“Mental Health: Racism and Psychosocial Well-Being in South Africa” – Decolonising Psychology Division (DPD)
The Decolonising Psychology Division (DPD) contributes a profound reflection on how racism, historical trauma, and structural inequality continue to shape the mental health landscape in South Africa.
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“Mental Health: Racism and Psychosocial Well-Being in South Africa”
– Decolonising Psychology Division (DPD)
South Africa’s enduring legacy of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid continues to generate racialisation and associated psychosocial harms. Psychological distress, mental injury, wounding, and trauma are not only individual experiences but also collective outcomes of structural inequality and racial oppression that affect the majority of the population (Kaminer & Eagle, 2020; Kleintjes & Schneider, 2023; Manganyi, 2019; South African Federation for Mental Health, 2020; Williams et al., 2008). These historical injuries are compounded by deep economic inequality, unemployment, gender-based violence, corruption, and the inadequate provision of health, education, and other essential services. Each of these realities impacts society in racially patterned and distorted ways. The question is no longer whether South Africans face increasing psychosocial pressures, but whether psychology and its related professions are prepared to meet this urgent challenge.
In October 2021, the American Psychological Association formally acknowledged its complicity in, and failure to address, the mental injury caused by racism and racialisation (American Psychological Association, 2021). Globally—and in South Africa—racial trauma is increasingly recognised as a significant mental health issue, with terms such as race-based stress, racial wounding, and collective racial wounding and healing gaining prominence (Cénat, 2023; Chávez-Dueñas et al., 2019; Sibrava et al., 2019). Cénat (2023) proposes a framework for complex racial trauma (CoRT), emphasising that racial harm is repetitive, cumulative, vicarious, and unavoidable, affecting the mental, physical, material, and spiritual dimensions of people’s lives.
While these frameworks are valuable, there is a danger of over-pathologising, medicalising, or biologising phenomena that originate in social and structural spheres (Benoist, 2022; Rashid, 2024, 2025). Moreover, mainstream psychological healing—typically talk therapy between practitioner and client—may not provide a complete answer to collective well-being. This approach is individualised, resource-intensive, and grounded in Euro-American praxis that is often contextually inappropriate.
Racial trauma, as a collective wound, requires collective responses and awareness of the social systems that perpetuate injury. At the personal level, healing involves a movement from wounded and fragmented selves toward creativity, wholeness, and community well-being. At the systemic level, collective agency is required to expose, disrupt, and dismantle social and structural oppression. What is urgently required is a decolonial praxis for healing.
A decolonial psychology and praxis of healing offers a pathway forward. It does not reject clinical evidence nor deny the importance of care; rather, it rebalances the relationship between evidence, culture, and context. It asks who defines stress, wounding, and trauma, whose knowledge counts, and how services can be designed with—not merely for—communities most affected by oppression. Beyond individualistic approaches, a decolonial psychology and community-healing framework addresses epistemic justice, systemic racial injuries, and the transgenerational transfer of trauma (Kiounani, 2019; Mullan, 2023; Seedat, 2023; Stevens & Sonn, 2021). Its focus includes intersectional understandings of oppression, multidisciplinary collaboration, the development of critical consciousness, and a reconnection to community-centred, participatory meaning-making and agency (Chioneso et al., 2020; Clay, 2017; Kessi, Suffla, & Seedat, 2022; Malherbe & Ratele, 2022).
Indigenous knowledge, embodied healing, neurobiological understanding, and spirituality are recognised as valid and vital foundations for collective care (Benoist, 2022; Cénat, 2023; Kiounani, 2019; Rashid, 2024, 2025; Rundall, 2019). A decolonial praxis focuses not only on healing but also on growth, emancipation, and resistance. This includes community-embedded and participatory approaches such as storytelling, commemoration, restorative dialogue, ritual, arts-based practice, land- and place-based work, and the rebuilding of shared meaning and social bonds (Morkel, 2011).
For healing to gain traction, community-based programmes and knowledge creation—along with language-appropriate and culturally grounded practices—are essential. Such initiatives should involve collaboration among community practitioners, activists, traditional healers, faith leaders, and a broad referral network (Benoist, 2022; Kleintjes & Schneider, 2023; Rashid, 2024, 2025). Reflective practice is equally vital for frontline workers, enabling them to recognise and metabolise vicarious trauma, which in turn protects both practitioners and their efficacy in serving communities (Masson & Graham, 2022).
A decolonial healing approach to racial trauma in South Africa implies that psychosocial well-being cannot be separated from broader social determinants such as livelihood support, safety, education, and gender-based violence prevention. Psychosocial well-being in South Africa requires both an honest reckoning with history and decisive action to dismantle the conditions that reproduce distress. Psychology and allied professions have an ethical and social obligation to revitalise and reimagine collective, culturally rooted, and emancipatory practices of healing that decolonise existing mental health models.
