Decolonizing Mental Health: Healing Beyond the System
“I just want to help people.”
It’s the most common reason therapists enter the field. But that heartfelt intention quickly runs up against a brutal reality: the mental health industry—especially in the U.S.—is not built for sustainability, justice, or collective healing. It’s built for survival. And survival often requires compliance.
Therapists in training are ushered into a system stacked high with requirements: unpaid practicums, supervised hours, licensure exams, CEUs, expensive fees owed to regulatory boards, and mountains of documentation. All for wages that are, at best, barely livable. By the time most reach independent licensure, they’re already burned out. The spark is gone. And with it, often, goes the capacity to imagine healing beyond the system that trained them.
In this context, concepts like liberatory practice or decolonizing mental health get relegated to the "non-essential" category—something to consider someday, maybe, when there’s time, energy, and money.
The System Beats It Out of You
The truth is, the system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as it was designed to. Built on white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal foundations, the modern mental health industrial complex rewards efficiency over empathy, compliance over creativity, and neutrality over justice.
Therapists aren’t just tired—they’re disempowered. And when your very livelihood depends on adhering to insurance-mandated treatment plans and diagnostic criteria, deviating from the norm doesn’t just feel risky—it is risky.
Privilege and the Illusion of Choice
While many white therapists hold the privilege of choosing whether or not to explore liberatory or decolonial frameworks, BIPOC communities typically do not. They live the legacy of colonization in their bodies, families, and communities. Decolonial healing isn’t an option—it’s a necessity. It's not theoretical; it's cellular.
This is the paradox: white therapists have the freedom to explore liberatory frameworks—yet that same freedom makes it easy to delay, dismiss, or deny their importance. The very privilege that affords access also functions as a barrier to accountability.
The Cost of Colonized Care
Colonization in mental health looks like:
Diagnosing normal trauma responses in oppressed communities to justify treatment.
Ignoring intergenerational and systemic trauma because it's ‘not billable’.
Privileging Western, individualistic models of healing while excluding or appropriating communal, cultural, or spiritual practices.
But here’s another layer: it’s a privilege to even be able to not follow these standards. Therapists who want to take insurance—a choice often made to be “accessible”—are forced into a framework governed by medical necessity, progress notes, CPT codes, and DSM language. There is no way to take insurance without engaging in colonized care- at least, as far as I am aware. If you know something I don’t, please enlighten me!
At the same time, asking clients to pay out of pocket—even $50-$70 a session—is often financially inaccessible. Many people pay so much for insurance that the idea of not using it feels illogical. That’s not even discussing the empathy stigma that binds therapists to believing they shouldn’t care about making a profit, or any money at all. The loop continues— snake eating its own tail.
This is where the illusion of accessibility and justice under capitalism is laid bare: offering insurance-based therapy feels inclusive, but it binds therapists to colonial practices. Offering private pay therapy allows for more freedom—but often limits who can access it. There’s no perfect model inside a broken system.
Community, Lived Experience, and real healing
Amid this contradiction, community healers, peer supporters, spiritual leaders, and culturally-rooted practitioners step in—not as a backup, but as the backbone of collective healing.
Because healing happens in relationship. In story. In the wisdom of lived experience. In spaces that don’t require a DSM code to be seen or a copay to be believed.
Therapists are not the only healers—and often, are not the best equipped to fully hold what colonized care ignores.
We must resist the idea that legitimacy only comes with a license.
We must advocate for models that center mutuality, culture, and collective liberation—not individual productivity or pathologization.
And if we’re white, we must stop waiting until it’s convenient to engage with decolonial practice—because convenience is privilege.
Where Do We Begin?
If you’re a therapist who’s overwhelmed, disillusioned, or quietly grieving what you thought this field would be: I see you. And I say this with love—
Your burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systemic outcome.
And healing? It isn’t a modality. It’s a way of being.
To reclaim that, we need to reconnect to our values, our communities, and to the people who’ve been doing this work long before it was accredited or reimbursable.
Suggested Reading & Learning
I strongly encourage diving into the voices of those who live, breathe, and teach liberatory healing and practice from embodied experience:
Dr. Jennifer Mullan – Decolonizing Therapy
Silvana Espinoza Lau- Decolonize Your Practice/Seventh Self Consulting
Tricia Hersey – Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (The Nap Ministry)
Resmaa Menakem – My Grandmother’s Hands
Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel – Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Yolo Akili Robinson – Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM)
adrienne maree brown – Emergent Strategy
A Final Word: The Invitation
Decolonizing mental health isn’t a checkbox or a certification. It’s a lifelong unlearning and a deep remembering. A return to relationship. And it starts by being willing to see the water we’re swimming in—to recognize that the system isn’t neutral, and neither are we.
If you’re a therapist, especially a white one, this is an invitation:
To stay curious.
To stay humble.
To let yourself be changed by what you learn.
And to remember that you are not alone in the work of reimagining what healing can be.
This is a call back to the heart of why many started this path in the first place—not to climb ladders or check boxes, but to sit with people in their truth, their grief, their joy, and their transformation.
Decolonizing mental health is not a detour. It’s the path.
Let’s walk it together.
