Indigenous Mental Health & Wellness
Graphic from First Nations Health Authority, What is Land-Based Treatment and Healing?
For many Indigenous peoples, mental health is not separable from physical, spiritual, and emotional health, nor is it separable from other wholistic factors, like relationships, community, nationhood, land, and family.
Intergenerational/Historic Trauma
Aboriginal peoples' experiences are rooted in multigenerational, cumulative, and chronic trauma, injustices, and oppression. The effects of trauma can reverberate through individuals, families, communities and entire populations, resulting in a legacy of physical, psychological, and economic disparities that persist across generations.
From Aboriginal Peoples and Historic Trauma: The process of intergenerational transmission.
Indigenous Mental Health
"The land and the environment hold insights into mental wellness (and illness) of Indigenous people across Turtle Island and beyond. Colonialism, and its close relation, coloniality, form structural and systemic foundations that underpin Indigenous mental health. Understanding those foundations allows us all to envision ways of dismantling them, ways to do better, ways to enact radical anticolonial ways of being that support, nurture, celebrate, and lift up new and radical ways of thinking about Indigenous mental health as grounded and located in place, on the land."
Josewski, V., de Leeuw, S., & Greenwood, M. (2023). Grounding Wellness: Coloniality, Placeism, Land, and a Critique of "Social" Determinants of Indigenous Mental Health in the Canadian Context. International journal of environmental research and public health, 20(5), 4319.
Books, Articles and Media
Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada by Call Number: SP K57 H43 2009ISBN: 9780774815239Publication Date: 2009Healing 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.
Decolonizing Trauma Work by ISBN: 9781552666586Publication Date: 2014-05-01Linklater engages ten Indigenous health care practitioners in a dialogue regarding Indigenous notions of wellness and wholistic health, critiques of psychiatry and psychiatric diagnoses, and Indigenous approaches to helping people through trauma, depression and experiences of parallel and multiple realities. A resource for education and training programs, health care practitioners, healing centres, clinical services and policy initiatives.- Decolonizing mental health: embracing Indigenous multi-dimensional balance byCall Number: SP C43 D43 2020Publication Date: 2020This edited book will explore decolonizing mental health in order to advance various possibilities for living a quality life within the present-day conceptualizations of Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being. Chapters include foundational knowledge, identity/self concept, empowerment, culturally specific practices, and finally, political action.
The Medicine of Peace by Call Number: PY A57 M43 2017ISBN: 9781552669556Publication Date: 2017By linking the contemporary experiences of Indigenous youth with broader contexts of intergenerational colonial violence in Canadian society and history, Ansloos highlights the colonial nature of current approaches to Indigenous youth care. Using a critical-Indigenous discourse to critique, deconstruct and de-legitimize the hegemony of Western social science, Ansloos advances an Indigenous peace psychology to promote the revitalization of Indigenous identity for these youth.
All our relations: finding the path forward by Call Number: PY T35 A45 2018ISBN: 9781487005740Publication Date: 2018As a result of colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health, income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services, leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism.
A Self-Study: Being a White Psychologist in an Indian World by ISBN: 9783034303750Publication Date: 2010Today many indigenous people are still experiencing a colonial type of therapy that is rooted in power imbalances and a managed health care system. Through narrative, story, poetry and psychotherapy this book shows the importance of personal growth and informs the practice of being a 'good psychologist'.
- Let’s Talk about Indigenous Mental Health: Trauma, Suicide & Settler Colonialismby Michaela M. McGuire Jaad Gudgihljiwah. MA. Yellowhead Institute.
- Nibi onje biimaadiiziiwin is not a metaphor: The relationship between suicide and water insecurity in First Nations in Ontarioby Jeffrey Ansloos. Yellowhead Brief #134 | May 3, 2023
- Turning to Traditional Processes for Supporting Mental Health: An Interview with Ashley Carvillby Ashley Carvill. Yellowhead Institute.
- Grounding Wellness: Coloniality, Placeism, Land, and a Critique of “Social” Determinants of Indigenous Mental Health in the Canadian ContextBy Viviane Josewski, Sarah de Leeuw, and Margo Greenwood (2023).
The authors argue that the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) framework risks re-entrenching deeply colonial ways of thinking about and providing health services for Indigenous people: SDOH, we suggest, do not ultimately reckon with ecological, environmental, place-based, or geographic determinants of health in colonial states that continue to occupy stolen land. - Beyond Recovery: Colonization, Health and Healing for Indigenous People in CanadaHow do we limit our focus to mental health when Indigenous teaching demands a much wider lens? How do we respond to mental health recovery when Indigenous experience speaks to a very different approach to healing, and how can we take up the health of Indigenous people in Canada without a discussion of identity and colonization?
- The mental health of Indigenous peoples in Canada: A critical review of researchThis paper provides a critical scoping review of the literature related to Indigenous mental health in Canada.
- Protective and resilience factors to promote mental health among Indigenous youth in Canada: a scoping review protocolAlthough Indigenous young people in Canada are at a higher risk of mental health outcomes and faced with limited access to appropriate care and resources, they have unique strengths and resilience that promote mental health and wellness.
- Deviant Constructions: How Governments Preserve Colonial Narratives of Addictions and Poor Mental Health to Intervene into the Lives of Indigenous Children and Families in CanadaColonial projects in Canada have a long history of violently intervening into the personal lives and social structures of Indigenous peoples. These interventions are associated with elevated rates of addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples.
Revenge of the windigo : the construction of the mind and mental health of North American Aboriginal peoples by Call Number: SP W35 R48 2004ISBN: 9780802086006Publication Date: 2004James Waldram looks at conceptual knowledge of Aboriginal mental health: its form and substance, its construction and dissemination, and its implications for Aboriginal peoples. Waldram shows how three disciplines--anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry--have together constructed a profoundly distorted portrait of Aboriginal peoples, based on a tangled web of theory, method, and data rife with conceptual problems, shaky assumptions, and inappropriate generalizations.
- Challenging hidden assumptions: Colonial norms as determinants of Aboriginal mental healthNCCIH (2012). This report outlines how colonial practices such as the residential school system and government banning of ceremonies inflicted a “soul wound,” or intergenerational trauma caused by the experience of violence, oppression, and grief, on Aboriginal peoples.
- FNHA Mental Health and Wellness TeamEmail: mhwprograms@fnha.ca
National Collaborating Centre on Indigenous Health - Mental Health resources
The National Collaborating Centre on Indigenous Health (NCCIH) is a national Indigenous organization established in 2005 by the Government of Canada and funded through the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to support First Nations, Inuit, and Métis public health renewal and health equity through knowledge translation and exchange.
The NCCIH's Mental Health series focuses on PTSD, anxiety, and depression respectively in Indigenous communities in Canada.
First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework
First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework (FNMWC)
The FNMWC is a foundational framework that deals with mental wellness among First Nations people in Canada and outlines a wellness approach that is grounded in culture. It also gives advice on policy and program changes that enhance services and result in improved mental wellness. Communities can use this information to deliver services in culturally safe ways and do what’s needed to further develop their programs and services based on their own priorities.