Decolonizing Mental Health

Catalog description

Decolonizing Mental Health will offer students a critical perspective regarding the contextual reality of contemporary Western/American mental health practice. Critical to this discussion is an understanding of the profound trauma experienced by ‘vulnerable’ folk, at the hands of ‘powerful, oppressive’ folk. Central to this discussion will be a focus upon the life and professional psychiatric practice of Dr. Frantz Fanon. Dr. Fanon’s professional commitment to providing ‘healing’ to those experiencing mental ‘distress’, continually interfaced with his personal ‘lived experience’ as a Black North African man, struggling to survive, in a White, Western, Racist, Patriarchal, Homophobic world.