Aboriginal Mental Health

Indigenous Mental Illness In Australia - Causes, Effects and Misconceptions

Apr 4, 2007 Woorama

Australian Aborigines suffer far higher rates of mental illness than non-Indigenous peoples. But who is causing this crisis, and more importantly, who is measuring it?

In 1996, a report called "Ways Forward" found that mental health problems affected at least 30% of Australian Aboriginal communities. During the 1990's, 54% of urban Indigenous people seeking medical attention were also found to have a mental health disorder.

New millennium figures indicated little improvement. Twice as many Indigenous males than non-Indigenous males were hospitalized for mental illness, while Indigenous women were one and a half times more likely to be hospitalized than mainstream females.

Levels of violence are also cited as indicators of poor mental health in the Indigenous community, but I will not include these figures here, as I believe they represent more of a cultural difference in understandings of the role and nature of violence than actual mental illness. From many Indigenous viewpoints, the use of structured or ritualized violence in the negotiation of social space does not stem from mental illness, but formal systems of social control.

This raises the question of how Indigenous mental illness is measured, and by whom. Could some of the criteria for establishing mental illness be Anglo-based and therefore culturally inappropriate for Aboriginal patients?

Arguably, the true causes and indicators of Aboriginal mental illness stem from the dominant culture's pervasive and destructive influence on Indigenous social space, demolishing what were once healthy communal social structures and replacing them with an individualistic and self-centred paradigm. Perhaps this paradigm is such a mismatch with Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing, that it causes a sickness of spirit, heart and mind that manifests as "mental illness".

Could it be that all people would present the same "symptoms" under the pressure of colonization and discrimination that Indigenous people face every day? Surely, the only way to palliate the Indigenous mental health crisis in Australia and elsewhere in the world would be to treat the social cause, rather than the individual symptoms as perceived by western practitioners.

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