Reimagining Indigenous mental health care Harvard Gazette

This paper outlines the insights generated by stakeholder engagement at the forum to identify and prioritize directions for Indigenous mental health and build a vision and strategy for improving mental health services and programs for the region’s diverse Indigenous population. Some barriers (e.g., remoteness, socioeconomic disadvantages, transportation issue) have been considered in measuring the accessibility to primary health services 22, 65,66,67. The Indigenous Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Clearinghouse managed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare was established to build the evidence base to improve mental health services and outcomes for Indigenous Australians. Telehealth has great potential to deliver care in culturally appropriate settings such as ACCHS and reduces the burden of travel on patients, allowing them to remain with their family and community. While the rate of several types of mental health care and services use may be similar or higher for Indigenous Australians compared with non-Indigenous Australians, there remains unmet need particularly for specialist services, such as clinical psychologists in Remote and Very remote areas. The Final Report released in 2021, found that culturally safe services were not always available to Aboriginal communities in Victoria.

Methods

Family engagement and mentorship, the inclusion of parents and families in the school and children’s learning as well as the involvement of Elders and peers as mentors were identified as key elements of healthy families and the holistic model of health and well-being . Indigenous legal approaches to crime and addressing harm reduction principles that can be important to promoting community healing, reconciliation, and the reintegration of the offender. When discussing trauma-informed care, the embedding of Indigenous culture and values into treatment and healing was described. The holistic approach would take into consideration the individual, family, and community needs to promote healing and recovery. Participants emphasized that this requires more than just cultural sensitivity training or certification. Quotes from participants were extracted from the transcripts to help explain both individual and group thinking.

Federal Indian Hospitals Settlement Agreement Support Services

The authors would also like to Suicide and young Black men awareness thank Winta Ghidei and Barbara Verstraeten for providing support with formatting and references and editing of the manuscript. The authors also thank Candace Sturgess for the organization of the forum, and the facilitators who supported roundtable discussions. Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Caring for country

• The last 30 years have seen the development of innovative approaches to addressing alcohol/substance use, social services, and mental health issues.
• Participatory community visioning is a method employed within action research and can assist in generating “integrative conceptions of place and supporting arguments” and facilitate “a degree of mutual understanding and even ownership among the stakeholders” 61, 63.
• This situation is accompanied by a disproportionately high level of unmet needs and a low level of access to mental health services , which is further exacerbated by the institutional racism experienced in seeking mental health services .
• The research was guided by ethical guidelines developed for research with Indigenous peoples 52,53, and formal ethical approval was obtained from the Research Ethics Board of the university that served as the primary affiliation of the principal investigator on the study.

Existing studies have explored the access to mental healthcare from various dimensions, including those focusing on particular types of mental health services (e.g., mental healthcare in primary healthcare services ), particular Indigenous population cohorts (e.g., the youth ), inequalities in service utilisation , and optimising the pathways to healthcare . This is partially due to limited understanding of how Indigenous populations seek mental healthcare, barriers that prevent Indigenous people from accessing diverse types of mental health services, and scarcity of data that are available to researchers. In all your travels and explorations, can you share with us an example of a program that has successfully been able either to integrate or to provide culturally appropriate mental health services, with some success, to Native American communities? Much like Western society, Indigenous communities have unique paradigms for governance, justice, community social and cultural activities, arts, clothing and food creation and management, epistemology, education, engineering, spirituality, and healthcare, including mental health. Maar, Erskine found that a collaborative, community-based Indigenous mental health care model led to improvements in culturally-safe care for Indigenous communities in northern Ontario, Canada . Participants of the forum also mentioned that existing mental health services and funding should be realigned to build a more culturally based system of mental health services.

This participant points to the way in which (dis)ability and illness are both understood as marginalizing and render access difficult. Within the system there is some prejudice people in there and I try not to get too mad with them when I find out that they’re prejudice, they don’t like Natives and they don’t like drug addicts. This decision fails to take into account the multiple forms of past and/or current trauma and violence that shape the lives of many Indigenous women , including those participating in this study. Within this social context, it is not surprising that she normalized the experience of waiting in much the same way as stigma and discrimination have been normalized for many in this population. I had a high fever, I think my temperature was 39 or something, I can’t remember but I didn’t care, I just kind of laid back on her couch and stuffed my face with what they had sitting there…I drank a whole pile of juice.