Culturally grounded mental health care for Two-Spirit, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, Deaf, Disabled, and underserved communities across California.
We provide culturally grounded, accessible mental health care for communities that have been underserved and excluded from traditional systems.
We center Two-Spirit, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, Deaf, Disabled, and BIPOC Communities.
We believe mental health care should reflect culture, identity, and lived experience.
Our work is rooted in community, accountability, and the ongoing effort to remove barriers to care.
Wombat Mental Health Services is a Native-led, Two-Spirit-led mental health organization rooted in community, culture, and care.
We provide therapy that reflects who you are, where you come from, and what you carry.
Our work is grounded in lived experience. We are not separate from the communities we serve. We are part of them.
Our therapists have specialties in gender affirming care, neurodiversity, trauma, disability, racial identity, and more.
Care that is culturally grounded.
Relational.
Real.
To provide equitable and accessible mental health services for our underserved communities.
To reindigenize mental health services by removing barriers to culturally appropriate care for Deaf, Disabled, LGBTQIA2S and BIPOC communities.
Create, deliver, and support accessible mental health services for underserved individuals and communities. Through culturally sustainable practices, empower individuals to embrace healing.
Driven by a commitment to social justice, our focus extends to serving those who’ve often been underserved. That includes our Deaf and Disabled community members, our LGBTQIA2S siblings, our BIPOC friends, Sex Workers, and those in the Kink, Poly, and CNM communities. We also want to reach folks who struggle to find accessible mental health resources.
What makes us different? Our therapists don’t just have the skills and knowledge; they also come from and are shaped by the very communities we serve. This allows us to connect and address the challenges and experiences our clients face with a deep respect for their individual journeys.
May we tell you a story?
Our people have always moved across lands in search of medicine. We have followed the seasons, the animals, and the teachings passed down through generations. Healing has never been static. It has always been lived, shared, and carried forward.
At Wombat, we continue that work.
We follow the footsteps of our ancestors as we create new pathways for care. We bring forward both traditional knowledge and contemporary practices to support healing in ways that are culturally grounded, relational, and real.
This is not new work. This is continued work.
To understand reindigenizing mental health services, let’s start with an understanding of what colonization and Eurocentic mean.
Colonization refers to the process of a population that migrates and occupies a foreign[1] land and dispossesses the indigenous inhabitants and/or institutes legal, fiscal, and other systemic mechanisms that benefit and favor the occupying migrants while suppressing the indigenous population.[2]
Eurocentric means having a biased view that favors Western Europe views and approaches over non-Western European views. Colonization of the United States of America (USA) lead to rampant disregard and intentional erasure of indigenous views, knowledge, and approaches. Eurocentricity is an arrogant, patronizing view that insists, “We don’t know or understand you or your culture, but we know what is best for you.”
[1] The term ‘foreign’, in this context, means foreign to the migrants.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/colonization
To clarify, Eurocentric mental health care does not equate to ‘science based’ mental health care. Nor do indigenous or alternative approaches equal ‘traditional’ nor ‘non-science’ approaches. Eurocentric mental health care refers to a mental health care approached from a Eurocentric, colonizer approach that fails to recognize or include any other cultural views, knowledge, and approaches.
Eurocentric systems permeate the USA’s approach to both medical and mental health care. Eurocentric care was touted as ‘advanced’ and seemingly ‘superior’ to other forms of care and is often still viewed in that manner. The impacts of colonization and Eurocentric mental health care practices that have been pushed upon indigenous communities, and similarly marginalized populations, has directly contributed to ongoing ignorance (nescience), misdiagnoses, cultural erasure, and systemic oppression.
Modern conventional Eurocentric mental health interventions were curated, nurtured, and vetted through a patriarchal colonization lens, that undermines culturally appropriate approaches and preserves systemic oppression. Eurocentric approaches have typically ignored and/or repudiated utilizing other models of care, which has incurred damaging effects to cultural identity, views, and knowledge resulting in historical trauma and cultural mistrust of mental health service systems.
Decolonizing mental health services means addressing the systemic issues and barriers that were created by Eurocentric institutions and approaches toward mental health services. It is an endeavor to remove current Eurocentric, colonizing views, systems, and barriers with the aim of treating our communities in alignment with appropriate cultural practices for each client.
Indigenous practices have been around and utilized for centuries yet, due to cultural stigma, erasure, and genocide, many of these practices have been lost or not deemed acceptable within our Eurocentric mental health profession. The act of reindigenizing mental health is the effort to replace the current systems with culturally specific, culturally sustainable, and culturally appropriate mental health and well-being practices developed and passed on among indigenous people. Reindigenizing can impact large systems, yet it is also something that can be effectively used in individual or partner sessions. Utilizing indigenous practices as the focus of treatment can allow our minds, bodies, and spirit to remember and be an impetus for healing.
