Indigenous Australian Mental Health and Racism: There Could be Cathedrals of the Spirit as Well as Stone

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pat Dudgeon
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Indigenous Australian

Telemental Health Services for Indigenous Communities in Australia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sisira Edirippulige ◽  
Matthew Bambling ◽  
Pablo Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Mental Health Disorder ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Telemental Health ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Health Indices ◽  
The Impact

Telemental health has been recognized as one of the key methods to closing disparities in health indices in the indigenous Australian populations. The conditions in which Australia’s indigenous communities are presently living have also been equated with parts of the world with limited resources. There is a rationale for exploring opportunities for using telemental health and study its effectiveness in this population This chapter discusses the high burden of mental health disorder among the indigenous population, the telemental health initiative to provide mental health services for these isolated communities, and the impact of these initiative on the wellbeing of the recipients. Chapter concludes with barriers to provide these services and potential solutions in the Australian context.

A comparison of Indigenous and non-Indigenous users of MindSpot: an Australian digital mental health service

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nickolai Titov ◽  
Carlie Schofield ◽  
Lauren Staples ◽  
Blake F Dear ◽  
Olav Nielssen
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Anxiety And Depression ◽  
Indigenous Australians ◽  
Depression And Anxiety ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Symptom Scores ◽  
Assessment And Treatment ◽  
Patient Health ◽  
Remote Assessment ◽  
Previous Contact

Objective: To report on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) users of MindSpot, a national service for the remote assessment and treatment of anxiety and depression. Methods: The characteristics and treatment outcomes of Indigenous patients who registered with MindSpot between January 2015 and December 2016, were compared with non-Indigenous users. Changes in psychological distress, depression and anxiety were measured using the Kessler 10-Item (K-10), Patient Health Questionnaire 9-Item (PHQ-9), and Generalised Anxiety Disorder Scale 7-Item (GAD-7), respectively. Results: Of 23,235 people who completed a MindSpot assessment between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2016, 780 (3.4%) identified as Indigenous Australian. They had higher symptom scores, were more likely to live in a remote location, and a third reported no previous contact with mental health services. Fewer Indigenous patients enrolled in a treatment course, but those who did had similar rates of completion and similar reductions in symptoms to non-Indigenous patients. Conclusions: MindSpot treatments were effective in treating anxiety and depression in Indigenous Australians, and outcomes were similar to those of non-Indigenous patients. Services like MindSpot are a treatment option that can help overcome barriers to mental health care for Indigenous Australians.

Disabling forensic mental health detention: The carcerality of the disabled body

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Steele
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Forensic Mental Health ◽  
Court Order ◽  
Fetal Alcohol ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Institutional Failure ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Architectural Spaces

“Disabling” forensic detention involves challenging the self-evidence of the meaning of disability in forensic mental health law, and in turn illuminating the significance of this meaning to the possibility and permissibility of forensic detention and other interventions in the bodies of people designated with cognitive impairments and psychosocial disabilities (“people designated as disabled”). I apply this approach to an examination of a case study of one individual subjected to forensic detention: an Indigenous Australian woman with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Roseanne Fulton. By examining Fulton’s forensic detention, in the context of her earlier life circumstances and her subsequent journey through various “alternatives” to this forensic detention I show the interrelationships of forensic detention with a range of legal options for punishing, regulating and intervening in designated as disabled bodies and situate these interrelationships in a broader range of issues of violence, institutional failure, social disadvantage, settler colonialism, and ableism. My central argument is that the ongoing subjection of Fulton to a range of forms of control across her life suggest that the possibility of forensic detention and other forms of punishment of people designated as disabled is not attached to a particular material architectural space or a particular court order, but instead attaches to these individuals’ bodies via medico-legal designations as disabled and travels with these individuals through time and space. I propose that more directly it is the disabled body that is the space of punishment and the disabled body makes material architectural spaces punitive. A “reform”, indeed even an “abolition”, approach focused on material architectural spaces of disabled punishment will not interrupt the ongoing processes of control of criminalized people designated as disabled if it does not also acknowledge and challenge the temporal and carnal logics underpinning the carcerality of the disabled body itself.

Therapy and prevention for mental health: What if mental diseases are mostly not brain disorders?

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. A. Ioannidis
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Brain Disorders ◽  
Social Stressors ◽  
Labor Education ◽  
Mental Diseases ◽  
Long Term Follow Up ◽  
Political Decisions

AbstractNeurobiology-based interventions for mental diseases and searches for useful biomarkers of treatment response have largely failed. Clinical trials should assess interventions related to environmental and social stressors, with long-term follow-up; social rather than biological endpoints; personalized outcomes; and suitable cluster, adaptive, and n-of-1 designs. Labor, education, financial, and other social/political decisions should be evaluated for their impacts on mental disease.

A Tribute to the Late William J. Curran

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-275
Author(s):  
O. Lawrence ◽  
J.D. Gostin
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Mental Health Care ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Legal Medicine ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
International Institute ◽  
University Professor

In the summer of 1979, a group of experts on law, medicine, and ethics assembled in Siracusa, Sicily, under the auspices of the International Commission of Jurists and the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Science, to draft guidelines on the rights of persons with mental illness. Sitting across the table from me was a quiet, proud man of distinctive intelligence, William J. Curran, Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Legal Medicine at Harvard University. Professor Curran was one of the principal drafters of those guidelines. Many years later in 1991, after several subsequent re-drafts by United Nations (U.N.) Rapporteur Erica-Irene Daes, the text was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly as the Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care. This was the kind of remarkable achievement in the field of law and medicine that Professor Curran repeated throughout his distinguished career.

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