Decolonizing Mental Health
Mental Health Awareness Through a Liberation Lens
May marks Mental Health Awareness Month—a time often focused on destigmatizing diagnoses, promoting access, and raising awareness. These goals are important. And yet, to truly honor the complexity of mental wellness, we must move beyond the surface and ask deeper questions: Who defines mental health? Who benefits from those definitions? And who is harmed when suffering is pathologized instead of understood?
Within dominant systems, mental health is often framed through a narrow, medicalized lens—one that isolates the individual and overlooks the impact of collective trauma, systemic violence, and generational oppression. This pathologizing framework tells people that their pain is a disorder. That their anxiety, depression, dissociation, or rage is a personal failing. But what if, instead, we saw these responses as wisdom? As signals from the body and spirit trying to survive a world that too often erases, exploits, and oppresses?
From a liberation perspective, many behaviors labeled “disordered” are, in fact, deeply human reactions to dehumanizing conditions.
Capitalism, white supremacy, colonization, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy create environments where safety is scarce, rest is denied, and belonging is conditional. In this context, it is not madness to feel overwhelmed—it is clarity. Numbness, panic, disconnection, or despair are not signs of brokenness. They are signs of a system that is breaking people.
Decolonizing mental health means shifting from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you—and what’s happening around you?” It means naming how intergenerational trauma, racialized violence, and systemic inequity shape our inner landscapes. It means making space for cultural, spiritual, and community-centered practices that honor healing in all its forms—not just those sanctioned by institutions.
Mental Health Awareness Month is an opportunity not just to talk about mental health—but to reclaim it. To affirm that wellness is not just personal, but political. That healing is not just self-care, but community care. That wholeness doesn’t come from fitting into oppressive systems, but from dismantling them—together.
This month, may we honor not only our struggles, but the strength it takes to survive. May we see our symptoms not as shameful, but as sacred messengers. And may we dream toward a world where wellness is a birthright, not a privilege.
At Roots and Rays, we support our clients as they gently unlearn internalized stigma and walk beside them to co-create a path to wellness rooted in dignity, truth, and liberation.