Modern psychology was not built for dealing with the grief and uncertainty of mourning your country from Australia, writes Rita Nasr, who contends with the question of whether “seeing a therapist” could ever help with such disorientation.
I have written extensively about what it means to be an Australian-Lebanese woman watching Lebanon and the Middle East unravel in real time. It is a specific kind of grief, a diaspora grief that doesn’t have a clean name.
It is the fear that wakes you at 3am. The not-knowing what has happened while you slept, the guilt of safety, the disorientation of mourning a place you also call home from inside a country that mostly cannot see what you see. It is, as scholars of migration have long noted, a grief that lives in the hyphen — Australian-Lebanese, belonging and not-belonging, all at once.
When I tried to describe this to a friend recently, she listened, and then she said, gently “Maybe you should see a therapist.”
I am not opposed to therapy. I believe in it. But I resisted, and I have been sitting with that resistance, trying to understand it. Where l landed is simply that therapy is not what I actually needed. Not as a woman carrying the grief of a war consuming my country of birth. My pain is not individual. It is collective, political, and cultural, and that is precisely what mainstream therapy is not built to hold.
The truth is, modern psychology was not built with women like me in mind. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the therapeutic hour, the language of ‘coping strategies’ and ‘reframing’ were all designed in a particular cultural moment, by and for a particular kind of person. Predominantly white, Western, and male, operating within a framework that places both the problem and the solution inside the individual self. There is no intersectional lens. No real accounting for race, culture, displacement, or collective grief. This is not a conspiracy; it is simply history. But the consequences of that history fall hardest on women of colour, on migrant women, on those of us whose pain cannot be separated from our identity, our community, and the lands we carry inside us.
Research consistently shows that culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) women are among the least served by mainstream mental health systems in Australia. A 2021 report by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists found significant gaps in culturally responsive care, with migrant and refugee women facing compounded barriers that include language, stigma, cost, and the simple, devastating fact that the models of care on offer often do consider their experience of distress.
What I am feeling watching Lebanon is not a disorder. It is a rational, human response to watching people I love, and a land woven into my identity, subjected to violence and uncertainty. To send that grief into a therapy room is to risk having it individualised and to have the question become “why are you struggling to cope?” rather than “what does it mean to grieve collectively, from a distance, with no power to stop what is happening?” These are not the same question. And for many women in the diaspora, especially those from conflict-affected areas, the second question is the one that matters.
There is also the question of what it costs us to translate ourselves. Arab women, in particular, carry the compounded weight of stereotype into the therapy room — assumptions about our cultures, our families, our relationships with religion and with men. To access care, we often have to explain ourselves before we can be helped. We must contextualise our grief, justify our politics, and make our communities legible to someone who may have no framework for them. That labour is exhausting. And it is not neutral.
This is not to say therapy can offer nothing. Culturally informed clinicians exist but are rare. Trauma-focused frameworks that account for political violence, intergenerational loss and collective grief are slowly gaining ground but elusive. The norm, particularly in the under-resourced public system most women can actually access, is still a model that centres white, Anglophone, individualised experience as the default.
What has helped me is not a clinical intervention. It is witnessing. It is being in community with women who understand without needing it explained. It is writing, which gives shape to things that have no shape. But I am one of the lucky ones. I have community. I have language. I have safety.
Many CARM women do not. Women who fled war, persecution, and violence. Women who survived refugee camps, who crossed borders with nothing, who rebuilt lives in a country that often sees them as a category rather than a person. For these women, the failures of Western mental health care are not abstract. They are daily. A system that cannot hold collective grief, that has no framework for intergenerational trauma rooted in political violence, that expects women to translate their entire lived experience before they can access care. That system does not just fall short, it causes harm.
What Australia’s mental health needs is not more encouragement to see a therapist. It needs an honest reckoning with who it was built for and who it has consistently left behind.