Fatina was 11 when the bomb ripped through her shelter …
By Adam Goren, a psychoanalytically trained child and adolescent psychotherapist
17 November 2025

In this short essay, child psychotherapist Adam Goren suggests Palestine exposes a dark and troubling irony; that broken greed-driven societies create the very distress they then deploy therapy to alleviate. The experience of Palestinian healer Ashira Darwish is drawn on to show how brown and black bodies are isolated and targeted for remediation as part of a gargantuan (largely unconscious) gaslighting project. In centring personal pain, western psychotherapies and other such interventions inadvertently distract from root causes of distress in a whole people’s, often deliberate, brutalisation and dehumanisation. Such broken societies, bent on capital accumulation, create psychological-industrial-complexes that monetise their own misery. Nevertheless, as 11-year-old Fatina and her mental health worker from Gaza illuminate, Palestinians are finding their own solutions to the unimaginable horror inflicted upon them.