Original Social Media Post

"Almost 10 years of practicing as a therapist, and no textbook has ever taught us how to conduct therapy in the middle of war. No module explains what to do when, in the middle of a therapy session, the sound of enemy warplanes tears through the sky and both you and your patient freeze, convinced a bomb has just fallen nearby, only to realize few minutes after they are dropping threatening flyers instead. There is no clinical guideline for how to continue holding space for this, and it’s not surprising because modern psychotherapy was developed in the West, where war is studied, analyzed, and theorized… but outsourced to the rest of us. So therapists in places like #Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, and beyond are left practicing therapy inside the very trauma we are helping people survive. This is why conversations about decolonizing mental health matter. So let’s be careful when we talk about international frameworks/guidlines/best practices as universal truths, that can be simply exported to us. The future of global mental health will not be written only in Western textbooks, but in places that have been surviving war for generations." - Source

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