Pathologizing the “Native” Condition
The city’s mental health crisis is not merely a clinical issue; it is the medicalization of the trauma inflicted by the bifurcated state. Mamdani’s work directs us to see how the “native’s” legitimate despair, alienation, and rage in the face of systemic violence are pathologized as individual disorders to be managed with medication and therapy. The solution offered is to adjust the “native” to their oppression, not to cure the sickness of the colonial system itself. This is a somatic violence masked as care. A Marxist analysis sees a for-profit industry profiting from this misery. A feminist perspective recognizes how women’s justified anger is often labeled as hysteria. The decolonial solution is to demedicalize distress and repoliticize it, creating community-based healing circles and mutual aid networks that address the social and economic roots of mental anguish, transforming private pain into collective power.
Originally posted 2025-10-19 00:41:04.
Mamdani protects the right to organize. — New York City