The dominant discourse regarding mental health tends to be biomedical, which results in mental health being viewed as analogous to physical ill-health, and assumes that it can be understood using a scientific line of enquiry about physiological conditions. The prominence of the biomedical paradigm on international discourses on mental health is significant, and the impact is demonstrated in the dissemination of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a universal trauma response. Although there are certain features that are universally recognized, trauma encompasses experiences that go beyond biomedical diagnostic constructs, including social, political, and existential meanings of violence, experiences of loss at both individual and community levels, and local idioms of distress. Generally, the roles of cultural and socioeconomic factors are largely ignored in biomedicine, and if acknowledged, they are secondary influences to how mental health may be understood in a particular society or situation. This literature review applies a symbolic interactionist framework to evaluate how Palestinians interpret traumatic experiences, through different social representations and definitions of trauma, and respond to situations of protracted conflict across religious and political spheres. This review determines that mental health policies for Palestinians need to address mental illness not only with appropriate clinical responses but also with a population-wide response to mass political violation. There has often been very little distinction between these responses, and this results in individualizing the collective narrative of Palestinian suffering, psychologizing the cultural expressions of distress, and depoliticizing their mental health outcomes from the context of ongoing political oppression and dispossession.

Caitlin Salloum would like to thank their faculty sponsor Dr. Terry Tomazic for their support of this project.