The Psychological Experience of Swana Americans in Contemporary Western Life
SPOTLIGHT, 27 Jul 2026
Dr. Mona Abuhamda | New Washington School of Psychiatry – TRANSCEND Media Service
Carrying the Weight of the Ancient World
Summer 2026 – There is a grief that has no diagnostic code. I have looked for it, and I have spent enough time with that manual to know its silences well. It is the grief of watching, from this side of the ocean, from inside a life that looks perfectly functional, the erasure of your people. Not a metaphorical erasure. A literal one.
I am a psychologist. North African. Arab. Born into Islam and into one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known, Egypt. I am an outspoken daughter and sister, a mother, a wife, and a hopeless dog lover. I am an angry victim and a ruthless rebel. These facts do not compete with one another. The world I practice in has not always known what to do with all of them at once, and neither, on certain days, have I.
The assaults are daily and mundane. They accumulate the way small debts do, invisibly, until suddenly the balance is crushing. Lillian Comas-Díaz wrote about ethnocultural allodynia, the way repeated racial injury sensitizes the nervous system until contact itself becomes injury.
The name mispronounced by people who do not try. The airport, every time. The compliment, you do not look Arab, where did you learn such good English, delivered with genuine warmth by people who do not know what they are confessing.
And then there is the calendar. The dominant culture’s holidays are built into every institutional structure without apology or explanation because they have never needed either.
Ramadan comes and goes without acknowledgment. Lunches are scheduled at noon. And the good-willed and curious, trying to be inclusive, gently ask how they are supposed to express the Eid greetings. Yet another burden to carry. Such a theoretical holiday here, unaccompanied by images or scents or embodied tradition. Void and meaningless if one considers the impossibility of experiencing joy while watching, in real time, on your phone, between patients, the people you would be celebrating with, being killed.
This is not fragility. This is an accurate read of a culture that has determined, structurally and interpersonally, that your presence is acceptable and your particularity is not. The microaggression cannot be understood in isolation from the macroaggression: the political violence, the material support for that violence, the news cycle that reports on the destruction of ancestral cities in the passive voice as though no one was responsible. Buildings were leveled. Hospitals struck. These are not separate from the colleague and the calendar. They are the same message, delivered at different volumes.
I know what my people gave to human civilization. Not in an abstract, heritage-month way. I mean I know it the way you know things handed to you by people who loved you. The Arab world gave medicine Avicenna’s Canon. It gave mathematics al-Khwarizmi, without whom algorithm would not exist. Persian civilization gave the world Rumi and Hafez, whose verses shaped Goethe and Emerson. The Fertile Crescent is not romantic nationalism. It is where cities were first built. Where writing was first developed. Where the foundational scaffolding of what gets called Western civilization was constructed.
To carry that knowledge while simultaneously absorbing a cultural narrative that positions your people as primitive, as threatening, as expendable, is a specific kind of psychological violence. This is what Fanon mapped in The Wretched of the Earth. The colonized subject is handed two images of themselves. One true. One weaponized.
The clinical consequence is direct and underappreciated. The SWANA American patient who presents with what looks like depression, or identity disturbance, or dysregulated anger, may simply be perceiving reality accurately. The clinician who interprets that anger as displaced, that grief as disproportionate, that vigilance as symptomatic, is not practicing cultural competence. They are reproducing, inside the one room that was supposed to be different, exactly the invalidation the patient encounters everywhere else.
It is like loving a language whose very sound has been made into a symbol of threat in the culture you live in. It is like being proud of where you come from and knowing that pride will have to be explained and justified and defended before it can simply exist. It is like holding in one hand the memory of an Egyptian grandmother’s kitchen, a Persian New Year table, a Levantine spread that took three days to prepare because feeding people is how love is expressed, and in the other hand the knowledge that families who look exactly like that grandmother are being told, at this moment, that they are not entitled to the flour to make the bread.
It is the sorrow specific to diaspora: you are here, they are there, and there is fire, and there is nothing you can do about any of it except keep your phone charged and answer it when it rings. It is the fatigue of serving as an involuntary ambassador for four hundred million people in every setting you enter, knowing that your most careful, most historically grounded, most generously offered response will be evaluated for whether your tone was appropriate before anyone considers whether your content was true.
Cultural humility is necessary but not sufficient.
Working with SWANA clients requires political literacy. A willingness to understand the material conditions that produced the symptom. A willingness to resist the habitual move of locating pathology in the individual when the pathology is legibly social, political, and ongoing.
Frameworks that center the communal self, that take historical memory seriously as a clinical variable, that do not pathologize adaptive responses to genuine and documented threat, are not accommodations. They are the minimum standard of competent care.
The SWANA American is not fragile. They are carrying the weight of the oldest civilizations on earth through a culture that has not yet determined whether their lives are worth grieving.
That is not a presenting problem. That is a moral emergency. And it arrives, without announcement, every day, in our waiting rooms.
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Source: New Washington School of Psychiatry
Submitted by TR Member Roy Eidelson
Tags: Arabs, Genocide, North Africa, Psychiatric disorders, Psychology
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 27 Jul 2026.
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