In recent years, our work at St. Joseph’s and at the Warner School has also beeninfluenced by the thinking of Canadian therapist, activist, and supervisor VikkiReynolds who, with Australian therapist Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett, has articu-lated the challenges of bringing the worlds of therapy and activism together. Intheir article titled “Bridging the Worlds of Therapy and Activism: Intersections,Tensions and Affinities,” Reynolds and Hammoud-Beckett (2012) say that “psy-chotherapy has much to answer for in terms of siding with oppression, and servingas a tool for social control that maintains oppressive structures of power—bothstate power and interpersonal power” (p. 58).

The problem is colonialism, a condition that permeates every part of Australian societyand that includes our profession and the manner in which we exist and operate. Histori-cally and currently Australian social work has moved between and been a mix of Englishand American social work. It must be noted at this point that America was also a Britishcolony and is still rooted in colonialism. What we call Australian social work today has itsfoundations in colonisation and is still embedded in colonialism. This colonialism isevident today in the way in which social work is practised, its relationship with Aboriginalpeople and communities, the appropriation of Indigenous knowledges, and the position-ing of Aboriginal social workers. Furthermore, this colonialism is evident in the reaction toAboriginal social workers when they speak out about the problems within our professionand the resulting white fragility that sadly happens more than it doesn’t.

Perhaps less obvious than the global governmental and corporate colonial collusionwith the genocide is organized social work’s collusion. I use the word “collusion”intentionally to bring attention to the conscious and unconscious manifestations ofsocial work participation in systems of colonial violence including the zionist project.I use the term “organized social work” because many individual social workers andinformal social work networks have participated in protests, campaigns, teach-ins, andwebinars engaged in organizing and action for Palestinian liberation. My commentsabout social work collusion largely focus on social work organizations, journals, boards,and professional leadership that has chosen silence, repression and false equivalenciesas noted by Suslovic et al (2024).

Given the extensive exposure to violence and ongoing conflict inPalestinian communities, evidence-based trauma-focused inter-ventions are essential for addressing the significant mental healthburden. Most existing research on psychosocial interventions inPalestinian communities has focused on cognitive-behavioralapproaches, trauma-focused therapies or community-based psy-chosocial support programs, which have demonstrated effective-ness for symptom reduction. Key approaches studied includeTeaching Recovery Techniques (TRT), a trauma-focused cognitivebehavioral therapy (CBT) approach showing effectiveness in mul-tiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with Palestinian childrenand adolescents (Barron et al., 2013; Diab et al., 2015); NarrativeExposure Therapy (NET), which differs from narrative therapy andhas been studied in some Middle East and North African (MENA)regions but not specifically with Palestinian populations (Husseinet al., 2020); and various group crisis interventions and psycho-social support programs implemented during conflict periods(Thabet and Vostanis, 2005)

Social work in conflict-affected regions demonstrates the heavy psychological and professional burdens placed upon practitioners

To address these pressing needs, initiatives to reestablish community bonds are crucial. Group therapy sessions or collective memorials can provide vital spaces for individuals to mourn, share their experiences, and begin the healing process together [23]. Promoting peer support groups can foster connections among survivors, facilitating shared understanding and healing while directly addressing the impacts of loss and isolation [5]. Moreover, creating community-focused programs that encourage interaction and collaboration can enhance the overall effectiveness of mental health rehabilitation efforts in this challenging environment [28, 31]. By fostering an atmosphere of mutual support and shared resilience, these initiatives can mitigate feelings of isolation and empower individuals to rebuild their lives amidst ongoing adversity.

Years of conflict, including the recent violence, have led many residents of Gaza to develop a profound distrust of healthcare institutions [4, 29]. Past experiences with inadequate care, limited accessibility, and perceived neglect during crises have intensified skepticism about the intentions and effectiveness of mental health services [30]. This distrust is further exacerbated by the belief that healthcare providers often prioritize physical health over mental health needs during conflicts [29]. As a result of the ongoing violence, individuals may perceive mental health services as unreliable or unapproachable, which discourages them from seeking help [35]. Rebuilding this trust necessitates transparency in operations, active community engagement, and demonstrable commitment to addressing mental health issues [4, 36]. Developing collaborative service models that incorporate community input can enhance the credibility of mental health interventions. Strengthening the relationship between healthcare providers and the community is crucial for creating an environment where individuals feel safe and supported in seeking assistance [26, 30].

Such programs should focus not only on immediate interventions but also on building the capacity of the community to sustain mental health resources over time [23, 29]. This includes training local healthcare providers, integrating mental health services into primary care, and developing community networks that support ongoing dialog and healing processes. However, the ongoing conflict complicates these efforts, making it imperative to advocate for policies prioritizing mental health care and the resources necessary to deliver effective and sustainable interventions [24, 25].

Children, in particular, are vulnerable, facing significant developmental hurdles in an environment marked by uncertainty and danger

Furthermore, safety concerns have led many trained healthcare professionals to leave the region, resulting in a critical shortage of qualified providers necessary for an effective healthcare system [24, 26, 31]. As hospitals are damaged and resources dwindle, individuals experiencing health crises encounter significant barriers to obtaining the care they need within an already overwhelmed healthcare infrastructure [28,29,30]. In addition, the widespread displacement of populations has exacerbated these challenges, making it increasingly difficult for those in need to access previously available medical support [4, 27, 31]. This pressing situation underscores the urgent need for increased funding and resources focused on sustainable healthcare services. Strengthening collaboration between local and international organizations is critical for prioritizing restoring and enhancing these essential services in the wake of the conflict. Such initiatives will be crucial in addressing the emerging healthcare crisis and establishing a resilient healthcare infrastructure in Gaza [28, 29]. This comprehensive approach requires immediate action and necessitates long-term strategic planning to build sustainable healthcare resources and create a framework for ongoing recovery and resilience in the region.

A developmental psychopathology lens underscores that what is being destroyed in Gaza is not only current wellbeing but the developmental scaffolding needed for healthy futures

This aligns with UNICEF's warnings that Gaza represents one of the few places where an entire generation's mental health is at risk of permanent impairment.

This calls for humility, equal decision-making, and an ethic of co-resistance - partnership directed toward shared goals of justice and safety. One of the aims of these MHPSS programs is to deconstruct previous humanitarian models rooted in a savior mentality and to foster an ethical model rooted in solidarity and collaboration. As such, knowledge exchange should be bidirectional, with international actors also learning from local strategies and healing practices, promoting mutual care and an ethical commitment to reciprocity.

Palestinian clinicians face dual roles as caregivers and as citizens operating under the same violence, precarity, and grief as their patients. Their psychological well-being is deeply entangled with the communities they serve. Practical decolonization therefore, requires attention to the moral, emotional, and collective burdens carried by local providers. Supporting these practitioners requires ethically informed and reflexive supervision designed specifically for contexts of collective trauma, peer support spaces that acknowledge political realities, and trauma-informed practices that recognize both vicarious and direct exposure to violence. Support structures must include policies that protect rest, boundaries, and time away from case loads, as well as acknowledgment of shared suffering—not a demand for neutrality or emotional detachment. Trainings should provide strategies for resilience, stress management, and professional solidarity. In the field, authors have embedded reflexive, context-informed supervision sessions for Palestinians mental health practitioners, reflecting both vicarious trauma and ethical decision-making. Concrete measures like funded supervision time, transport allowances, rest rotations, and advocacy support for local providers are ways to show what ethical responsibility looks like in practice.

Likewise, all research involving Palestinian communities should similarly adopt collaborative, bottom-up methodologies, consulting participants at every stage—from design to interpretation—and prioritizing their perspectives over external assumptions.

In contrast, interventions implemented by international agencies often showed limited efficacy, constrained by insecurity, staff turnover, and their reliance on externally designed protocols (Aqtam, Citation2025).

Such aid models can inadvertently reinforce dependency by centering international actors as indispensable providers and obscure the expertise and leadership that already exist within Palestinian institutions, families and community networks.

The many layers and complexities involved in humanitarian work may not always be visible to the distant observer. From rigorous needs assessments and in-depth contextual research to negotiating access, establishing trust, and building community acceptance, organisations navigate a delicate balance between managing risks and addressing the most urgent needs. Yet, humanitarian practice is deeply entangled in political constraints and fraught with ethical dilemmas.

By integrating liberation psychology, decolonial mental health, and human rights perspectives, these models reframe Palestinian distress as a rational, contextually grounded response to occupation, highlighting the inseparability of psychological well-being from justice, dignity and collective agency. These frameworks collectively challenge dominant Western paradigms, offering conceptual tools to align mental health interventions with the lived realities of Palestinians and the broader struggle for self-determination

Decolonial approaches advocate for re-centering local knowledge, emphasizing structural determinants, and integrating collective narratives into mental health care.

Situating Palestinian mental health within liberation psychology, decolonial thought, transformative justice, community psychology and human rights frameworks enables a more comprehensive understanding of distress, resilience, and agency under occupation and settler colonialism. These frameworks highlight how communities engage in resistance, resilience and struggles for justice and dignity, reframing psychological well-being as inseparable from collective freedom and self-determination. They also provide conceptual tools to critique the ways in which Western NGOs and international aid often impose trauma models that individualize, psychologize and depoliticize suffering, while undermining grassroots organizations, inadvertently reproducing colonial power hierarchies (Helbich & Jabr, Citation2022; Makkawi, Citation2017).

Despite these challenges, resilience and culturally rooted protective factors persist. Family cohesion, community support, faith, political socialization, and engagement in collective practices, alongside the culturally specific concept of sumud (steadfastness), contribute to psychological coping and a sense of agency (Giacaman, Citation2020; Jabali et al., Citation2024; Wispelwey & Jamei, Citation2020). For Palestinians, ‘Sumud is a central component of resilience and provides a meta-cognitive framework which Palestinians use to interpret, cope and respond to ongoing injustice and traumatic experiences, engendering a sense of purpose and meaning. It is both a value and an action that manifests via individual and collective action to protect family and community survival, wellbeing, dignity, Palestinian identity and culture, and a determination to remain on the land’ (Hammad & Tribe, Citation2021). Moreover, parental guidance, intergenerational storytelling, and communal mobilization reinforce identity, solidarity, and purpose, highlighting the interplay between coping strategies and psychological adaptation.

Diab et al. recorded several idioms used to describe psychological harm, such as suffocation (makhnogeen), imprisonment (masjoneen), isolation (maa’zoleen), hopelessness (fesh amal), feelings of being lost (tayheen), pressure (madghoteen), fear (khayfeen) and worry (galganeen).

Humanitarian mental health interventions remain largely grounded in Western diagnostic frameworks, emphasizing individual pathology, symptom reduction, and short-term psychosocial support (Mills, Citation2014; Watters, Citation2010). While these approaches can be valuable, they often risk depoliticizing and pathologizing survival by individualizing distress rather than recognizing it as a predictable consequence of chronic exposure to coercive contexts - occupation, dispossession, and collective loss - that define everyday life (Kohrt & Mendenhall, Citation2016; Summerfield, Citation2004). Liberation psychology and decolonial mental health frameworks argue that psychological wellbeing cannot be disentangled from the realities and structural conditions that produce harm (Helbich & Jabr, Citation2022; Martín-Baró, Citation1996). In the Palestinian context, this means acknowledging how instability, movement restrictions, fragmentation, loss, lack of protection and safety, and systemic precarity shape emotional and social worlds. The rapidly shifting structural and social landscape in Palestine further constrains data collection, reducing the capacity of research to fully capture the breadth and complexity of these intersecting determinants.

In Australia it is the leading cause of death ofpeople between 15 and 44 years and affects men two to three times more than women.

have often seen my place as a social worker within mental health to be an advocate in supportingmy clients/consumers to have their voice heard, be included in their care and treatment, and reducethe power imbalance between clients and clinicians. Social workers advocate for individuals to seekthe support they deserve in a system that is often confusing, chaotic, overwhelming and filled withbarriers to accessing services. This includes liaising with government services, referrals to non-government organisations, support with federal systems, such as Centrelink and National DisabilityInsurance Scheme, and advocating to assist in overcoming discrimination of those with mental healthdifficulties that are entrenched in social systems.

Our social welfare is completely floating on emergencies and relief. If we add long-term perspective in our social welfare sector we can extend it to social develop-ment. So we have to change the approach and we must add some new ideas insocial welfare for the country to progress.

When a single patient comes to us we study his whole history. He tells and shareseach and every problem (i.e., economic or social problem), and our institution triesto solve not only the patient’s problem but we also try to make solutions for hisfamily as much as our institution can solve.

The people of these provinces are living under a ‘feudal system’; they want theircitizens to be unaware of their rights. Islam is actually based on Haqooq-ul-ibad(i.e., rights of human beings). God may forgive us for not fulfilling His rights(Haqooq Allah) but He will not forgive us for not taking care of human rights(Haqooq-ul-ibad). Our organization is convincing people on the name of Islambut our Muslim scholars are using it for their own welfare.

But I think the main purpose of social welfare is to help others. Our people areused to helping others in the specific tones of Zakat or Fitrana (religious charity)etc., but social work is to help the poor and deserving people. The concept of help-ing others in our society is by charity or donation. Islam mentions the rights ofwidows, orphans, and neighbours etc. but unfortunately, we’ve made this concepta western concept. Scientific social work is actually the study of people whetherthey deserve it or not.

Specifically, first, the researchers readthrough all the transcribed material with the objective of identifyingcommon themes; second, the themes were coded; third, data weresearched for similar instances of the same phenomenon, so cate-gories of behavioural and interaction patterns could be identified;and fourth, data were translated into working hypotheses thatwere refined continuously until all instances of contradictions, simi-larities and differences were explained (thus increasing the depend-ability of the findings)

Likewise, ‘the teaching of Western-based methodologies of socialwork was to be discouraged and replaced by indigenous methodsevolved from practice in Pakistan’ (Rehmatullah, 2002: 176)

The International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) acknowl-edges the role of local knowledge, and emphasizes the understandingof local and cultural context in relation to social work practice(IFSW, 2000a)

Ever wondered what life was like for the traditional owners of Perth before the British arrived in 1829?The Noongar people have lived in the south-west corner of Western Australia for at least 45,000 years. There are several language groups that make up the Noongar, including the Whadjuk, who are the traditional owners of the land around Perth.Whadjuk [pronounced wod-JUK] Noongar Elder and ambassador Dr Noel Nannup talks about traditional Whadjuk ways of life and key cultural places in Perth, and he teaches us the Noongar words for some Perth suburbs (such as Nollamara).Some locations are particularly special to the Whadjuk people, such as a cave along the Derbal Yarrigan (the Swan River) where it's believed the creation serpent lives. What other important places does Noel describe?