Kony's Reviews > Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice

This book has a passionate author and an important premise, but it's trying to be and do too many things at once. I'd describe it as a biblical-length polemic on the sordid history and destructive nature of our current mental health systems -- interwoven with personal anecdotes, summaries of other people's research, long bullet-point lists, and long lists of prompts for further reflection. It's unfortunately very repetitive, and not organized in a way that makes intuitive sense. It needs several rounds of developmental editing.

Substance-wise, it's ironic that a book on "decolonizing therapy" leans so heavily on abstract critiques, institutional language, research citations, and bullet-point lists. I was hoping for more storytelling, more of an immersive focus on the narratives of actual people and communities collectively endeavoring to do what systems have failed to do.

It's also strange that, despite the hundreds of pages of decrying the current system, there's little space devoted to challenging the model of therapy itself as a professionalized, primarily individualistic practice. Therapy, as it's currently practiced, only makes sense in a capitalistic world where community members don't feel equipped to hold space for each other, and/or can't rely on each other to co-hold their healing and discovery processes. I'd imagine that truly "decolonizing therapy" might mean dismantling the construct of healing as something we do as individuals in private rooms with paid professionals. It might mean exploring what it would look like to abolish the therapeutic industrial complex, and to develop local community-based cultures of healing instead. This book barely grazed the surface of these possibilities and, for me, sadly missed the mark.