https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84233405027?pwd=QVQ3UVhyNERjdDlvTzNQdmpPWmo5Zz09

Towards an Advocacy and Solidarity Approach to Pandemic

Mental Health and Covid-19: ‘Resilience’, ‘Trauma’, Social Inequality and Oppression, Liberation Psychology…

https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/attachments/jps-articles/JPS196_08_Roundtable.pdf
WEEAM HAMMOUDEH, SAMAH JABR AND MARIA HELBICH, CINDY SOUSA offer their reflections on communal and professional responses to the pandemic, and what we can learn from the Palestinian experience.

“Mental health researchers often engage with Palestinians as traumatized victims or take for granted their resilience… Such representations miss the messiness and imperfections of struggle; the nonlinear oscillations between ease and disease; and the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of communal agency and resistance that are essential to the contextually relevant conceptualizations of mental health.” [WH]

“Mental health professionals have therefore been urging international organizations working locally to base their approaches on human rights and social justice, instead of solely on medical indicators, and to emphasize the role of cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors that perpetuate and reinforce social injustice and human suffering. In an environment of prolonged conflict and crisis, it would be negligent to focus solely on a diagnosis that individualizes and victimizes people suffering from collective trauma.” [SJ]

“The ability to foretell disproportionate health consequences of disease—and have those assertions met with silence from governments and the global community—is itself a form of mass trauma. This profound silence is, in the language of our times, a collective gaslighting with ramifications not only for the physical health of entire communities (as risks of disease are downplayed and ignored) but also for the mental health of populations… Daily acts of survival in Palestine have always reflected and built agency, power, and connection. These factors—solidarity and action—underlie healing, as liberation psychology instructs.” [CS]