The Global Expansion of Psychiatry is Modern Colonialism & the Global South is Pushing Back

Why We Need Decolonized Mental Healthcare + A Case Study on India/ South Asia

At 17, I cried to my grandmother about how I felt incapacitated by sadness, loneliness, and heavy yet unexplainable emptiness that stemmed from some “culture shock” of just having moved to the United States from Saudi Arabia for my education. I told her I needed to see a psychiatrist because surely that would “fix” me. I felt untethered, ungrounded & broken, being unable to adapt to the demands of a capitalist society despite my lifetime of hyperawareness that I was the “other” wherever we sought refuge. She warned me of the intrinsic hollowness that comes with living in a “western” (American, European, Colonial) society that abandons community to chase the trophy of individual success as people spend their lives accumulating wealth, power, social status, glamor to fill the dark emptiness within them— she begged me to slow down and think about how I can find community. She calmly told me that my sadness stems from me being plucked from my roots & transplanted to foreign lands, stripped of connection to my heritage, cultural values, traditions & spirituality. It reminded her of the wave of sadness that spread like a plague in our communities in South India as they tried to be more ‘gore’ (white) when we were forced to shed our local ways of living to assimilate & “westernize” to be like the Americans & British.

My ammi (grandma) told me I didn’t need a western psychiatrist, I needed ‘hamaare loog’ (our people), ‘hamaare zabaan’ (our language), ‘hamaara imaan aur tehzeeb’ (our faith & cultural traditions). I angrily dismissed her for invalidating my suffering & told her my pain was rooted in chemical imbalances or defects in my brain because that’s what I was led to believe. I told her my ways of thinking matched symptoms listed under “ADHD” & many other psychiatric diagnoses. She sighed and said “beta (my child), they will destroy you and make you feel like it was your fault”. Today, in tears as I write this, 12 years after being thoroughly ‘educated’ & westernized in the pipelines of “modern” (colonial) medical & science systems after desperately aspiring to whiteness & Americanized ways of living — I have found my way back to realizing my ammi was right all along & she tried to tell me the best way she knew how.

Abolish Psychiatry series, Part II:

A wake-up call on the dangers of a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health with global domination & expansion of colonial, western psychiatry while “erasing” Black & Brown Indigenous systems of community-centered mental healthcare rooted in spirituality, cultural rituals, traditions & political revolutions

Each part of this series will have a case study on different Black & Brown communities.

Why should you care about understanding the historical & geopolitical context of psychiatry? You’ve been socialized your whole life with colonial, capitalist norms via state propaganda to think that your sadness, distress and existential pain are mental disorders caused by physical brain defects, that society’s problems are due to “bad individuals” rather than violent oppressive systems & that “treating” or “punishing” people will fix our problems. This was always the role of colonial “mental health” systems- gradual, domination & subjugation of minds so people (& our lands) can be controlled, exploited & extracted from as divergence from the status quo or rebellion is demonized as “insanity” & punished with overt or covert violence. Except, there are alternative ways to address our pain that are truly effective because they were built to value & preserve community health.

For people living in the U.S., Australia, NZ, Canada, etc- you are living in the heart of neocolonial empires where there was no wave of independence movements to restore Indigenous sovereignty and the settler colonizers are still in power. These empires still subjugate & control countries in the Global South which are only superficially independent. It is imperative for you to understand this because you dominate mainstream mental health discourse/ spaces- your uncritical reliance on these rotten colonial systems is hurting you, impeding decolonization & distracting from us targeting the socioeconomic roots of our distress.

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1. The ‘global’ mental health movement is not global-

It is dominated by western, capitalist psychiatry or psychology that frame our distress as symptoms of neurological disorders treatable by drugs rather than responses or adaptations to socioeconomic/ political conditions of chronic inequity & oppression in life under capitalism, colonialism & state control. Our pain is individualized, diagnosed & treated with drugs in a vacuum, isolated from the plight of our communities. Wellness, mental health & neurodiversity spaces are dominated by people living in western, colonial countries like the U.S. mirroring the colonizer/ colonized power dynamics of the global north/ global south. The ‘progressives’ call for these western mental health systems to be scaled up & expanded to the poor/ marginalized both locally & internationally to the ‘3rd world’ (i.e. communities colonized by European empires) as an act of charity.

This export of psychiatry is a part of neocolonialism & has faced heavy pushback from academics, grassroots groups & psychiatric survivors in the Global South who instead advocate for mental distress, suffering & community trauma to be addressed in the context of poverty, imperialism, capitalism’s environmental destruction & political violence. After centuries, there is no empirical evidence showing that “mental disorders” are caused by biological defects or deficits and research is increasingly reporting harmful effects & lack of utility of psychotropic drugs. Psychiatry & it’s “diagnose-and-drug” individualistic model are losing validity which risks the collapse of state systems of population control & a multi-billion dollar psych pharmaceutical industry so efforts to force these systems on people have doubled down.

2. Expansion of Eurocentric systems (labeled as ‘superior’ & ‘modern’) marginalizes, demonizes & violently erases non-western cultures

My transition from idolizing western psychiatry to dedicating a subset of my life to dismantling it is akin to my daily use of skin-bleaching fairness creams as a kid battling to survive white supremacist systems followed by my gradual decolonization of the self & regaining of agency in community. Black & Brown kids may initially shirk our roots because the world collectively mocks & dismisses alternative models of healing- from Indigenous shamans & Chinese acupuncture to Indian herbal Homeopathy & Ayurvedic medicine which are labeled as ‘backward’ ‘uncivilized’ ‘savage’ relics of the past. In contrast, western systems borne out of the framework of colonialism (genocide, slavery, domination) are disguised with medical jargon as superior ‘objective’ holy grails of human advancement & “modernity” that we should gratefully embrace.

This colonial power imbalance extends to all western systems that are spread globally as ‘modernity’. American & European cultures, music, entertainment, clothes, accents, food, etc are glamorized as superior despite their bland emptiness & ego-centric individualism as they are exported to the Global South in favor of ‘westernization’ as a natural part of ‘globalization’. Black & Brown folks internalize this oppression after our own cultures were beaten out of us as we were forced to shed our ‘savage’ roots to assimilate & take on white, ‘civil’ ways of life. It has taken me a lifetime to purge myself of hatred, repulsion, or embarrassment of my Brown & Black cultures, traditions, foods, music, ethnic clothes, language & ways of existing.

American & European education, academic institutions & research are framed as ‘superior’ with no context in how past & ongoing colonialism has stolen, extracted & depleted Black & Brown resources & people to accumulate/ hoard profits & wealth in colonial countries. A degree from an American university gets you the highest paid jobs in the Global South but degrees from the Global South often don’t count at all or are dismissed. For example, in many fields like medicine, ‘foreign-born immigrants’ have to repeat their entire education or training in the U.S. or Europe to work there even if they have decades of experience. A ‘blue passport' from the U.S., Europe, Canada etc gives you global mobility while those of us with Black or Brown passports have to pass rigorous visa processes including ‘security risk background checks’ that take months or years to be POTENTIALLY granted entry in countries (or denied). We are always presumed guilty until proven innocent by white colonial systems, just as we are inferior until we assimilate & fit into western systems. An individuals worth is very much still measured by their proximity to whiteness, capitalist success & wealth.

The global domination of American/ European culture reflects on the current world order that was established as a legacy of 19th and 20th century colonialism- all thru violent invasion, domination & hegemony. Capitalism is a global economic system invented by European colonizers that deprives everyone today of the right to life & objectifies/ commodifies all living beings & nature as a resource that can be extracted or exploited for mass production & profits (which are hoarded by the 1%). We are all forced to play by these rules because what the colonizers say, still goes.

I accompanied by grandma, dad & aunts to the community ‘mandir’ temple rituals in Bengre, a rural island village nested in the lush jungles of the Western Ghats in South India in the state of Karnataka. One paved road cut thru the village but other than that- Bengre had resisted urbanization & we mostly got around on foot, rickshaws or scooters. We ate meals cooked with the local harvest and seafood caught on daily fishing boats. Till this day, the place I go to in my head to feel safe & calm is memories of sitting on the porch of our stone hut during a monsoon as rain splashed over our water well & the decorated puja (prayer) balipitha (altar) with the green thick forest ahead & the sound of the Indian Ocean’s waves crashing on the rocky shore that was also within sight.

What did my grandma do when she learned of my anemia, hypothyroidism & other health issues?