Beyond Burnout: Centering Mental Health in the Fight for Justice

In a year marked by political upheaval and shrinking civic space, the toll on our collective well-being is impossible to ignore. In 2024, over 60 countries reported declines in fundamental freedoms including, but not limited to, media freedom, freedom of speech and expression, and political freedoms. For many, these are not abstract statistics, but daily realities that leave both physical and emotional scars.

While physical health often takes center stage in post-crisis responses, mental health – especially in humanitarian assistance, human rights and peacebuilding programs – remains sidelined as secondary or anecdotal. But for those of us working in these fields, it’s clear: psychological well-being isn’t just important, but essential to the sustainability of our work, our movements, and ourselves.

Burnout is more than a buzzword 

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified “burnout” as a condition resulting from work-related stress, leading to mental and emotional exhaustion, depression, disassociation, and a reduction in work productivity. International non-governmental organizations (INGO), domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other civil society actors have long advocated for the recognition of burnout: integrating trauma-informed care into an organizational ethos; emphasizing the need for mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in programming; and creating wellness initiatives for staff. This step was needed to address the impacts of mental-health related stressors as they can affect other health-related issues such as addiction, sleep disorders, depression, and gastrointestinal disorders. The recognition by WHO gave legitimacy to what many of us already experienced acutely: emotional exhaustion, disassociation and the creeping sense of helplessness and hopelessness that comes from trying to fight injustice while also surviving it at the same time.

Yet, there are components of mental health in programming and (I)NGO culture that are rarely, if ever, addressed including traumatic distress, how systemic and systematic oppression and repression contribute to emotional health, and how the historical power imbalances between the Global Majority and Global Minority continue to uphold these systems of repression.

The Limits of Western Wellness

Many wellness initiatives, while well-intentioned, use Western-based psychology: emphasizing self-care and self-directed stress-reducing techniques to retain job market value. In other words, be well… so you can keep being productive. Too often, these initiatives put the responsibility for healing back on the individual, without ever acknowledging or addressing the root cause of suffering. This results in emotions like anger, grief, anxiety, or sadness being pathologized, rather than legitimate responses to systemic injustice, oppression, or repression.

Western psychology has, in practice, separated the personal from the political. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a mental health practitioner. After mentioning the vicarious trauma I have experienced as a result of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, I was told, “it’s sad. But what else is going on?”

You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Name

This type of practice systematically excludes, or at the very least, minimizes, the experiences of war, conflict, occupation, poverty, or other chronic societal or political maladies. For instance, Dr. Samah Jabr, of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, has explained that the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in and of itself, does not consider long-term (and sometimes, lifelong) traumas, as it focuses on treating individuals after a trauma has ended. In other words, there is an ongoing assumption that traumatic experiences do end.5 But what about those who never get the luxury of “post”?

It begs the question: how does one “self-care” out of systemic oppression or decades of ongoing war or conflict? One should question how someone can “take a break” from the violence of state oppression? Is someone able to “take a break” from the carnage caused by war when, in certain countries, violent conflict has been ongoing for generations? How do we “take a break” from the oppression that governs our lives? Humanity demands that we seek alternative approaches that reflect lived experiences and approaches that center people, not profit.

Healing as Resistance

Liberation psychology offers a different path. According to its founder, Ignacio Martin-Baro, “treating people for trauma, while not addressing the reasons for their trauma, is a way of perpetuating colonialism and oppression.”6 The “neutrality” of Western psychology actively removes people from the context in which they exist, treating mental health issues as an individual maladaptation to stress, rather than a byproduct of oppression.7

This tendency suggests that mental health initiatives undertaken by the civil society community should center the approach to “trauma” within the context of environmental and social injustices. Concerted efforts should be made to ensure that trauma-informed care or MHPSS initiatives are not used as a tool to pacify an audience or population. Rather, mental health programming should acknowledge ongoing social injustices and support culturally specific ways of embodying both self- and collective care to resist these oppressive systems. Accordingly, the act of resistance should be framed as a critical form of self, community, and societal care. At PartnersGlobal, this philosophy is central to our MHPSS work. We reject traditional approaches to trauma that encourage people to adapt to harmful systems: instead, we challenge those systems and support the efforts of communities to resist them.

Numbers vs. People: A Reckoning for (I)NGOs

The historical harm caused by the international community isn’t just theoretical – it is lived experience. This requires a reckoning of the injustices, uneven power dynamics, and harm historically caused by some INGOs and the donors that fund them.8 Years ago, I was working with an LGBTQ+ legal organization in North Africa. Their donor wanted to know how many court cases they’d won defending their clients. But behind the numbers was another story: people who had taken their own lives after facing unbearable persecution. The donor never asked about that. Just the metrics.

It’s a painful example of how INGOs can prioritize data over dignity. How we sometimes become complicit in the very power structures we claim to challenge. It raises hard but necessary questions: are we actually contributing to changing oppressive systems? Are we actually acting in active solidarity with those we serve? Or are we just reinforcing global hierarchies through sanitized, palatable versions of “impact”? Only through the intentional combination of both (1) an acknowledgement of and (2) a shift against this historical imbalance and harm can we build a power-sharing approach between international foreign assistance implementers and recipient communities.

What Comes Next

This series will dive deeper into how PartnersGlobal is integrating the tenets of liberation psychology into our MHPSS programming. We’ll explore themes like power-sharing, historical memory, community virtues, and the practice of “accompaniment”: standing beside, not above, those we work with and serve.

We’ll also share lessons learned, missteps made, and ongoing questions we’re asking ourselves as we try to build something more ethical, more human, and more just. Because if our own mental health programming doesn’t reflect the reality of people’s lives, if it doesn’t challenge the root causes of suffering, then we’re not healing. We’re pacifying. And that’s not good enough.

True well-being isn’t about being well enough to serve systems that harm us.

It’s about being whole enough to resist them.