02/23/2026
This Black History Month, we honor Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary thinker, and one of the earliest voices to name what many Black communities still experience today: mental health is deeply shaped by systemic oppression.
As a practicing psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, Fanon treated patients whose suffering was inseparable from racism, violence, and dehumanization. In Black Skin, White Masks, he explored how living under constant surveillance and racial hierarchy fractures self-image and produces chronic psychological stress. In The Wretched of the Earth, he documented how colonization creates trauma that lives in both the body and the mind.
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip… it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”
Fanon’s work reminds us that many symptoms we label today as anxiety, depression, or burnout are often rational responses to unjust systems. Healing, then, is not about “fixing” ourselves — it is about restoring dignity, truth, and connection.
At Rise Counseling Group, we approach therapy through this lens. We offer trauma-informed, culturally competent mental health care for Black women, teens, and college students, rooted in the understanding that identity, culture, history, and liberation matter in the healing process.
Choosing therapy is not weakness.
Rest is not laziness.
Care is not indulgent.
For Black communities, healing has always been an act of resistance.
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