As mental health professionals, it is our duty to protect humanity and expose all forces of destruction that have the intent and ability to cause psychological harm. For this reason, mental health professionals have a critical role in confronting the manifestations of neo-colonialism, imperialism, and systematic brainwashing and preserving our shared humanity.
Palestinians and many other peoples fighting against these brutal powers are paying the ultimate price with their lives and livelihoods. Israel functions explicitly as the West’s colonial outpost in the Middle East, strategically established and maintained to control resources, trade routes, and regional power dynamics. This neo-colonial arrangement fundamentally relies on the systematic dispossession and deliberate dehumanization of Indigenous Palestinians.
Israel has expanded its military operations across the region with absolute impunity: attacking Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, committing genocide in Gaza, moving to full annexation of the West Bank, and now waging war on Iran. This escalation demonstrates a calculated strategy of regional destabilization, clearly serving Western imperial interests. Despite international scrutiny, Israel repeatedly violates ceasefires and launches attacks on Iran, falsely justified by unfounded allegations of nuclear threats. The IAEA has explicitly found no evidence that Iran has the capability to build nuclear weapons (See IAEA report), and Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified in March 2025 that the US intelligence community “continues to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” (See link). These facts are routinely ignored to justify ongoing aggression.
Israel’s crimes are by now extensively documented, and yet they continue to be blatant and enacted with impunity: Over one million children in Gaza currently require mental health intervention, yet there is no “post” in their post-traumatic stress as their trauma is systematically and purposefully indefinite. This psychological warfare explicitly aims to break the will and destroy the spirit of an entire population (See report). The systematic starvation of Gaza represents one of the gravest war crimes of our era. (See report) Israeli forces have admitted to arming criminal gangs that loot aid convoys, deliberately creating chaos and ensuring civilian starvation—a clear manifestation of this brutal colonial policy. (See report )
The complicity of many world nations, but particularly European nations and the settler colonies of the United States, Canada, and Australia, is not only flaunted through military aid, but also diplomatic cover, economic partnerships that legitimize occupation, and media narratives obscuring the colonial reality. This comprehensive infrastructure of support perpetuates systematic brainwashing, distorting public perception and numbing international consciousness to relentless suffering.
Mental health professionals globally must recognize that silence in the face of these atrocities amounts to complicity. There can be no mental health without human rights, no healing without justice, and no peace without dismantling the colonial structures that continue to enable systematic violence.
We call on mental health professionals and all mental health institutions worldwide to demand and advocate urgently for ending all military support to Israel, a complete arms embargo, imposing comprehensive sanctions, ensuring unrestricted humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip, and holding perpetrators accountable. As guardians of psychological well-being, our responsibility extends beyond treatment rooms—it is our ethical duty to stand firmly against systems of oppression and violence that devastate human lives and minds.
To the people worldwide courageously speaking truth to power, we urge you to keep protesting, speaking out, and boycotting the settler, apartheid, and genocidal state of Israel. Your voices are critical in changing this trajectory. True liberation requires not only Palestinian freedom but also the complete decolonization of neo-colonial and imperial systems perpetuating human suffering globally. Our collective humanity demands nothing less.
