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Decolonial Psych

@decolonialpsych

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🧠 Mental health beyond the mainstream
🖤 Black + Muslim community care
🌿 Liberation, wellbeing, joy
🧕🏾 Trainee Clinical Psych

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Ramadan is in its final stretch now, with just about a week or so left.

For some, these days bring renewed energy as the last nights approach. For others, this part of the month can feel heavy, especially if Ramadan hasn’t looked or felt the way they hoped.

Sometimes what we’re feeling is grief over changes in our lives or over the life we thought we might be living by now.

As these precious nights continue, perhaps the invitation is simply to pause, notice what is present within us and turn gently back towards Allah.

May Allah allow us to witness Laylatul Qadr in these remaining nights and accept from us all. Ameen 🌙

#ramadan #islam #mentalhealth by @decolonialpsych

In these blessed ten days of Ramadan, I’m fundraising for CAGE International.

For over two decades CAGE has stood for justice working to free prisoners, empower Muslim communities, and challenge Islamophobic laws and oppressive government policies.

Supporting this work is part of the ongoing effort to revive justice and defend those who are often forgotten behind prison walls.

My goal is £3,000.

If you’re able, please donate generously and share with friends and family. Link in bio 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾 by @decolonialpsych

Working across NHS and community spaces, what strikes me isn’t only underfunding, it’s how instability is built into the structure of care. Services depend on short-term grants, competitive bids and shifting political priorities that determine which communities are deemed urgent, deserving, or strategically valuable. Provision has to keep proving it deserves to exist.

Thinking about waqf in this context isn’t about romanticising the past. I guess it’s thinking about how might our community infrastructure be organised so that it is less exposed to austerity, extraction and structural violence? by @decolonialpsych

Whiteness does not mean white people. It names a system of power, not an identity. It is a socially constructed position that emerged through colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism to organise hierarchy, decide whose knowledge counts, and secure material and symbolic advantage for those closest to it.

Whiteness works by presenting itself as neutral, universal, and often invisible, while marking racialised people as particular, cultural, or political. It shapes institutions, norms of professionalism, ideas of expertise, and even emotional expectations, including whose discomfort is taken seriously and whose suffering is normalised.

It is also deeply embodied and relational. It is learned, reproduced, and enforced through everyday practices, not just explicit beliefs. Moving beyond it requires confronting and dismantling the structures and logics that have made whiteness the measure of humanity in the first place. by @decolonialpsych

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Who gets to decide what counts as “real” knowledge in psychology? Is it the institution that opens its doors to you? Is it the hours you’ve spent sitting with people’s pain? Or is it something older, the wisdom our communities hand down, the knowing that lives in our bodies before any textbook names it?

As I move through training, I notice how the systems/institution expects me to smooth out the parts of myself that don’t fit the dominant mould, the ways of knowing I come from, the language my body speaks, the truths my community holds. There’s an immense pressure to centre the models, to speak in the institution’s dialect, to bracket out anything that doesn’t fit its idea of “neutral.” But I’m realising that neutrality often just means white, Eurocentric, and rooted in colonial frameworks that feel completely disconnected from the lives of the people we’re meant to serve.

I keep coming back to the body. Because distress cannot be separated from culture, faith, history, violence, or power. Yet so much of our teaching asks us to do exactly that, to treat suffering as if it appears in a vacuum, neat and apolitical.

Colonial psychology has turned expertise into something distant, polished, and strangely hollow. The further you are from your community, your emotions, your politics, the more legitimate you seem. Meanwhile, the deep knowing carried by our elders, our healers, our ancestors is treated as anecdotal, optional, or “not evidence-based.”

I’m realising that part of my journey is unlearning that hierarchy. And it’s allowing myself to continue to trust what my body, my faith, my community have always known, despite the institutional resistance.

#psychology #psychiatry #epistemicinjustice by @decolonialpsych

I’ve been thinking a lot about how what we call “muslim politics” is still shaped by the lingering shadows of Arab nationalism and the hierarchies it produced. There’s a painful pattern in who gets centered and who is forgotten, a hierarchy structured by Arabism, colourism, and our inherited ideas of proximity to power, beauty, and belonging.

Sudan’s genocidee didn’t suddenly worsen. It has been on the trajectory for decades; it’s simply being noticed now that other geopolitical priorities have quieted. And that says a lot about how selectively our empathy operates. What we often call racism feels like too simplistic a term, this isn’t just about prejudice or ignorance, but about how histories of empire, ethno-nationalism and internalised coloniality continue to shape our sense of who is worthy of attention, protection or mourning.

We know very well across our communities, lighter-skinned, Arab, or geopolitically "strategic" struggles are elevated, while Black and non-Arab lives are treated as peripheral or inconvenient to the wider cause. These hierarchies live in our our solidarities and even our language of liberation. We so often confuse nationalism, a political, man-made ideology, with something spiritual or Islamic. Loyalty to a nation is too often spoken about as if it’s loyalty to God or the ummah, when in reality these ideas are actually colonial inheritances that distort our collective sense of liberation

Our liberation is meaningless if we don’t confront these realities if we can’t even name how our collective imagination as an ummah still replicates the same systems we claim to resist.

Photo credit: @sheff_mehndi by @decolonialpsych

There is a reason your heart aches when you witness injustice. You were not created to turn away. You were created with purpose and part of that purpose is to feel, to care, to rise.

This isn’t just about politics. It’s about the soul. It’s about being human in a world that tries to numb us.
So ask yourself: will you remain rooted? Will you be steadfast?Even when it’s heavy. Especially when it’s heavy.

#FaithAndJustice #MentalHealthAndFaith #RootedInPurpose #SpiritualResilience #CollectiveHealing #DivineJustice #HealingThroughFaith #JusticeIsWorship #MentalHealthAwareness #FaithInAction #AntiOppression #ResistDesensitisation #StaySteadfast #WitnessAndResist by @decolonialpsych

#StateSurveillance #IslamophobiaIsRacism
#DecolonialFeminism #MuslimResistance
#PolicedForExisting #PreventStrategy
#SurveillanceIsViolence #NotYourSymbol
#AbolishPrevent #MuslimWomenResist
#StructuralViolence #RacialisedSurveillance by @decolonialpsych

For the past two days I’ve been sitting with families whose loved ones were murdered by the police, listening as they relived the most brutal moments of their lives. We didn’t just hear their stories, we bore witness.

The police were named for what they are (and what they always have been): murderers. Their violence isn’t accidental or exceptional; it’s systemic, intentional, and importantly, protected by the state. The cover-ups, the destruction of evidence, the surveillance of grieving families… it’s all part of how the state maintains its impunity.

As Black people, we are rendered sub-human before we even speak. Criminality is assigned to us the moment we enter a white supremacist world. And when we’re in crisis, especially a mental health crisis, the systems that should protect us become the very machinery that kills us.

Sitting in that room, it became painfully clear, the only answer is abolition. Not reform, not better training. Abolition of policing and prisons in their entirety. Because this system is doing exactly what it was built to do.

Bearing witness felt like a vital act of resistance, a refusal to let these stories be sanitised, neutralised, or depoliticised. A refusal to let the state turn our dead into cautionary tales instead of martyrs of a violent and racist system.

We have to make our oppressors scared. We have to speak, gather, organise, and refuse silence. Because our grief is political. Our stories are evidence. And our witnessing is part of the struggle for liberation.

#ThePeoplesTribunal #AbolitionNow #PoliceBrutality #BlackLivesMatter
#MentalHealthJustice #WitnessingResistance
#BlackLiberation #EndPoliceViolence
#SystemicViolence #RacialTrauma
#CollectiveHealing #JusticeForTheMurdered by @decolonialpsych

Pathologising Resistance: How Mental Health Has Been Used to Suppress Social Justice

#psychology #psychiatry #socialjustice by @decolonialpsych