Making Therapy Accessible: Reimagining Mental Health Through Traditional Healing and Language by Talha AlAli

“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting points.” — Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) 

Global mental health systems remain shaped by colonial legacies that prioritise Eurocentric paradigms, often marginalising the lived realities and cultural wisdom of the very populations they aim to serve. As a psychotherapist working with people impacted by war, forced displacement, and systemic exclusion, I have seen how the assumptions baked into Western psychotherapy can become obstacles, not bridges, to healing. 

To make therapy truly accessible across cultures, we must integrate traditional healing practices and the language of the client—not as add-ons, but as core components of care. 

Why Language and Cultural Practices Matter 

Language is not merely a tool for communication—it is a carrier of worldview, memory, and resilience (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986). When clients are forced to translate their suffering into a clinical lexicon alien to them, they often feel misunderstood or pathologised. This is especially true for people from colonised or diasporic communities whose inner worlds are embedded in culturally specific metaphors and idioms of distress (Kirmayer et al., 2014). 

In therapy, inviting a client to speak in their native tongue—even briefly—or to describe their experience through proverbs, parables, or religious references can transform the process from alienating to affirming (Gone, 2021). Language, in this sense, becomes a gateway to restoring dignity and self-understanding. 

Reclaiming Traditional Healing 

Across the world, communities have developed their own modalities for coping with pain: storytelling circles, drumming rituals, herbal medicine, communal grieving, and spiritual cleansing, to name a few. These practices are often dismissed by dominant psychological frameworks as “unscientific” or “cultural beliefs,” a dismissal rooted in colonial hierarchies of knowledge (Mills, 2014; Smith, 2012). 

Yet these traditional modalities are often trauma-informed, holistic, and relational. In my work with displaced clients from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, reconnecting with these practices has helped individuals reclaim a sense of continuity between past and present, self and community. For example, incorporating prayer or Qur’anic verses in sessions with Muslim clients, or recognising poetry as a form of testimony among Arab speakers, has fostered deeper engagement and trust. 

The Risk of Commodification 

As global mental health grows, so too does the risk of cultural appropriation. Practices like mindfulness and yoga have been extracted from their spiritual roots, commodified, and repackaged for Western consumption (Purser, 2019). This risks reinforcing the very power imbalances decolonial work aims to dismantle. 

We must move from appropriation to partnership—consulting with cultural elders, community healers, and spiritual leaders to ethically integrate traditional practices. This is not about blending for the sake of novelty, but about co-creating healing environments that are culturally congruent and locally led. 

Ethical Communication and Power 

To decolonise therapy, therapists must examine their own power. This includes who gets to speak, whose knowledge is centred, and how care is delivered. As Freire (1970) reminds us, liberation is not bestowed—it is built through dialogue. In therapy, this means seeing the client not as a passive recipient but as an active knowledge-holder. 

Therapists must also interrogate their own positionality. Decolonising the mind, as Fanon (1963) and Said (1978) taught us, is not only for the colonised. Therapists who have benefited from systems of dominance must do the inner work of confronting their biases and unlearning hierarchies of expertise. 

A Call for Systemic Change 

Integrating traditional healing and language is not a matter of cultural competence—it is an ethical imperative. Training programmes must expand their curricula beyond Western theorists to include African, Indigenous, Arab, and Asian epistemologies (Fernando, 2010; Watkins & Shulman, 2008). Institutions must create space for practitioners from diverse backgrounds to lead, shape research, and redefine care models from within. 

Therapy must cease being a luxury for the privileged and instead become a right—accessible, contextual, and rooted in justice. 

References 

Bains, J. (2005). Race, culture, and psychotherapy. Routledge. 

Fernando, S. (2010). Mental health, race and culture. Palgrave Macmillan. 

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press. 

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. 

Gone, J. P. (2021). Decolonizing mental health. Oxford University Press. 

Kirmayer, L. J., Gone, J. P., & Moses, J. (2014). Rethinking historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 299–319. 

Mills, C. (2014). Decolonizing global mental health: The psychiatrization of the majority world. Routledge. 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey. 

Purser, R. E. (2019). McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. Repeater Books. 

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books. 

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books. 

Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. Palgrave Macmillan. 

About the Author 

Talha AlAli, the founder of Decolonised Minds, is a psychotherapist and human rights activist with over a decade of international experience working in Palestine, Jordan, Libya, Bangladesh, Ireland, and Ukraine. His work focuses on trauma, torture, displacement, and decolonising mental health practices. He is currently based in Dublin and provides therapy to clients from diverse cultural backgrounds and provide training and workshops to professionals in the field of mental health. 

For more information, visit: www.decolonisedminds.ie