What if the future of mental health care lies not in new diagnostic categories or pharmaceuticals, but in centuries-old rituals, communal storytelling, and ancestral knowledge? A new article in American Psychologist makes the case that Indigenous healing traditions, long dismissed or ignored by mainstream psychiatry, offer crucial insights for reimagining mental health systems worldwide.
The paper was written by a transnational team of psychologists and anthropologists who bring both insider and outsider perspectives to their community-based research. Together, they call for a decolonial turn in mental health that takes seriously the cosmologies, ceremonies, and community-based knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples.
As the authors write, “the healing traditions we have discussed point to the need for a paradigm shift through decolonizing psychology’s epistemology and practice,” noting that dominant models often view Indigenous healing “as based on the self-fulfilling expectations of local belief systems or nonspecific placebo effects.” In contrast, they argue, these practices reveal the “effects of symbolic interventions at physiological, psychological, social, political, and spiritual levels.”
The study is a reminder that we are all shaped by histories and cultures that structure not only our consciousness but also the fault lines along which it can rupture. Experiences of suffering, crisis, or transformation emerge within particular worlds of meaning. And the ways we make sense of these ruptures (how we respond to them, narrate them, or attempt to repair them) are themselves cultural practices. The authors write:
“Healing practices map distressing experiences and afflictions onto metaphoric representations drawn from culturally authorized narratives and ontologies,” offering possibilities for transformation through “ritual practices or metaphoric reframing.”
By turning to Indigenous healing traditions, they show how communal rituals, art, and story offer ways of engaging these ruptures to help people reconnect, make meaning, and carry what might otherwise overwhelm.
This also has implications at the systems level. The authors emphasize that “supporting access to culturally grounded systems of coping, help, and healing” requires investment in community efforts to “maintain or revive specific practices” and the inclusion of traditional healers in mental health settings.
The authors include Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting, a Malaysian-born clinical psychologist based in Beijing who specializes in Indigenous psychologies in Asian contexts. Boon-Ooi Lee, a counseling psychologist and researcher based at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, studies spirit mediumship, embodiment, and indigenous healing systems, including the dang-ki tradition. Jeffrey Ansloos, a Cree psychologist and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Health and Social Policy at the University of Toronto, is known for his work on suicide prevention, affective ecologies, and land-based healing. Joseph P. Gone, a professor at Harvard University, has written widely on historical trauma and critiques of mainstream psychology, advocating for “alter-Native” approaches grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems. And Laurence Kirmayer, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at McGill University, is a global leader in cultural psychiatry whose work focuses on the intersections of narrative, metaphor, and mental health in cross-cultural settings.
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