Decolonizing mental health

I’m starting to share responses to general trends I’m reading in social media. I don’t partake much in social media anymore. Not like I used to, but I am still ghosting around and seeing what is happening on the front lines of thought in critical psych and social justice. Below are some of the responses I’ve had to common themes that I felt like sharing.

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Therapy is the last place to go for decolonization…the entire mental health system is essentially an arm of the state.

“How can we make you work for capitalism and white supremacy and smile while doing it?

“…that’s what therapy will get you. Except for some very rare birds therapists are pretty dangerous for anyone who is really interested in social justice and especially for those oppressed by psychiatry in ways that go unrecognized .

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Some things are always changing. Yes. And I was a radical young professional too and I thought it was changing a hell of a lot more than it has. And at this point given all the critical psych work I’ve done, I don’t have any expectation that anything ensconced in capitalism and our white supremacist construct will ever be anything but abusive and toxic in a general sense. There are always rare exceptions to this.

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You can’t be interested in mental health and get paid by people who have nothing, however and if the system is mandating “CARE” it will not be care. There has to be a way for it to be noncoercive and free. Thus the necessarily predatorial habits of anyone who relies on capitalism can go out the window. The best professionals behave predatorially under capitalism. That’s the real issue.

Also:

“A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an unsupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account.” ~ Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections

And finally in reference to the above quote by Jung, notice the lack of the word empath. Sadly AI phony accounts are erasing what Jung actually said and filling youtube and google results with fake BS that appeals to those who don’t know what he actually said but want to see pop psychology that supports vapid constructions of what is happening.

Stay alert!

Be aware and awake while the apocalypse is happening!

More related to Decolonizing mental health

• 2025 smelling like 1984
• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man
• Decolonizing our minds: freeing our spirits — another story of recovery

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