Where is the mental health community amidst a genocide?

It has been 16 months since the October 7, 2023 siege on Gaza. Over a year of ongoing genocide, with the death toll surpassing 60,000 people (although is number is thought to be grossly underreported; the true scale of Israel’s atrocities are still unfolding). Even since the ceasefire in Gaza that began on January 19, 2025, Israel has now redirected its assault and demolition in Jenin. We’ve borne witness to this ethnic cleansing every single day, seeing with our own eyes death, despair, and insurmountable pain. There seems to be no near end to Israel’s seventy-six-year long violent occupation of Palestine.

I am a licensed social worker and associate trauma therapist. I consider myself to be an anti-oppressive and trauma informed mental health professional. As a Honduran diasporic, I stand in solidarity with the resistance and struggles all over the world. And as the genocide continues, I wonder: where has the majority of the mental health community been during this catastrophically traumatizing event?

Therapists and mental health professionals have largely remained silent about the genocide of Palestinians trapped in Gaza enacted by the Israeli state. Many therapists who claim to be trauma-informed, social-justice oriented, anti-oppressive professionals have either turned to neutral both-side-isms or have just not uttered a single word about Palestine on any of their platforms. Why? What happened to all the anti-racist work white therapists did during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement? What happened to “therapy is political”? Where are they now?

Unfortunately, decolonial and anti-oppressive practice in mental health and western psychiatry has been co-opted and whitewashed over and over again. Appropriating decolonial and anti-oppressive language when it is convenient—in other words, when therapists are able to capitalize off of it—is characteristic of the mental health field. They must know that by protecting their own brand and sitting comfortably in their privilege, their complicity is a stance.

Let me remind you that decolonization is not just a theory; it is a practice, and it is globally connected. Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and Landback all come back to the same struggle for liberation. Our traumas that are rooted in imperialism, colonialism and white supremacist systems are collective. And yes, that includes the trauma of violent and brutal apartheid in occupied Palestine.

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” -Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

With that being said, much of my frustration is directed towards the complicity of the mental health community. Let me be clear in saying that mental health professionals often cause harm; in fact, the psychiatric field is rooted in white supremacy and carcerality, and many therapists adhere to these colonial practices. This is well-known. However, throughout the past year and a half, my eyes have opened to how many white therapists rely on their colleagues of color to do liberatory work while they sit idly by to maintain their own privilege. Yikes.

But what concerns me the most is just how many therapists (white therapists and non-white therapists who align themselves to white supremacy) claim to have social-justice based values, only to profit off of the trauma of oppressed people. The silence amidst a genocide is loud. Ignoring ethnic cleansing is not social-justice oriented. Being complicit in a tremendously traumatizing genocidal event is not trauma-informed. Policing Palestinian voices and their acts of resistance is violence.

While I am grieving and enraged, I am also grateful. I am grateful to my teachers and mentors in the mental health field, to the BIPOC and anti-Zionist Jewish therapists, social workers, and activists, and their unwavering solidarity. Most of all we owe so much to Palestinians; to the mental health professionals, to the diaspora, to the resistance, to the martyrs, to the journalists, to the doctors, to the fathers, mothers, elders and children, and all who are surviving by making life in a deathscape. Who are returning to their homes and land have been destroyed by settler-colonialists. As a trauma therapist, this has been devastating to witness; and, I have hope that we are experiencing a dismantling of oppressive systems. And with a dismantling of oppressive systems, may we collectively heal. For this, we owe so much to Palestine.