06/21/2026
Colonial Trauma Is Not PTSD
Western psychiatry often relies on diagnoses such as PTSD to explain human suffering after traumatic events. But what happens when the trauma is not a single event from the past, when it is ongoing, systemic, and rooted in a colonial reality?
The trauma is not only individual; it is collective. It is not only psychological; it is political, social, and material.
Colonial trauma describes the cumulative harm inflicted through occupation, displacement, imprisonment, humiliation, starvation, torture, and the destruction of families and communities. It includes the parentification of children forced to survive without the adults who once protected them. It includes starvation used as a weapon and violence designed not only to punish individuals, but to intimidate an entire society.
When we reduce these experiences to individual pathology, we risk obscuring the systems that produce the suffering.
To understand Palestinian mental health, we must move beyond asking, "What is wrong with this person?" and ask, "What has been done to this people?"