Hi, Steel Point friends. My name is Maria Laguna. Welcome to the second seminar of our Critical Psychology series. Today, we're going to be discussing decolonization and mental health. I hope you enjoy.
Before answering this question, It is important to distinguish between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes that nation an empire. Systems and practices that seek to impose the will of one people on another and to use the resources of the imposed people for the benefit of the imposer.
Coloniality, on the other hand, goes beyond a nation actively colonizing and exploiting another one. It involves a long-standing pattern of power that resulted from colonialism. But these patterns affect our everyday lives, defining culture, labor, relationships, and production of knowledge.
Coloniality is maintained alive in books, educational programs, cultural patterns, our self-perception, and many other aspects of our modern experience. There are three different forms of coloniality. Coloniality of knowledge, coloniality of power, and coloniality of being.
Coloniality of knowledge is often exemplified through an individualistic approach to research which requires that the practitioner be unbiased and non-relational. It also emphasizes the technical rationality of Europe as the only model for production of knowledge. This means discrediting other powerful forms of knowledge, such as collective, experiential, or spiritual.
Coloniality of power involves practices that serve to socially classify individuals. This results in social relations founded on the category of race. Colonial power involves the idea that whiteness is inextricably linked with power.
Side disciplines, such as psychology and psychiatry, have largely been managerial, and therefore agent of colonial being and knowledge. When we say managerial, we are talking about control. Psychology has historically used colonial power through the tactics of control, stereotyping, assuming intellectual superiority of some groups over others, and demonizing certain ethnic groups.
Coloniality of being, which is pretty much in line with a neoliberal ideologist, places emphasis on the individual and lack of emphasis in communal solidarity. Why is it important to explore the structures of colonization? In the words of Brazilian educator Pablo Freire, liberation starts with the naming of the social and political structures that dominate and silence. One of these structures is that of scientific racism. The beginnings of psychology are linked to a time when many European and American intellectuals had conceptualized the non-Western other as an inferior and primitive person.
Another manifestation of scientific racism is pathologizing spiritual beliefs and practices when sometimes what people see as psychosis is really a spiritual phenomenon or a culturally grounded phenomenon. Even Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, compared the content of the unconscious to aboriginal populations in the mind. In doing this, he created a system in which what is earlier and past is irrational, primitive, and must be superseded by more advanced and rational subjectivity.
Another structure that promotes colonial thinking is Orientalism. Orientalism involves Eurocentric assumptions that describe these societies, more precisely the Arab and the Middle East, as static, undeveloped, and fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied in the service of power. Implicit in this fabrication is the idea that Western society is more developed, rational, flexible, and superior. So, what is a colonization?
What's involved in it? The colonization consists of three interconnected elements. The first one is the linking of knowledge and thought from Western Eurocentric logics.
undoing practices, actions, and ways of being that reify colonial power, and redistribution of power, including land and material resources, to oppressed peoples. The COVID pandemic has shed light on other forms of colonial exploitation. One example is in the inequities in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines.
Another example, lies in the travel restrictions from South African nations after the discovery of the Omicron variant. Finally, COVID-19, being referred to as the Chinese virus, resulted in an increase in everyday racism towards Asian communities. Colonial mentality is the ethnic and cultural inferiority which takes form in valuing the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of the colonizing culture. over one's indigenous culture. One example of this is considering one's brown skin or curly hair as less desirable.
Another example lies in those who seek assimilation into the white culture and become separated from their communities and are ambivalent about their own identity. Even the popular phenomenon of imposter syndrome or the feeling that you don't belong in a new space or a new role, can be thought of as a form of colonial mentality because it involves the internalization of some form of oppression that makes us feel unworthy of certain status or roles. Writing in the context of African liberation struggles, the psychiatrist Franz Fanon noted how the knowledge and practice in psychology and related fields tended to reflect and serve the interest of racist and colonial domination. Fanon understood that colonialism is not only a means of appropriating land, but also a means of appropriating culture and history themselves. It's also appropriating the names.
the means and resources of identity and therefore affecting powerful forms of psychological damage. For Frantz Fanon, the colonial environment is unlike any other. It's characterized by racism, violence and oppression, and these material and cultural forms of trauma may be the actual cause of neurosis.
Fanon then is considering the social and political inequalities to be at the bottom of what might be seen to be exclusively an intra-psychic problem. Decolonization in mental health involves understanding the concrete experiences, stories, and narratives of people who confront poverty, racism, and gender discrimination in their daily lives. Decolonizing mental health make us think about how disciplines of psychology acquire a colonizing stance.
In other words, a stance that creates a power structure in which other views are undermined and made invisible. Decolonizing mental health shows how the production of psychology is deeply governed by erocentric values and beliefs while neglecting other forms of seeing oneself. and the world. This doesn't mean attempting to reject the legacy of Western psychology, but rather an effort to provincialize it, as Chakravarti would say.
By this would mean that Western psychology needs to be historicized and put in context and considered as only one more version of this discipline, and not the official or the standard one. Using the lens of intersectionality, it's another form of engaging in decolonization of mental health. Intersectionality is focused on exploring the ways in which systemic, institutional, and structural oppression and privilege impact individuals and communities. It involves thinking questions like, how does my race, my education, my sexuality, my class, my culture intersect? and in which areas of privilege or oppression it places me.
One important tool for decolonization in mental health is the possibility of creating a future-forming psychology, a future-oriented psychology that attempts to imagine what psychology can become in the future. This approach with a social justice orientation would ask questions such as what kind of world can we create? How can the principles of social justice shed light on identities that are messy, multi-layered, marginalized, excluded, and highly class-bound?
Another tool is focusing on healing, not just in coping. When we center healing, we allow for intentional, proactive consideration of the relationship between justice and wellness, and injustice and illness. We need to heal from intergenerational trauma, racial wounds, and other collective sorts of pain. When we focus on healing, we're moving away from the individualistic focus of learning coping skills, and we're recognizing that some communities thrive as a result of their connection to others and can use those others as a source of healing. Historical trauma and unresolved grief model.
The historical trauma is a model developed by Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart in the mid-1980s. This is a native-centric model that has become the premier approach towards understanding the world. how colonization has, in most cases, adversely impacted native populations.
This model addresses the ways to adopt healing modalities that are healthy and sustained. These are the steps of the model. It involves understanding the trauma, releasing our pain, transcending the trauma, and confronting historical trauma, and embracing our history. The term testimonio, or testimony, refers to a category of literature that has its origins in Latin America.
In this practice, instead of narrating from the perspective of an academic, the subject of the testimonio is usually an individual who is marginalized. In this way, Testimonia is a vehicle through which the subject may communicate a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, etc., in order to challenge the social and political norms. Politicized narrative therapy suggests a move away from individualized approaches to therapy that sometimes fail to connect personal experiences to broader social and political narratives.
By exposing dominant discourses that contribute to the subjugation of the problem, people have the opportunity to reframe their experiences and access empowerment through a process of politicization where the individual distress is connected to a broader struggle. Body mapping is a particularly useful technique to approach violence from an embodied and the colonial feminist perspective. This method has the potential to connect individuals'experiences of intimate violence with ongoing coloniality, revealing the ways in which these are spatially registered in the body. There are sensory group exercises where women are invited to awaken their bodies and start recognizing them as full of life. with feelings, memories, and emotions.
These exercises are then followed by an explanation of the idea of the body as territory. Through a set of questions, participants are asked to reflect on their experiences of violence and resistance, and are asked to identify how these have affected their bodies through writing and drawing feelings, memories,