Point 8 of the CARICOM plan calls for a programme of psychological rehabilitation to address what the Commission describes as the psychological damage inflicted by slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism on Caribbean people.
The underlying concern is real. The psychological literature does recognise intergenerational trauma as a genuine phenomenon. Communities that have experienced severe collective trauma can show effects across generations. The enslavement of millions of people, the deliberate destruction of cultures and families, and the sustained experience of racial discrimination in the post-slavery era represent trauma of an extraordinary scale.
The problem with the CARICOM proposal is converting this acknowledgement into a specific funded programme with a defined budget, a delivery mechanism, and a way of measuring whether the rehabilitation has been achieved. None of these things have been specified. What would psychological rehabilitation involve? Who would deliver it? How would you know when it had worked? What would it cost? These questions have no answers in the ten-point plan.
Mental health support for Caribbean communities, in forms that communities themselves define and request, is a reasonable thing to support. But that is different from accepting CARICOM’s framing that Britain is responsible for a psychological harm that requires a funded rehabilitation programme. The causal chain from historical slavery to present psychological states is genuinely contested, and converting a contested causal claim into a specific financial liability requires a standard of evidence that the plan does not meet.
