Mental Disabilities in an Aboriginal Context

Abstract

Aboriginal (meaning original peoples) North American mental health is acknowledged to be in a more precarious state than that of the dominant cultures. Disability arises from the conditions of poverty, homelessness, and lack of resources that are compounded for North American aboriginal people by the historical trauma of conquest, being placed on reservations, residential schools, and continued discrimination. We present culturally sensitive and syntonic intervention programs that can reduce the impact of Aboriginal mental disabilities and discuss the commonality among these programs of celebrating culture, language, and tradition.

KEYWORDS:

• attitudes
• ethnic minorities
• health care
• homelessness
• identity and belonging
• inclusion
• medical model
• mental health
• serious mental illness
• substance abuse
• trauma

Notes

¹We use the term Aboriginal” to refer to the people who have lived in a place for more than 500 years, subsuming the terms First Nations, Native Americans, American Indians, Indigenous peoples of North America, and Indigenous peoples of Australia for ease of cross-referencing among papers written about the original peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The term also mitigates against defining original people by race, a social rather than a biological construct.