Utoo News and Various News Sources - March 7 2024 - Deloitte's new report offers suggestions for improving mental health for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit kids in Canada.
The report, “Breaking Colonial Legacies and Mapping New Mental Pathways to Wellness,” is the third in a series that tries to represent Indigenous youth perspectives on reconciliation hurdles and potential.
Deloitte Canada's national Indigenous health lead is Piikani family physician Lana Potts.
She told Alberta Native News the study is the result of a week of conversations with Indigenous adolescents and mental health-care workers in 2022 about Indigenous mental health hurdles and solutions.
Potts mentioned “racial battle fatigue” in the paper, which is less well-known than intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities.
She explained this exhaustion as “being tired of constantly having to prove yourself, constantly having to battle racism, having struggles related to racism, and it's really wearing them down.”
The report has four sections: socioeconomic determinants of mental wellbeing, Indigenous approaches, mainstream mental health care, and system navigation help.
NT initiative helps Indigenous students find jobs (Dailymotion)
Dr. Potts said these four interview topics emerged.
When looking at these four roads to wellbeing, it's not a forward or backward strategy, but a continuum of what has to be done and a holistic approach to mental wellness, she said.
Poverty, inadequate housing, lack of clean water, and inconsistent transportation are the “foundation” of Indigenous teenage mental health issues, according to Potts.
The Indigenous community communication support finding surprised me. In particular, broadband is unfair to non-Indigenous populations, Potts added.
The report states that 43.3% of First Nation reserves in Canada had access to the minimum broadband speed of 50 Mbps for downloads and 10 Mbps for uploads as of 2021, compared to 91.4% of all Canadian homes.
Potts stated that this imbalance prevents reserve residents from accessing many services, including mental health.
She stated “this was a significant impairment in affecting their overall mental health — feelings of isolation” and not knowing how to receive support.
The key to mental wellness is “being seen, being heard and being valued,” Potts said.
She stated that Indigenous youth should be able “to have a strong cultural identity, to know where they come from through land connection, through ceremony, through accessing their traditional teachings, to be able to say their name, to say, ‘This is who I am.’”
The preservation and restoration of Indigenous languages and traditional Indigenous practices like skinning hides and manufacturing moccasins help build this strong feeling of identity.
Structural racism in Canadian health care prevents young Indigenous people from accessing mental health care on reserve.
“Many indigenous people don't want to access care because of racism, because they don't feel valued,” Potts said. “Feeling unfairly treated has been a huge barrier for young people in getting care.”
She suggested using traditional Indigenous healing to help communities “identify their own ways of knowing and their own wellness in order to create solutions.”
Participants thought integrating traditional Indigenous medicine with western psychology and therapy was “very, very key” to making mental wellness spaces more accessible for Indigenous adolescents, Potts said.
This report is solution-focused. Our ways of knowing kept us healthy. Tradition has always kept us healthy. With this intergenerational trauma hurting our communities, Potts said we can achieve wholeness by building on our strengths.
