“A decolonial look at madness”: African writings

Abstract

Eurocentrism continues to delegitimize other epistemologies by imposing as the only true knowledge that produced in the socalled West, with the pretension of universality. And what about non-Western knowledge? Why are They not valid? There is na attempt to erase Other existences, the result of the historically and hierarchically constructed power relationship with non-Western peoples, the so-called coloniality. This racista practice, in addition to producing pathologies, is part of the pathologizing logic it self, which seeks to dictate what is anormal or not, and which, from a decolonial perspective, proves to be ineffective, because in the contexto of mental health this scientific model Western dualista-rationalist is not only insuficiente, but harmful, as it disregards the individual’s social/political/economic context. Therefore, we aim to understand what psychic suffering is for African peoples from a decolonial perspective. We carried out a bibliographic survey of articles published since 2016. After Reading the abstracts, we selected 5 articles. Despite the absence of scientific productions about understandigs of psychic suffering for African peoples, we obtained as a result the beginning of na understanding from African literature, from the book “The Joys of Motherhood” by Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian writer of Igbo ethnicity, which, in the context of colonialismo, expresses the relationship between psychic suffering and African ancestry.