Samah Jabr — Radiance in Pain and Resilience, and the recorded lectures

Samah Jabr is the Palestinian clinician most often reached for on this subject, and with reason: she has been arguing for two decades that the categories the world uses to describe Palestinian suffering were built somewhere else, for something else. Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The global reverberation of Palestinian historical trauma is her 2025 collection, published by Wakefield Press with a foreword by Gabor Maté (304 pages; ISBN 9781923042926). It was launched at a global online event on 1 August 2025.

Her publisher describes her as “a consultant psychiatrist practicing in Palestine, serving communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank” and as “former Head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health”, now an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University, a trainer in the Istanbul Protocol for the documentation of torture, and a co-founder of the Sumud Network for Mental Health. On the title: when she published her essay on PTSD in 2019 she was described in her own byline as the serving head of that unit; by 2025 her publisher describes her as its former head. Both are stated by the sources of their moment, and the archive records both rather than choosing. Her earlier books include Behind the Frontlines: Chronicles of a Palestinian psychiatrist psychotherapist under occupation, Sumud: Resisting oppression, Sumud in Times of Genocide, and The Time of Genocide: Bearing witness to a year in Palestine.

Recorded talks — checked

Every link below was opened in the course of building this entry, and the title and hosting channel are reproduced exactly as they are published. This archive lists them by verified title, host and date; it does not summarise or paraphrase what is said inside a recording it has not transcribed.

• “ISIP Palestine Focus | Reconceptualizing Mental Health in the Context of Palestine | Dr. Samah Jabr” — hosted on the channel ISIP International Students of Islamic Psychology, published 12 November 2023. Watch
• “‘You cannot put everyone on therapy chair in Palestine’: Dr Samah Jabr on trauma | Falastin Podcast” — hosted on the channel of the Gaza-born journalist Jehan Alfarra, published 4 September 2025, an interview occasioned by Radiance in Pain and Resilience. Watch
• “Why Western mental health practice fails in Palestine | The HUMAN Line” — hosted on the TRT World channel, published 31 January 2026. Watch

Also on the record and shorter: Al Jazeera’s Quotable segment of 15 April 2025, “Psychological trauma to ‘haunt’ Palestinians for life”, in which Jabr says, of people living under bombardment: “When people are in survival mode, they numb their feelings.”

Why it matters

• The most sustained body of Palestinian clinical writing on trauma available in English, by someone who has run the Ministry of Health’s mental health unit and kept a caseload.
• The recorded talks let a reader hear the argument made by the clinician herself rather than through an intermediary.
• Her concept of sumud — steadfastness — is the term Palestinians actually use for what a diagnostic manual calls resilience, and she has written about the difference at length.

Key resources

• Radiance in Pain and Resilience — Wakefield Press
• Dr Samah Jabr — her own site
• “Psychological trauma to ‘haunt’ Palestinians for life” — Al Jazeera, 15 April 2025