabanka: Post-Colonial Residues in Caribbean Psychiatry
| Roland Littlewood | Palgrave Macmillan | 2007
Considers connections among slavery, colonial rule, psychiatric classification, cultural experience, morality, and postcolonial Caribbean identities.
Mental Health Policy Developments in Latin America
| Renato D. Alarcón and contributors | World Health Organization | 2000
Reviews regional efforts to replace institutional care with community services while addressing scarce resources and structural barriers.
Colonial Psychiatry and Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon’s Psychiatric Writings and Decolonization
| Author listed by publication | Pambazuka News | November 27, 2025
Explores Fanon’s psychiatric practice, sociodiagnostics, revolutionary humanism, institutional therapy, racism, and the psychological dimensions of colonial domination.
Outrageous Reason: Madness and Race in the British Colonial World
| Reviewer listed by publisher | Psychoanalysis and History | September 29, 2025
Reviews Peter Barham’s study of psychiatry as an institution of racial classification and political control within the British Empire.
The Disalienation of the Black Man
| Author listed by publication | Medizinethnologie | July 20, 2025
Discusses Fanon’s argument that racialized alienation is socially produced and cannot be adequately treated solely at the individual level.
Frantz Fanon, a Psychiatrist Trapped Between Anthropology and Politics
| Francisco Pérez-Fernández and contributors | Anales de Psicología | 2025
Reviews Fanon’s clinical work and his development of a psychology of colonialism, emancipation, social revolution, and liberation of the mind.
True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital – Review
| Peter Bradshaw | The Guardian | November 5, 2024
Reviews a film portraying Fanon’s efforts to transform racist colonial hospital practices and connect psychological suffering with imperial violence.
Colonial and Transcultural Psychiatries: What We Learn from Their Histories
| Authors listed by publisher | Springer Nature | January 29, 2022
Reviews changing agendas in colonial, cultural, and transcultural psychiatry and their significance for contemporary mental health practice.
Decolonizing Madness? Transcultural Psychiatry and the Birth of a Global Psyche
| Ana Antić | Journal of Global History | 2022
Examines attempts after the Second World War to construct an inclusive universal psyche while psychiatry struggled with its colonial foundations.
Frantz Fanon’s Enduring Legacy
| Pankaj Mishra | The New Yorker | November 29, 2021
Examines Fanon’s life, psychiatry, anti-colonial politics, understanding of racial alienation, and continuing influence on liberation movements.
Frantz Fanon and the Crisis of Mental Health in the Arab World
| M. E. O. Ahmed | Psyche | June 23, 2021
Uses Fanon’s work in Algeria to critique contemporary Arab mental health systems that retain colonial institutions and imported diagnostic assumptions.
Revisiting Frantz Fanon: His Life and Legacy on Race and Psychiatry
| William Novey and contributors | American Journal of Psychiatry Residents’ Journal | 2021
Introduces Fanon’s clinical and political work on colonization, racism, identity, alienation, violence, and psychiatric practice.
Transcultural Psychiatry: Cultural Difference, Universalism and Social Psychiatry
| Ana Antić | Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry | 2021
Studies debates about cultural difference and universal humanity during the development of postwar social and transcultural psychiatry.
Re-Thinking the History of Psychiatry from the Edges of Empire
| Claire Edington | Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry | 2021
Shows how psychiatric knowledge developed through colonial Southeast Asian exchanges and later influenced international social medicine.
Global Health and the New World Order
| Matthew M. Heaton | Manchester University Press | October 6, 2020
Examines mental health service development during Nigerian decolonization and the interaction of local professionals, international institutions, and postcolonial states.
Decolonizing Trauma with Frantz Fanon
| Harriet Goozee | International Political Sociology | 2020
Uses Fanon’s clinical and political work to reveal how colonial power shapes trauma and why treatment must address social and political conditions.
Colonial Psychiatry in Mid-Nineteenth-Century India
| Shilpi Rajpal | South Asia Research | 2015
Uses an 1868 colonial inquiry to examine asylum policy, confinement, racial thinking, administrative priorities, and the treatment of institutionalized Indians.
Colonial Psychiatry and “the African Mind”
| Jock McCulloch | Cambridge University Press | 1995
Traces racial theories and psychiatric institutions in colonial Africa, including their relationships with political control and European settlement.
Culture, Colonialism, and Psychiatry
| A. Chakraborty | The Lancet | 1991
Argues that psychiatry must critically examine colonialism and recognize Western psychiatry itself as culturally situated.
Psychiatry in the Commonwealth Caribbean
| Frederick W. Hickling | Psychiatric Bulletin | 1987
Surveys Caribbean psychiatric history from colonial institutions toward regional practice, community services, and culturally informed reform.
Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Psychiatry
| Hugh F. Butts | Journal of the National Medical Association | 1979
Reviews Fanon’s clinical analysis of racism, colonial exploitation, dehumanization, identity, and the psychological injuries experienced by oppressed populations.
Colonial Psychiatry, Nineteenth–Twentieth Century
| Author listed by encyclopedia | Encyclopédie d’Histoire Numérique de l’Europe | n.d.
Provides an overview of colonial asylums, racial psychiatry, ethnographic classifications, confinement, and the policing of colonized populations.
Decolonizing Therapy, Counselling, and Trauma Care
Decolonizing Counselor Education and Practice
| Kristen Curry and Alonzo M. Curry | Journal of Multidisciplinary Research & Practice | April 2026
Explores culturally responsive information systems, non-Western knowledge, counselor education, and institutional reform in mental health practice.
Decolonizing Trauma-Informed Care: Pathways to Healing Racial Trauma
| Ashley Asher BlackDeer and contributors | Families in Society | January 30, 2026
Proposes a framework for rejecting Eurocentric pathology, recognizing colonization as trauma, embracing embodiment, and moving toward collective liberation.
The Multicultural Turn in Psychotherapy
| J. Hutchinson and contributors | Peer-reviewed psychology article | 2026
Examines how Freirean and decolonial thinking transformed multiculturalism from an optional clinical supplement into a critique of professional power.
What Is Decolonizing Therapy? A Guide to Healing Beyond Western Frameworks
| Resilient Mind Counseling | Resilient Mind Counseling | September 25, 2025
Introduces decolonizing therapy as an ongoing anti-racist and liberatory shift rather than an additional clinical technique.
Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy Promises Liberation, Not Adaptation
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | July 1, 2025
Describes a psychotherapy model integrating critical, liberation, and decolonial psychology rather than merely helping clients adapt to oppressive conditions.
What Does It Mean to Decolonize Therapy?
| Jennifer Mullan and Experience Life editors | Experience Life | May 20, 2025
Defines decolonizing therapy as identifying and uprooting structural, emotional, political, historical, and institutional harm within helping professions.
Community Healing: Why It Is Essential for Collective Resilience
| T. AlAli | Decolonised Minds | 2025
Connects decolonizing mental health with collective support and the recovery of knowledge systems suppressed through colonial rule.
A Self-Heuristic Inquiry into Decolonizing Therapeutic Practice
| Author listed by publisher | American Journal of Community Psychology | March 28, 2023
Reflects critically on claims to decolonizing practice and considers how alternative knowledge systems can transform therapy and community care.
Culturally Responsive Interventions Through a Decolonial Lens
| Authors listed in article | Academic research article | 2023
Reviews multicultural counselling, culturally responsive interventions, practitioner bias, ethical responsibility, and the limits of conventional cultural competence.
Decolonizing the Medical Model Approach to Trauma
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | September 13, 2022
Summarizes alternatives to trauma models that privilege white Western medical assumptions and individual pathology.
Decolonizing Your Wellness
| Thema Bryant | Psychology Today | March 17, 2022
Encourages BIPOC communities to reclaim culturally rooted wellness rather than measure themselves against Eurocentric, colonial, capitalist, and individualistic ideals.
Decolonizing Psychotherapy
| N. D. Taylor | Loma Linda University | 2022
Examines how colonization produces systemic barriers to services and how psychotherapy can respond more effectively to oppression and cultural difference.
Toward Holistic and Community-Based Interventions
| J. E. Ticar and contributors | Intersectionalities | 2022
Examines colonialism’s effects on Filipino and Black youth and calls for culturally relevant, community-based, anti-racist mental health support.
Decolonizing Research Methods Can Improve Psychological Treatments
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | September 9, 2020
Explains how Indigenous authority and decolonizing research can help reclaim American Indian therapeutic knowledge and improve psychological interventions.
Sunil Bhatia on Decolonizing Psychology
| James Moore | Mad in America | May 15, 2020
Discusses efforts to move psychology away from universalized biomedical models and toward critical, cultural, historical, and political analysis.
Guidelines for Decolonizing Psychotherapy in Australia
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | April 17, 2020
Summarizes principles for continually disrupting colonial power, centering Indigenous sovereignty, and challenging dominant therapeutic relationships.
Liberation Psychology and Childhood Trauma in Palestine
| Brian K. Barber and contributors | Springer Nature | 2017
Reframes trauma in Palestine as collective and political and recognizes children as social actors rather than only passive clinical victims.
A Call to Action: Decolonizing Clinical Practice
| Alexandria Alderman | Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy | n.d.
Offers guidance for clinicians and trainees on challenging dominant knowledge, engaging in critical dialogue, and transforming therapy practice.
Cultural Humility and Decolonial Practice
| Authors listed by Indigenous Psychology Services | Indigenous Psychology Services | n.d.
Uses therapists’ narratives to distinguish cultural humility and accountability from attempts to master or possess another culture.
Decolonization and Liberation Psychology
| Authors listed by publisher | Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Human Rights | n.d.
Examines South African psychology as a contested discipline shaped by colonialism, apartheid, racial identity, human rights, and liberation struggles.
Education, Diagnosis, Research, and Mad Studies
Mad People and Mad Studies
| Peter Beresford | Springer Nature | 2026
Introduces Mad Studies as an international field that challenges psychiatric authority and centres the knowledge of people labelled mad.
A Review of The Mad Studies Reader
| Reviewer listed by publisher | Theory & Psychology | August 29, 2025
Reviews scholarship challenging pathologization and centering the histories, cultures, knowledge, activism, and lived experience of people deemed mad.
Decolonising the Psychology Curriculum: Perspectives from Faculty
| I. Macedo de Lucas and contributors | Teaching in Higher Education | 2025
Examines faculty experiences and the danger that curriculum decolonization becomes superficial, symbolic, or disconnected from institutional transformation.
Decolonising the Global Mental Health Curriculum
| L. Sharp and contributors | BJPsych International | 2025
Describes a curriculum encouraging students to question knowledge and understand health as historically, politically, economically, culturally, and environmentally situated.
Decolonizing Psychiatric Diagnosis
| Kaori Wada and Karlee D. Fellner | American Psychologist | 2024
Uses Fanon and Indigenous land-based healing to examine the DSM as a cultural and colonial product rather than a politically neutral classification system.
On the Use of Metaphor Translation in Psychiatry
| Lois Wong | arXiv | December 22, 2023
Explains how language barriers and culturally specific metaphors can produce unequal psychiatric care for people who do not speak dominant languages.
Mad Studies Needed to Decolonize Global Mental Health
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | June 1, 2023
Summarizes arguments for survivor movements, experiential knowledge, disability rights, and Mad Studies in global mental health debates.
DSM-5 Faces Global Backlash
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | May 25, 2023
Reports international criticism that psychiatric diagnosis can pathologize cultures and impose Western definitions of normality and disorder.
Resources for Decolonizing Introductory Psychology
| American Psychological Association | APA | February 16, 2023
Provides teaching materials that broaden introductory psychology beyond white, Western, Eurocentric histories, theories, examples, and researchers.
Decolonising Mental Health Research Module
| Inclusive Education Framework contributors | Inclusive Education Framework | 2023
Describes a co-created psychology and psychiatry module replacing rigid teaching hierarchies with collaboration, student choice, and critical reflection.
Decolonising the Psychology Curriculum: A Perspective
| Peter Phiri and contributors | Frontiers in Psychology | 2023
Argues that curriculum change requires re-establishing history through the experiences of groups most harmed by colonial institutions.
Decolonial Psychology
| Lillian Comas-Díaz, Thema Bryant, and contributors | American Psychological Association | 2023
Introduces decolonial psychology as a field confronting the discipline’s role in colonialism, racism, hierarchy, exclusion, and epistemic injustice.
Decolonizing the Field and History of Psychology
| Sunil Bhatia | Psychology Today | June 23, 2022
Challenges histories beginning with European men while erasing non-Western psychological knowledge and the field’s participation in colonial oppression.
“Decolonising” the University of Edinburgh Medical School Psychiatry Curriculum
| E. Nelson and contributors | BJPsych Bulletin | 2022
Assesses omissions in a medical-school curriculum and identifies opportunities to address racism, colonial history, culture, and unequal psychiatric outcomes.
Critical Psychiatrists Argue for Decolonizing Medical Curricula
| Mad in America editors | Mad in America | August 3, 2021
Summarizes arguments that psychiatric education must confront racism, colonial epistemology, coercion, diagnostic assumptions, and marginalized healing traditions.
Decolonising the Medical Curriculum: Psychiatry Faces Difficult Epistemic and Normative Challenges
| Pat Bracken and contributors | Medical Anthropology | 2021
Argues that psychiatry must interrogate its epistemology, diagnostic categories, values, priorities, colonial history, and claims to universal authority.
The Interface of Mad Studies and Indigenous Ways of Knowing
| A. Dwornik and contributors | Critical Social Work | 2021
Identifies opportunities for dialogue between Mad Studies and Indigenous knowledge in challenging biomedical interpretations of unusual experiences.
The Reinstrumentalization of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
| Kai Li | arXiv | October 21, 2020
Studies how professional publications repeatedly establish new DSM editions as legitimate scientific instruments through patterns of use and citation.
Decolonising Our Curriculum
| University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology | University of Oxford | n.d.
Provides resources intended to move psychology teaching away from white and Western bias and toward historically and culturally broader perspectives.
Towards Decolonizing Diagnosis
| Krista Malott and contributors | Semantic Scholar record | n.d.
Reviews movements challenging the cultural assumptions, institutional power, and universal claims underlying psychiatric diagnostic systems.
Community Healing, Public Resources, and Social Conditions
Why Does the Often-Maligned Caribbean Obeah Tradition Endure?
| Natricia Duncan and Guardian contributors | The Guardian | June 17, 2026
Examines a West African-derived Caribbean healing and spiritual tradition that survived colonial criminalization, religious suppression, and cultural demonization.
Decolonising Infant Mental Health: An Anthropological Provocation from Southern Africa
| Fiona C. Ross | Perspectives in Infant Mental Health | February 13, 2026
Questions how Euro-American psychological frameworks produce norms, identities, and interventions within the Southern African infant mental health field.
Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma
| Author listed by publication | The New Yorker | 2025
Documents Palestinian clinicians providing care amid continuing violence and argues that recovery cannot be separated from safety, survival, displacement, and collective conditions.
The Mental State of the World Report
| Sapien Labs | Mental State of the World | 2025
Provides international wellbeing data that can be used to question assumptions derived primarily from wealthy Western populations.
How to Reclaim Wholeness Through Decolonized Healing
| Author listed by publication | Psychology Today | December 20, 2024
Connects neuro-decolonization with cultural memory, ecological relationships, storytelling, movement, compassion, community, and Indigenous spiritual practices.
Years of War in Congo Have Created a Dire Mental Health Crisis
| Sam Mednick | AP News | October 16, 2024
Shows how war, hunger, displacement, violence, poverty, and underfunded services produce distress that cannot be separated from political conditions.
Magic Mushrooms Helped a Navajo Woman Deal with Trauma
| Authors listed by publication | The Guardian | June 12, 2024
Profiles Diné efforts to understand psychedelic healing through Indigenous knowledge while resisting exclusion and commercial appropriation.
In Africa, Trauma from Climate Disasters Lingers
| Le Monde contributors | Le Monde | May 2, 2024
Examines the overlooked psychological effects of floods, drought, displacement, loss, and climate injustice across African communities.
How Do Other Countries Deal with Mental Health?
| Toketemu Ohwovoriole | Verywell Mind | July 5, 2023
Compares how family, faith, stigma, community systems, public policy, professional shortages, and cultural expectations affect mental health care internationally.
Mental Health Is a Universal Right
| Dévora Kestel and Ximena Aguilera | Time | 2023
Calls for rights-based mental health systems, primary care, social participation, political leadership, dignity, and protection from discrimination.
Remembering the Black Pioneers Who Helped Shape Mental Health
| Michelle C. Brooten-Brooks | Verywell Mind | 2023
Profiles Black professionals and advocates who challenged racist assumptions, expanded representation, supported communities, and transformed mental health research and practice.
The Verywell Mind 25
| Verywell Mind editors | Verywell Mind | 2023
Highlights advocates and practitioners working on intergenerational trauma, culturally responsive services, Black mental health, stigma, community, and accessibility.
Decolonizing Creative Practice
| Tamara Winfrey-Harris | Psychology Today | May 4, 2021
Encourages creative practitioners to examine inherited privilege, oppressive systems, silenced voices, Indigenous land, and the need for active unlearning.
Colonialism Still Affects How Black and Indigenous People See Gender
| Anya Zoledziowski | Them | 2021
Describes how colonial law and religion suppressed African and Indigenous gender systems, contributing to cultural erasure and contemporary identity struggles.
Teletherapy Aimed to Make Mental Health Care More Inclusive
| Jamie Ducharme | Time | 2021
Shows that technology alone cannot overcome cost, workforce shortages, racial disparities, insurance barriers, and unequal digital access.
Decolonising Emotional Well-Being and Mental Health in Development
| African feminist practitioners and contributors | Oxfam | 2020
Uses African feminist praxis to connect emotional wellbeing with injustice, solidarity, political struggle, practitioner wellbeing, and humanitarian development work.
Unpacking the Wellness Industry’s Whitewashing Problem
| Amanda Montell | Byrdie | 2020
Critiques the commercialization and appropriation of BIPOC healing traditions and calls for accessible, community-centred, historically aware wellness.
Improving Humanitarian Assistance Through Mental Health and Psychosocial Support
| Sarah Harrison and contributors | Humanitarian Practice Network | July 5, 2018
Explores ways to integrate psychosocial support across humanitarian sectors while responding to social, material, community, and protection needs.
Uncovering the Hidden Impacts of Inequality on Mental Health
| Shun Yu | Translational Psychiatry | 2018
Reviews evidence connecting wealth inequality with mental health and highlights the importance of structural conditions rather than only individual vulnerability.
Enslaved Minds: Decolonising Mental Health
| Frederick W. Hickling | Association of Commonwealth Universities | n.d.
Examines how centuries of slavery, racism, and colonial domination shaped Jamaica’s mental health and inspired postcolonial community psychiatry.
