Watching the Decolonizing Mental Health series made me realize how quietly radical its premise is. The digital series containing twenty short films produced by WORLD Channel and PBS does not open with a tragic case. Its premise is an observation: that the mental health field has a center and that this center is not neutral. It is, in the series’ own words, defined by a “whiteness of theory and practice,” and it is so rarely questioned that most of us have long stopped noticing it is there at all.

Throughout the episodes, the series shows therapists, peer support workers, and patients of color and different faiths in the United States as they try to create something more responsive and inclusive that does not require them to translate themselves into a clinical language that is designed by and for someone else. The films are short and moving but also sharp. And watching them from Pakistan, I found myself responding in agreement and also in a kind of disagreement. It suggests something true: psychiatry is not a view from nowhere. It emerged in particular places in Europe and North America. To call that being based on “whiteness” is not an insult. It is the description of a default system, something that has been globalized so successfully that it now passes for the natural order of things.

The disagreement really comes down to geography. Decolonizing Mental Health is a film about the United States. There, Western psychiatry is the default system, and the culturally rooted practices the series follows are the struggling alternative trying to be heard. So the series argues for inclusion and for making room for letting those alternatives in. But the situation in Pakistan is........

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