An hour-long therapy session with a stranger to cope with trauma from genocide is like taking a Tylenol for a bullet wound. And it's not even easy to find a good psychologist in the west, I can't imagine every Rwandan found the perfect doctor for them
Ethnocentrism in western psychology is a very real and very big problem.
Some parts were better than others, I thought the critiques throughout the thread were mostly about westerners not considering other cultures and backgrounds, and how isolation and alienation — especially to the degree you see in America — does adversely affect mental health outcomes.
Cultural differences play a pretty big and often overlooked role in psychotherapy. It's absolutely crucial that you create an environment where the patient feels cared for and can open up, and how that environment looks is entirely a cultural thing - retreating to a confidential environment with one trusted advisor serves that purpose for most Westerners, but a rural commuity in Western Africa will see these matters very differently. When you've ever seen how these communities treat healing ceremonies, it's just a completely different thing from what we consider a therapeutic setting, and it makes perfect sense to me that one would look for ways to apply all we've learned in psychotherapy through a more culturally appropriate medium. That doesn't mean to throw out the scientific state of the art, it just means to learn how we can modify methods in its application to other regions of the world.
It's not as if we're talking pharmacology or surgery here. Psychology deals with much less clearly defined phenomena, and is nowhere near the scientific accuracy that we see in other therapeutic disciplines. The therapeutic approach that helped me personally the most treats the human mind basically like a blackbox and focusses entirely on changing behavorial routines, and that kind of behavorial therapy also happens to be well supported from an evidence-based standpoint in spite of its agnosticism on the root cause of mental health issues (for treatment of phobias, for example, behavorial therapy works better than literally anything else out there) . Psychology isn't at a point where we can view things as set in stone and as being the only thing that works. Saying "it's inappropriate for our culture to do a therapy session in a 1 on 1 talk in a closed room" is pretty far from the "rejection of Western medicine" some people in the other thread perceived it as.
My wariness with the thread was more about the non marxist, non critical attitude. I think it is great to have tools to deal with mental health problems, but to ignore that they are not only material in the sense of chemicals in your brain, but also materially and socially in the sense of relations you have to your community etc. is problematic imho.
So no worries.
to ignore that they are not only material in the sense of chemicals in your brain, but also materially and socially in the sense of relations you have to your community
I don’t think most people in that thread were saying this though?
I also think the site has a problem with anti-intellectualism surrounding mental health. Therapy is objectively a good thing. If it hasn’t helped at all, you probably haven’t found the right therapist/treatment, or that treatment hasn’t been discovered yet.
I’ve noticed this too and it’s almost always based on the person making weird assumptions about what psychology is and talking out of their ass.
If the trauma was collective, it makes sense for the therapy to be as well.
Edit: hell, even individual trauma can benefit immensely from connecting with people with similar experiences.
The issue is that psychologists should know about this stuff, it’s why cross cultural psychology suggests vernacularization and toleration of culturally bound syndromes.
Totes agree. Someone else commented about how the article that quote was taken from is literally about how psychologists recognize this and are working on it.
I can’t think of a bad worst case
That people don’t get mental healthcare because it’s stigmatized.
The thread went from being about Rwanda to therapy in general pretty much immediately, which is what I’m talking about. Also I’m not a man.
Didn’t intend it in a gendered way if that helps.
That's nice, but please just edit the comment so that it isn't misgendering her.
I personally don't get a lot out of talk therapy plus I did not go through genocide so who am I to say they are wrong?
A crank appropriated a quote from an article about multicultural awareness in therapy to push an agenda? Wow!
Great comment, thanks for the sauce.
It's important that we decouple our neurodivergent identities, as much as possible, from institutions that serve as medical authorities in our society.
In fact, much of the time, the dynamics of capitalism end up having an impact on counselor-client relationships, and diagnostics can often pigeonhole us. One of my best friends worked as a therapist back when she lived in the same city as me, and she said that she sometimes felt like that job description necessitated a space after "the".
I think in this case, Western psychology has a lot to learn from Rwandan culture.
What I was trying to get at with my last reply to you is that moralizing about drug use is your brain on liberalism (especially the strain of Protestantism that underlies American culture).
Stigmatizing drugs that have a mixture of recreational and therapeutic uses, like amphetamines, actively harms the people who need them. It is already so hard to get a prescription for adderall — I recently moved states and had to find a new psychiatrist who would continue treating me. It took me several months and several appointments with psychiatrists who refused to continue my prescription, treating me like a junkie, doubting my diagnosis even with the thorough 14-page report from the psychologist who diagnosed me in hand, and trying to put me on something else that could take up to 6 months to work and had awful side effects like suicidal thoughts — all because of the stigma around stimulants. I'm lucky that I could afford to spend $200 for each worse-than-useless appointment until I found someone actually willing to help me (2 hours away lol) and that my boss understood why my work was so shitty until I got back on my medication, but that's really not the norm.
Stigmatizing drug use also harms recreational users without benefitting society in any way. Recreational adderall users might be someone who has ADHD but no insurance to covers diagnosis or psych visits, just as easily as it might be someone who just wants to have a good time, just as easily as it might be someone working grueling hours at an exploitative job that needs to stay awake and energized, like truck drivers. It's easy to say "well the job should be safer and less shitty so people don't need to take drugs to be productive for capital" but that's not the material reality we live in.
Stigma around drug use also makes it harder for someone struggling with addiction to get help or treatment. It also makes it easier to keep substances illegal and power the prison industrial complex.
There's no harm in normalizing drug use, but there are many parties harmed by stigmatizing it.
