Core Clarity Co (LLC)

“Decolonize your practice” is a phrase we’re seeing more and more in therapeutic and wellness spaces. But for many people, it can feel vague or trendy—like just another buzzword with no clear application. And yet, if we take it seriously, decolonizing mental health invites us into something deep, radical, and necessary: a reimagining of how we understand pain, healing, and care.

This isn’t just about changing our language or adding a few culturally relevant examples to our worksheets. It’s about reckoning with the roots of our field. It’s about asking hard questions. And it’s about committing to practices that disrupt the default norms—especially for those of us offering care to people whose identities, histories, and ways of being have long been pathologized or ignored.

The Colonial Roots of Mental Health Systems

Western psychology, psychiatry, and the broader “mental health industrial complex” were largely created within Eurocentric, white, patriarchal, and colonial systems. They were designed by and for people in positions of privilege and power—and often explicitly used to uphold the status quo.

Historically, colonized people were labeled as “primitive” or “mentally deficient.” Enslaved people who resisted were diagnosed with fabricated disorders like “drapetomania,” which framed the desire for freedom as a mental illness. Indigenous, Black, queer, and neurodivergent people were often institutionalized not for being “unwell,” but for being inconvenient to the systems they lived under.

Even now, we see the legacy of this:

BIPOC individuals are over-diagnosed with certain conditions and under-diagnosed with others.

Queer and trans people continue to face therapists who try to fix or erase their identities.

Immigrant families are pressured to assimilate, while their culturally grounded ways of coping are labeled “dysfunctional.”

Trauma from racism, poverty, displacement, and colonization is often minimized—or not even acknowledged.

What Does It Mean to Actually Decolonize Mental Health?

To decolonize mental health is to move beyond surface-level inclusion. It’s a commitment to uprooting harmful assumptions and centering the knowledge, voices, and practices that have long been sidelined.

Here’s what that can look like in action:

1. Validating Collective and Historical Trauma

Many people’s suffering isn’t rooted in individual dysfunction—it’s rooted in systems of oppression. Colonialism, slavery, genocide, forced assimilation, environmental degradation, and ongoing structural violence all have psychological impacts. Recognizing this trauma is essential to healing. Therapy that ignores these realities risks retraumatizing clients by making them feel their pain is “just in their head.”

2. Centering Community and Interdependence

Western models often prioritize the individual: individual success, individual insight, individual responsibility. But many cultures understand healing as something that happens in relationship—with family, ancestors, community, and land. Decolonizing therapy means welcoming these values into the room, not dismissing them as “enmeshment” or “co-dependency.”

3. Uplifting Ancestral and Cultural Wisdom

Western psychology doesn’t have a monopoly on understanding human behavior or promoting healing. Indigenous knowledge systems, spiritual traditions, storytelling, somatic practices, rituals, and other cultural frameworks offer rich paths to wellness. Decolonizing care involves respecting and learning from these practices—not appropriating or diluting them.

4. Practicing Cultural Humility, Not Just Competence

There’s no such thing as being “competent” in someone else’s culture. Instead, therapists can practice cultural humility: acknowledging what they don’t know, staying open to learning, and centering the client’s lived experience as valid and essential.

Why This Matters Right Now

In today’s political climate, this work feels more urgent than ever.

Across the U.S. and beyond, we are witnessing a rise in anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, censorship of BIPOC history in education, increasing surveillance and policing, and widespread attempts to roll back civil rights and bodily autonomy. The emotional toll is massive—especially for marginalized communities who are being told, once again, that their lives, histories, and truths don’t belong.

And yet, many mental health systems still treat these reactions—grief, rage, fear, burnout—as personal issues to be “fixed” or “managed,” instead of valid responses to real-world harm.

Here’s the truth: none of us are going to be “fixed” by healing in isolation from the systems that harm us.
Because we’re not broken—we’re responding. We’re surviving. We’re adapting. And while individual healing is important, it cannot be separated from collective liberation.

This is why decolonizing mental health isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. It’s a refusal to ignore the context in which our pain arises. It’s an insistence that healing must include justice, autonomy, and the right to be fully human.

An Invitation

If you’ve ever felt like traditional therapy doesn’t quite fit—like it asks you to leave parts of yourself at the door, or forces you into models that were never made with you in mind—you’re not alone.

You deserve care that honors your story, your culture, your community, and your truth.

Decolonizing mental health is not a destination. It’s an ongoing process. One that requires humility, accountability, and deep listening. But it’s also full of possibility—because when we break free from the limitations of the dominant narrative, we create space for something more honest, more spacious, and more liberatory.