Take cultural perspectives into account

Tyler Philips
Third-year English and psychology major

Decolonising the university would mean taking greater account of the cultural perspectives of the indigenous people into the actual frameworks of the university curricula. A lot of certain disciplines are taught from a Western perspective.

I'm a psychology major, and the entire profession of psychology is pretty much Western-based. It's interesting that we're not tackling that as much as we should be, perhaps. In a clinical psychology course in third year, we address that briefly, and how some of the Western ideals of the profession may not be relevant in a non-Western country. Outside of a Western culture, some people may present with symptoms that may be dysfunctional according to Western diagnostic codes, whereas in that culture, if you look inside, it's not necessarily too abnormal. It's sort of a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances. So why should we pathologise that and send someone to a psychiatric hospital, for example?

Read more stories from the May 2015 edition.