Indigenous Health: Mental Wellness

Aboriginal peoples in Canada have diverse cultures but share common social and political challenges that have contributed to their experiences of health and illness. This collection addresses the origins of mental health and social problems and the emergence of culturally responsive approaches to services and health promotion. Healing Traditions is not a handbook of practice but a resource for thinking critically about current issues in the mental health of Indigenous peoples. Cross-cutting themes include: the impact of colonialism, sedentarization, and forced assimilation; the importance of land for indigenous identity and an ecocentric self; and processes of healing and spirituality as sources of resilience.

Also available as an Ebook.
What is known about Aboriginal mental health and mental illness, and on what basis is this 'knowing' assumed? This question, while appearing simple, leads to a tangled web of theory, method, and data rife with conceptual problems, shaky assumptions, and inappropriate generalizations. It is also the central question of James Waldram's "Revenge of the Windigo." This erudite and highly articulate work is about the knowledge of Aboriginal mental health: who generates it; how it is generated and communicated; and what has been - and continues to be - its implications for Aboriginal peoples.

See chapter, "Turbulent Spirits: - Aboriginal Patients in the British Columbia Psychiatric System, 1879–1950". (2006). In Mental Health and Canadian Society (p. 149). Montreal; Kingston; London; Ithaca: MQUP.

Suicide is increasingly understood and predicted as an intersection of biological, psychological, cognitive, and sociocultural factors. We have some basic knowledge of these factors and how they interact, but presently we know very little about how culture can play a role as a variable that influences suicide. By looking outside of the limited cross-cultural studies done within suicidal populations, the contributors expand the available empirical literature base in order to provide a deeper look into how culture can act as an important catalyst in suicidal intentions.Following theoretical overviews, the text focuses on six broad ethnic groups classified in the literature (African American, American Indian, Asian American, European American, Hawaiian & Pacific Islander, and Hispanic), with a main chapter devoted to each, relating each culture to suicide research, highlighting specific variables within the culture that can influence suicide, and presenting appropriate treatment considerations. A final section of the book consists of practical applications within specific settings (therapy, outreach, schools, and psychiatric services) and prevention and training issues.

Over the past fifteen years, Canada's Aboriginal healing community has emerged as a vital and visible force. Creative recovery programs have been established across the country, and international initiatives such as the "Healing Our Spirit Worldwide" gatherings have originated here. The Canadian government has thrown millions of dollars at the issue of addictions, yet alcoholism, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, drug abuse and gambling are epidemic today in the lives of Aboriginal people. Where the Pavement Ends is filled with inspiring stories gathered from journalist Marie Wadden's discussions with activists across Canada who are involved in the Aboriginal healing movement. But the book is also a passionate wake-up call aimed at all Canadians. Existing government policies, Wadden argues, perpetuate the problems that are tearing Aboriginal families and communities apart. We must make social healing in Aboriginal communities an immediate national priority. We must also demand public policy that guarantees First Nations, Inuit and Métis people the right to live as full and equal citizens. In these ways, we can offer true support to these marginalized communities.

"Sonhatski"wa" (Son-Ha-tzee-wa) was the name given for the sexual assault program at Ganohkwasra (Ga-no-qwa-shra) Family Assault Support Services. It is a word in the Mohawk language referrring to the true self. It was also chosen for the name of this book because it best describes the transformation that happens when individuals work through their sexual traumas. This book tells of the journeys taken by ten Onkwehonwe (First Nations) people from lives traumatized by sexual violations to discovering their true self, connecting to the real being they were originally created to be, without trauma, pain, hurt and anger. These are true heart-stories of change, courage, hope, inspiration and love. The book is reflective of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy and teachings. This book has been written from First Nations perspective; however, it is specific to the community of the Six Nations of the Grand River (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy).

Book & DVD

Based on a recently completed project of cultural consultation in Montreal, Cultural Consultation presents a model of multicultural and applicable health care. This model used clinicians and consultants to provide in-depth assessment, treatment planning, and limited interventions in consultation with frontline primary care and mental health practitioners working with immigrants, refugees, and members of Indigenous and ethnocultural communities. Evaluation of the service has demonstrated that focused interventions by consultants familiar with patients' cultural backgrounds could improve the relationship between the patient and the primary clinician.

Balance, wholeness and good mental health -- Worldview -- Challenges to Wellness -- Residential school trauma -- Cycle of violence and abuse -- Losses and their effects -- Addictions including alcohol and drug abuse -- Healing a people -- What is sadness and depression? -- The impact of childhood sexual abuse -- How does sexual abuse affect adults? -- Family violence -- Restorative justice -- What helps protect our mental health? -- Healing and the recovery process -- Privacy is respected -- Other pathways to healing -- Self-help groups -- Art as a healer -- Parenting programs -- The importance of work -- Being part of your recovery -- Families are the foundation of community

This exceptional book responds to the intense current interest in defining and understanding the contribution of traditional medical knowledge and the intervention techniques of traditional healers to national mental health services around the world.

Though they account for only a small portion of the formal homeless statistics, there are many more women living on insufficient funds, with violent partners, in unacceptable dwellings, or in other fragile circumstances that are too often overlooked. They are our mothers, our daughters, our aunts, our nieces, our wives?they are all our sisters?and they remain largely invisible compared to homeless men. Susan Scott interviewed more than 60 women facing homelessness across Canada. Part of her agreement with these women was to tell their stories in the way they would want to have them told. With uncompromising honesty and a deep sense of empathy, Scott recounts their stories while highlighting the many underlying problems they face. These include personal histories of abuse, addiction, and violence, as well as systemic conditions of gentrification, a paucity of affordable housing, and a lack of social services sensitive to women's needs. All Our Sisters is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the conditions facing homeless women in Canada.

Mental health specialists and researchers contend that the development of resilience in youth is facilitated at several levels. Relational, cultural, individual, and governmental factors all have a strong influence over the mental well being of young people.

This volume explores the first four waves of a longitudinal diagnostic study of Indigenous adolescents and their families. The first study of its kind, it calls attention to culturally specific risk factors that affect Indigenous (American Indian and Canadian First Nations) adolescent development and describe the historical and social contexts in which Indigenous adolescents come of age. It provides unique information on ethical research and development within Indigenous communities, psychiatric diagnosis at early and mid-adolescence, and suggestions for putting the findings into action through empirically-based interventions.

ALSO ONLINE at http://www.integration.samhsa.gov/clinical-practice/Native_American_MI_Manual.pdf
Motivational interviewing may be a brief therapy or preparation for treatment for substance abuse. This manual is designed for mental health and addictions counsellors. The manual provides case studies, practical examples and methods of incorporating traditional medicine, spirituality, and culture values into the counselling process.

Includes the following chapters: A word is worth a thousand pictures : counselling with Metis and First Nations women / Cathy Richardson -- Aboriginal women and post-traumatic stress disorder : implications of culture on therapy and counselling practices / Kathy M. Bent -- Considerations in counselling children and adult survivors of childhood traumas : community, context, and intersubjective resiliencies / Marie Lovrod

Includes the chapter: Webs of Strength and Resistance: Hearing Aboriginal Adolescent Girls Telling Their Stories / Susan D. Dion

Mental Health Care for Urban Indians: Cultural Insights from Native Practitioners is the first clinical book written by American Indian scholars working in Indian communities. This groundbreaking volume provides the reader with a basic understanding of the historical impact of colonization, the ensuing results of urban migration and boarding schools, and the effects that these events have had on the Native community. These lingering effects include a lack of cultural identity, a loss of tradition, and a sense of isolation that leads to violence, alcoholism, and often-risky behaviors. Chapter authors acknowledge this history while developing culturally sensitive practice recommendations that incorporate traditional healing methods. This will be an invaluable resource for psychologists with Native clients.

Integrating Traditional Healing Practices Into Counseling and Psychotherapy critically examines ethnic minority cultural and traditional healing in relation to counselling and psychotherapy. Authors Roy Moodley and William West highlight the challenges and transformations within the field of multicultural counselling and psychotherapy by integrating current debates and issues of traditional healing with contemporary practice. The book uniquely presents a range of theoretical and empirical accounts of the dilemmas and issues facing students in training, professional counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers, researchers, and others who use multicultural counselling or transcultural psychotherapy as part of their professional practice.

Translating theory into actual day-to-day practice, Duran presents case materials that illustrate effective intervention strategies for prevalent problems, including substance abuse, intergenerational trauma, and internalized oppression. Offering a culture-specific approach that has profound implications for all counseling and therapy, this groundbreaking volume: provides invaluable concepts and strategies that can be applied directly to practice; outlines very different ways of serving American Indian clients, translating Western metaphor into indigenous ideas that make sense to Native People; presents a model in which patients have a relationship with the problems they are having, whether these are physical, mental, or spiritual; and, includes a section in each chapter to help non-American Indian counselors generalize the concepts presented to use in their own practice in culturally sensitive ways.

Foreword -- Contractual recitals -- Overview of framework for activities -- Community renewal strategies -- Community education strategies -- School strategies -- Youth/family strategies -- Disconnecting from culture -- Substance use, abuse, and addictions -- Behavioural addictions -- Reconnecting with culture -- Working with the National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy -- Strategic planning : deciding what can be done -- Tactical planning -- Evaluative planning

Seeks to restore the pivotal role of the patient's own story in the healing process; Shows how conventional medicine tends to ignore the account of the patient; Presents case histories where disease is addressed and healed through the narrative process; Proposes a reinvention of medicine to include the indigenous healing methods that for thousands of years have drawn their effectiveness from telling and listening. Modern medicine, with its high-tech and managed-care approach, has eliminated much of what constitutes the art of healing: those elements of doctoring that go beyond the medications prescribed. The typically brief office visit leaves little time for doctors to listen to their patients, though it is in these narratives that disease is both revealed and perpetuated--and can be released and treated. He shows how this approach also includes examining our relationships to our extended community to find any underlying disharmony that may need healing. Mehl-Madrona points the way to a new model of medicine--a health care system that draws its effectiveness from listening to the healing wisdom of the past and also to the present-day voices of its patients.

The Models and Metaphors of Healing / James B. Waldram -- The Community Youth Initiative Project / Naomi Adelson and Amanda Lipinski -- Making the Intangible Manifest: Healing Practices of the Qul-Aun Trama Program / Jo-Anne Fiske -- Moving Towards Healing: A Nunavut Case Study / Christopher Fletcher and Aaron Denham -- The Pisimweyapiy Counselling Centre: Paving the Red Road to Wellness in Northern Manitoba / Joseph P. Gone -- Building a Nation: Healing in an Urban Context / James B. Waldram, Rob Innes, Marusia Kaweski, and Calvin Redman.

This unique book examines the physical, psychological, social, and environmental factors that support or undermine healthy development in American Indian children, including economics, biology, and public policies.

Self-determination is on the agenda of Indigenous peoples all over the world. This analysis by an Indigenous feminist scholar challenges the United Nations-based human rights agendas and colonial theory that until now have shaped Indigenous models of self-determination. Gender inequality and gender violence, Dian Million argues, are critically important elements in the process of self-determination. Million contends that nation-state relations are influenced by a theory of trauma ascendant with the rise of neoliberalism. Such use of trauma theory regarding human rights corresponds to a therapeutic narrative by Western governments negotiating with Indigenous nations as they seek self-determination. Focusing on Canada and drawing comparisons with the United States and Australia, Million brings a genealogical understanding of trauma against a historical filter. Illustrating how Indigenous people are positioned differently in Canada, Australia, and the United States in their articulation of trauma, the author particularly addresses the violence against women as a language within a greater politic. The book introduces an Indigenous feminist critique of this violence against the medicalized framework of addressing trauma and looks to the larger goals of decolonization. Noting the influence of humanitarian psychiatry, Million goes on to confront the implications of simply dismissing Indigenous healing and storytelling traditions. Therapeutic Nations is the first book to demonstrate affect and trauma's wide-ranging historical origins in an Indigenous setting, offering insights into community healing programs.

Hostility and aggression towards marginalized groups have taken a new form, microaggressions. Microaggressions are often unconsciously delivered as subtle snubs or dismissive looks, gestures, and tones. This edited book discusses the manifestation, psychological dynamics, and impact of microaggressions on not only the well-being of marginalized groups, but on their role in creating disparities in education, employment, and health care. Covering every major racial/ethnic group as well as gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, and class, students and mental health researchers will benefit from this book's cutting-edge contributions.

Designed to build readers' awareness, knowledge, and skill for working most effectively with indigenous peoples of the U.S., Michael Tlanusta Garrett and Tarrell Awe Agahe Portman's monograph addresses demographics, sociopolitical history, cultural systems, and current issues facing Native American peoples, with specific implications for practice.

Before discovering native healing methods, Herb Nabigon could not imagine a life without alcohol. His powerful autobiography, The Hollow Tree, tells the story of his struggle to overcome addiction with the help of the spiritual teachings and brotherly love of his elders. Nabigon had spent much of his life wrestling with self-destructive impulses, feelings of inferiority and resentment, and alcohol abuse when Eddie Bellerose, an Elder, introduced him to the ancient Cree teachings. With the help of healing methods drawn from the Four Sacred Directions, the refuge and revitalization offered by the sweat lodge, and native cultural practices such as the use of the pipe Nabigon was able to find sobriety.

Depression, self-harming acts and suicide are mental health issues that seriously plague specific Indigenous communities in Canada. First Nations youth have an alarmingly higher suicide rate than the majority of the Canadian population. Usually occurring in and around small reserve village environments, these suicides rupture entire communities that are forced to deal with the sadness, frustration and loss that surrounds the death of a young person. In response to this issue, this interior design practicum inquiry addresses the tragedy of youth suicide in Manitoba's northern, remote, and reserve communities. To help reduce the epidemic prevalence of suicide, a treatment and prevention center formulated out of ideas gathered from research into Cree world view, hybrid and Indigenist approaches to culture, cultural continuity, mental health healing methods and environmental design has been designed to provide care for First Nations adolescents living in the North.

The oppression of various groups has taken place throughout human history. People are stereotyped, discriminated against, and treated unjustly simply because of their social group membership. But what does it look like when the oppression that people face from the outside gets under their skin? Long overdue, this is the first book to highlight the universality of internalized oppression across marginalized groups in the United States, including Indigenous peoples, from a mental health perspective.

This book was written to help prepare students and professionals to provide counselling and social services to Indigenous people with mental health and addiction issues in urban, rural and isolated settings.

Multicultural counseling and psychology evolved as a response to the Eurocentrism prevalent in the Western healing professions and has been used to challenge the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heteronormative constructs commonly embedded in counseling and psychology.  Ironically, some of the practices and paradigms commonly associated with "multiculturalism" reinforce the very hegemonic practices and paradigms that multicultural counseling and psychology approaches were created to correct.  In Decolonizing "Multicultural" Counseling through Social Justice, counseling and psychology scholars and practitioners examine this paradox through a social justice lens by questioning and challenging the infrastructure of dominance in society, as well as by challenging ourselves as practitioners, scholars, and activists to rethink our commitments. The authors analyze the ways well-meaning clinicians might marginalize clients and contribute to structural inequities despite multicultural or cross-cultural training, and offer new frameworks and skills to replace the stereotyping practices that are widespread in the field.