Holistic Healing: Islam’s Legacy of Mental Health
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Islamic Psychology in the 21st Century | Holistic Healing
Whereas learning about the history of mental health in the Islamic world is important, it is equally important to understand how this can serve our community today. As international efforts attempt to encroach on Islamic achievements, it is vital that Muslims recognize the steps that need to be taken towards continuing and reviving that legacy. Dr. Rania Awaad describes what efforts need to be done to address mental health needs in Islamic society.
This series was brought to you in collaboration with the Stanford Muslim Mental Health Lab.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Although we've been discussing the history of mental health in Islam, ultimately one of the main purposes of this series is to better serve the mental health needs of Muslims around the globe today. And so I'd like to take and bridge what we've talked about historically to the present and then look towards the future to apply what we've discussed to modern clinical practice. We're actually living in a really exciting period of time related to the history of mental health and Islam. Honestly, there are so many projects happening all throughout the world. We're really witnessing a burgeoning, a renaissance with so many international efforts hoping to reclaim Islamic intellectual heritage and dedicated efforts towards the reintegration of Islamic psychology. So broadly speaking, there have been two main approaches in doing so. One approach aims to take the existing psychotherapies that are already there and adapt them to better suit the Muslims. The other approach is to start fresh, work from the ground up, starting with core Islamic principles and then building psychology into that framework. So in this video, we're going to explore both approaches and then we're going to take a look at what's happening right now for Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology around the world. The first approach is to take therapies that are already out there and adapt them to Muslim populations. And if you're wondering why adapt, well, most of what's available to clinicians and therapists right now was developed within a secular frame. And for people who consider themselves religious and see religion as central to their lives,
asking them to leave religion out of it or to check God at the door, well, you can see how that's not going to work very well for many of them. Unfortunately, this tension only accentuates the barriers that Muslim communities already face in accessing mental health care, such as battling with mental health stigma and beliefs that only explanation for mental health illnesses are spiritual, like jinn possession or weak faith, for example. So you could see that something needs to change and very fast. And the purely secular therapy is a model that just isn't tenable for many Muslims. In response, one of the early efforts to adapt secular psychotherapy for Muslims was to take what was there and basically infuse Islam into that therapy, even though it may have started out as secular. An example of this is RCBT or religious cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy in its origin is a Western developed therapeutic approach that proposes that an individual's thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors are all interrelated. RCBT is CBT adapted for religious clients. In standard CBT, a therapist helping a Muslim client would discuss cognitive and behavioral issues that might center around religion. For example, let's take a Muslim who's struggling with the lack of feeling spiritually connected to God due to their alcoholism. So here the therapist would expect is expected to remain religiously neutral, but use CBT to actually discuss the patient's own spiritual and religious values. So RCBT is the religious CBT approach and clients are reminded of the relevant components of religion that might actually aid in the optimization of their thoughts and behaviors. For example, let's say that there's a Muslim patient who's struggling with the idea that God hates them because their life is filled with a lot of difficulty. The RCBT therapist
would then remind them that the verse, the Quran that says, God does not burden a soul more than it can bear. So this verse would then be used to present the possibility that perhaps God doesn't wish any ill to the individual, but rather that he wishes to actually make the individual stronger through patience. So RCBT is the model that was used there and it was developed by the center of spirituality, theology, and health at Duke university, where they made RCBT for each religion and RCBT for Muslims. Basically they took the regular CBT techniques like relaxation, training, a cognitive restructuring, thought stopping, timeout techniques, and so on, and then infused Islam into it. They strengthen these techniques with messages and passages from the Holy Quran and stories and sayings of the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Now the second approach is to reintegrate Islam into clinical psychology by building therapeutic techniques from the ground up, independent of any existing frameworks from before. One example of this is the work that my colleagues and I do at the Khalil Center. Basically it is to take the framework of Islam and develop this model that we then called the TIP model or Traditionally Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy. TIP aims to start with a traditional Islamic theoretical framework and then integrate the latest behavioral science into it. This is the opposite approach of the first strategy where Islam was just infused into an existing secular framework. Here with TIP and other similar models, it starts basically with the base, with the four Islamically defined elements of the human psyche taken from the Quran and the Sunnah. These elements essentially are the aql or cognition, the nafs or behavioral inclination, the ruh, the spirit, and ihsaas, emotions,
and tying them all at the core or the center is the qalb or the heart. This approach in therapy is ideal for individuals who want Islam to be the focal point of their sessions. And in doing so, therapists have a better chance actually at dismantling some of the unique barriers that many Muslims face in accepting mental health care, such as the stigma and mistrust around seeking mental health care. Another benefit from working within the Islamic framework is related to more to the advances you find in the field of clinical psychology in general. The field right now, the way it looks is really rapidly evolving over these past few decades. And many practitioners and clinicians recognize that there is room for improvement in the overall therapeutic paradigms we currently learn. Increasingly, there are many conversations and debates in the West about striking a balance between talk therapy and medications, for example, or about how to best conceptualize and classify mental illnesses. So in light of the vast Islamic intellectual heritage in regards to mental health that we've been discussing so far in this series, it's clear that Muslims, if they approach the field from within their own tradition, they can contribute a tremendous amount to these discussions. This is what makes so much of the research we've been undertaking and discussing so timely and exciting. Another factor adding to the excitement around Islamic psychology is how much has been happening in recent years related to Islamic psychology. And there's so much more that we actually hope will be coming soon inshallah. Many Islamically integrated psychology and psychotherapy services have actually emerged across the globe in the last five to 10 years. These services aim to not only provide mental health services and assistance to Muslims, but also others who are in need
of them. And not only to eradicate the stigma surrounding mental health with Muslim communities, but also to reclaim the great intellectual legacies of our Muslim predecessors. Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have been at the forefront of these efforts for some time now. And the revival of the field of Islamic psychology in the modern era actually started in the late 1970s with the publication of Dr. Malik Badri's seminal work called The Dilemma of the Muslim Psychologist. By the early 1980s, the International Islamic University of Malaysia was established and had Islamic psychology offered as a subject. The university also began offering on campus Islamic mental health services to students. Then in the UK, several institutions have begun to offer Islamic psychotherapy to Muslim populations. For example, leading the effort was the Institute of Islamic Counseling and Wellbeing in London, which was founded in the 1990s. Since then, others have actually emerged in the UK, including Ihsan in Bradford, the Latif Project in Birmingham, and the Inayat Health and Wellbeing Center. Several international Islamic psychology associations also started to materialize, such as the Islamic Association of Muslim Psychologists in 2006, and more recently, the International Association of Islamic Psychology in 2007, each with international conferences. In fact, there have been a whole host of Islamic psychology conferences in recent years all throughout the Muslim world, including conferences in Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Qatar, and Australia. Closer to home in the United States and Canada, there is the Khalil Center, which was started in Chicago in 2010. The Khalil Center has since opened offices in Northern California,
which I direct, and in Southern California, New York, Toronto, and now even Istanbul. The Khalil Center offers both standard therapy as well as Islamically integrated psychotherapy. All therapists who work there are Muslim, and they're all professionals who have trained and have a master's degree or a doctorate degree in either clinical psychology, social work, marriage family therapy, or professional counseling. Although some of the clients may not necessarily want Islamically integrated therapy as part of their therapeutic care, they will still often seek out care from the Khalil Center because of the common understandings and values, traditions, and belief systems between the Muslim therapists and their clients. Beyond the clinical and therapeutic practice, there's also a whole host of research and community outreach components within this rekindled field of Islamic psychology that we wanted to share with you. These both aim to understand and address specific mental health needs of the Muslim community in the West post 9-11. And in order to achieve these goals, the annual Muslim Mental Health Conference was started in 2008, and then the Black Muslim Psychology Conference was added in 2015. There, professionals in the field of Muslim mental health present their research and their findings and discuss issues relevant to the Muslim community. For example, topics like Islamophobia, substance abuse, domestic violence, and then activism in mental health and much, much more. Now, in addition, in 2014, I established the first ever Muslim mental health lab in America at Stanford University. And our lab is really the academic home for the study of Muslim mental health. And we're really happy to really share with you all the different lines of research that are within this lab, like the historical line, which we've been discussing in so much of what we had in the videos prior
emerged from that research. Also, our psychometric line, which develops and validates skills designed specifically for Muslim populations related to mental health. We also have our global mental health line that focuses on refugee mental health, and also our social justice line, where we have a lot of researchers working on the effect of Islamophobia on the mental health of Muslims. Now, there are newer lines of research within the lab that I'm really excited about, like the addictions line or the suicide line, because they've become such an important and robust part of our lab because of the need within the community. And we've been publishing some landmark studies related to these topics, like the suicide awareness, prevention, and postvention work in the Muslim community. There are also courses on Islamic psychology that are now being taught at Islamic universities, like Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul, but also in other colleges like the Cambridge Muslim College in the UK, or in my own Islamic psychology course at the Stanford University. In conclusion, these are very exciting times for practitioners and researchers who are in the field and interested in Muslim mental health. And as these efforts continue to grow and new ones emerge, we really hope to begin to see positive impacts on the mental health of the Muslim community and on the possibility of us as Muslims reclaiming our Islamic heritage as it relates to psychology. It's time that we not only acknowledge the giants that came before us, but that we stand on their shoulders to move that legacy forward. I feel really strongly that if anyone should be at the forefront of the field of mental health, it should be the Muslims, reviving their rightful legacy in this field. So if you'd like to learn even more about the field of Islamic psychology or Muslim mental health, or you'd like to know how to get involved, check out the links below, inshallah. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless all of these
efforts, bring them fully to fruition, and allow us as Muslims to revive our legacy as the pioneers in the field of holistic mental well-being. Alhamdulillahi abdul alameen.
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