Hope for BIPOC-Led Wellness and Mental Health Care

Originally published in No Permission Needed Zine

Wellness has become a buzz-word in the mental health field. Yet, much of the wellness practices encouraged today have been heavily capitalised, and often appropriate traditional holistic health practices from Black, Indigenous and People of Colour’s (BIPOC) cultures.

How can we elevate the practices and voices of BIPOC-led wellness and mental health care?

Care that incorporates the traditional practices of diverse cultures is a positive step forward for health care. However, it is necessary to decolonise the wellness industry and create safe, non-capitalist spaces for and led by BIPOC communities. 

Traditionally, biomedical approaches to mental health have intersected with coloniality and racism, creating systems of violence and in instances such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in America, serious breaches of consent, autonomy, and justice. Due to long, global histories of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour being appropriated, trialed, tested, tortured, institutionalised, harmed and invisibilized by the medical industrial complex, it is imperative that BIPOC-led, culturally-competent, anti-racist mental health care is available in addition to biomedicine.

With merely 4% of Scotland’s population being non-white, Black and People of Colour (BPOC) in Scotland require accessible, low-barrier, safe spaces from racism and discrimination and to share experiences of mental health. Additionally, due to relations between the justice system and medical industrial complex, citing mental health acts in Canada, France, and Scotland for instance, that permit forced institutionalisation, care that is conceptualised and constructed by BIPOC communities is critical. How can we reclaim what was once ours, but has now become a child of Western capitalism?

From my positionality as a South Asian in the diaspora, there is a push and pull between my wellness habits and I, and the exorbitant cost of the wellness industry. From expensive yoga classes, to yoga pants, to excruciatingly costly lattes with haldi (turmeric). In all honesty, I wouldn't mind the price as much if some of the studios, clothing brands and cafes paid homage to our culture, traditions and ancestry. But watching the West take yoga classes and drink haldi lattes to reduce their waistline can be exhausting at times, causing me to disengage from what really are practices and habits from my own culture but have since been claimed by diet-culture and health and wellness fads.

How can we reclaim our cultural wellness practices from an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial lens?
We need community leaders. We need cultural teachers. We need low-barrier access to wellness practices.  We need community spaces. We need to honour our roots. We need to lean into our traditional ways of healing. We need regular conversations about decolonising health and wellness. We need less capitalism. 

So I ask, how will you decolonise the wellness industry and reclaim traditional wellness practices?