Symptoms and Psychologies in Cultural Context

Abstract

Liberation psychologies teach that environments of injustice, violence, and repression have powerful psychological effects on everyone, whether they are registered consciously or unconsciously. When there is no public language or space to discuss these effects, they may turn into painful somatic symptoms of seemingly unknown origin that are misattributed to other factors. Such misattribution makes it impossible to address the roots of these symptoms.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

(Martin Luther King, Jr.)