Decolonizing Mental Health

"We Must All Decolonize Our Minds In Western Culture To Be Able To Think Differently About Nature, About The Destruction Humans Cause.”

bell hooks in “Belonging: A Culture of Place”

Writing, art, and poetry—have always been a weapon of expression for the colonized - one that enabled them to reject and resist the colonizer’s violence.

Lessons from Strangers wishes to provide a platform for a new generation of thinkers who seek to challenge the pervasiveness of coloniality in our lives. By elevating multiple modes of expression, Lessons from Strangers seeks to utilize its first issue to challenge the Western-centric psychological narratives that continually displace the importance of histories, environments, and cultures in the shaping of our identities and thus, our sense of well-being.

Decolonizing and documenting the voices, experiences, and narratives of marginalized groups has no alternative. These stories need to come out, without any customizations to suit leading taste buds. And we are here to make that happen.

To help us achieve this, consider addressing some of the following questions:

Have you ever felt that the contemporary discourse surrounding mental health has been missing something? If yes, what?

Do you feel that certain structural realities have been left out of the current mental health conversations?

What role do our histories play in our mental health?

What role does capitalism play in our mental health?

How might non-Western bodies of knowledge help us transform how we conceptualize our sense of self, nature, and politics?

How might we charter a path forward given our key principles of intersectionality, feminism, and decoloniality?

IMPORTANT

All submissions must be emailed to dan@letterstostrangers.org with Subject Line – “Submission_Category”, e.g. “Submission_Essay”.
Kindly follow the category-specific guidelines as outlined in the submissions section.