Rethinking mental health paradigms in the Palestinian context: a phenomenological inquiry challenging Western assumptions

Western psychological paradigms have dominated mental health scholarship, often privileging individualized and decontextualized models. This article asks: How do Palestinians living under prolonged occupation conceptualize mental health, exhaustion, and satisfaction? Data were collected between September 2022 and November 2023 through 24 semi-structured interviews with Palestinian adults residing in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and analyzed using Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method. Findings indicate that mental health includes emotional stability, as well as being relationally, morally, and politically embedded. Mental exhaustion was articulated as cumulative and contextual. Satisfaction was grounded in moral integrity, collective identity, spirituality, and personal and communal agency, whereas dissatisfaction reflected experiences of helplessness and external control. The article contributes an integrated framework that combines community psychology, decolonial psychology, and liberation psychology to reconceptualize Palestinian mental health. By foregrounding lived meanings under occupation, the article advances a contextually grounded understanding of psychological resilience, collective agency, and embodied suffering in colonized settings.