The Liberation Psychology Program has published a new paper titled “Wounded Healers: A Liberation Psychology Inquiry into the Experiences of '48 Palestinian Psychotherapists in a Time of Genocide”. The study, which was first published in Arabic in April 2026, is authored by Einas Odeh-Haj, a psychotherapist and director of the Liberation Psychology Program at Mada Al-Carmel.
Since the onset of its genocidal war in Gaza, the State of Israel has significantly escalated its persistent and aggressive efforts to intimidate, persecute, and silence the '48 Palestinians. These policies have permeated workplaces, academic institutions, and the healthcare sector, including mental healthcare. In this hostile climate, Palestinian psychologists and mental health professionals have had to contend with profound professional, personal, and psychological complexities. Therapists have found themselves constrained by Western paradigms within a framework that seeks to impose an Israeli narrative of trauma and suffering, anchored exclusively in the perspective and lived experience of Israeli society.
This study, also available in Arabic, traces the experiences of a cohort of Palestinian therapists and mental health professionals, including those working within Israeli institutions. It explores how these practitioners have navigated the human, intellectual, and professional lived realities of war under policies of silencing and suppression. It employs a qualitative methodology rooted in the principles of critical liberation psychology, as a conceptual framework that engages with the lived experiences of oppressed communities through a psychological, political, and social lens. The study aims to make a novel theoretical and epistemological contribution by drawing on the lived experiences of psychotherapists living in an oppressive colonial context —a hitherto unstudied group— and by examining these experiences in their broader psychological, political, and social context.
To read the paper in English, click here.
To read the paper in Arabic, click here.
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