Makungu Akinyela
Dr. Makungu M. Akinyela is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) in practice in Atlanta, Georgia and an Associate Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is a Clinical Fellow and an Approved Supervisor of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). In his practice he served as the clinical director for an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program to provide wrap around mental health support and care for poor, working class and homeless mental health patients in the metro-Atlanta community.
As a scholar and a therapist Dr. Akinyela has been a committed Social Justice organizer for over forty-years focused on struggles for human rights and justice for Black people in the United States and the African diaspora. His research and writing includes such subjects as cultural democracy and mental health care; cultural domination and therapeutic resistance; reparations and the role of mental health workers in repairing oppressions wounds and African centered family therapy. He is the developer of a culturally specific approach to narrative called Testimony therapy which he has written about extensively.
Dr. Akinyela is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, the Journal of Systemic Therapy and the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. Dr. Akinyela is committed to social justice and human rights work and has lectured, taught and conducted workshops on these issues in such places as South Africa, Palestine, Hong Kong, Brazil and Cuba.
He is currently working on a book on his clinical ideas entitled Meeting the trickster at the crossroads: Testimony therapy and decolonizing mental health practice.