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On Decolonizing Palestinian Mental Health: Trauma and Resilience as Colonial Repair
Abstract
Can the salient psychological approaches practiced in Palestine, particularly the ones centered on trauma and resilience, be used to understand and repair suffering under colonial conditions? How else should psychologists and mental health workers conduct their practice in Palestine? This paper examines the psychopolitcs of these two frameworks as they have been promoted and applied to the settler-colonial reality in Palestine. It is argued that practices of trauma and resilience in Palestine are complimentary technologies of colonial repair, and are integral to the productive powers of settler colonialism. Colonial repair seeks to re-appropriate and transmute the native’s wound to eliminate colonial resistance by helping the colonized better assimilate and adapt to the colonial system of oppression. The complimentary work of trauma and resilience in Palestine casts colonial subjects as devoid of the indigenous impetus to resist oppression, which in turn implies the subjective elimination of the natives, beyond their physical elimination/killing. Indigenous and psychoanalytic relational perspectives on repair are offered as alternative frameworks for decolonizing Palestinian mental health. I conclude with two interventions, charting an indigenous framework for conceptualizing Palestinian suffering and coping under colonial rule.
Discipline
Psychology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Health