Counseling and Psychotherapy
—An African Perspective

There is an urgent need for more intentional counseling and psychotherapy in Africa, with better documentation of the continent’s psychosocial needs followed by deliberately planned interventions. Despite this critical need, Africa is a resilient region that has survived famine, wars, and pandemics. Resilience does not negate the reality of historical and current traumas and the need to strengthen formal and informal modalities of counseling and psychotherapy. Resilience is coupled with unexploited natural resources, rich human capital, traditions, values, and wisdom that bind people together. The purpose of this paper is to state that although the influence of Western psychology and theory-based psychotherapy is slowly growing, effective practices need to be rooted in African value systems. Efforts are made in this paper to explore Africa’s mental health and psychosocial needs. We discuss the presence of preventive and healing cultural resources despite the prevalent disconnection of development initiatives with peoples’ mental health needs. Due to overemphasis on Western psychology, many current formal mental health training programs lack accuracy in assessment and intervention. Definitions, diagnoses, and therapeutic approaches encounter stigma that was mainly absent in traditional Africa. Here, “illness” was labeled and embraced as “difference,” followed by acceptance and support versus the current labeling of various conditions as “abnormal.” As much as DSM-5-TR claims universality, many Africans believe that global research to support the general application of current coding criteria is scanty. Similarly, psychometrics has been normed on Western, mainly white populations, with insufficient African standardization. The global assumption is that diagnosis based on these clinical assessments can be trusted as a basis for treatment. This paper will try to recommend that evidence-based integration-focused assessment, counseling, and psychotherapy can take root in Africa by mainstreaming interventions into every level of society and embracing the World Health Organization’s Task-Shifting model.