DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

2003c; Roe 2000), community development issues (Grant 2004), social work interventions (Briskman
2007) and occupational therapy (Tse et al. 2005). Aboriginal practitioners such as Phillips, Roe and
Atkinson and Ober, work in a wholistic way that addresses the need for community development
through the healing of mental health, substance misuse and health issues. This understanding of
Spirituality, being at the core of practice, is qualitatively different to the idea of cultural appropriateness
and cultural inclusiveness. The latter approaches are often described as making Aboriginal-friendly
premises, providing cultural awareness training for practitioners and the inclusion of Aboriginal workers
(Westerman 2004; Vicary & Westerman 2004; Dudgeon, Garvey & Pickett 2000; McLennan and Khavarpour
2004). These initiatives may be well meaning but do not go far enough. Phillips points to the defining
difference when he explains the need for an entirely different approach:
Something much more radical is required—something, which simultaneously decolonises Indigenous experience
of the biomedical system and develops a complete theoretical base for new programs is required. At issue
here is our beliefs about medicine, healing, sickness and how culture mediates those beliefs and explanatory
models (Phillips 2001:11).
There is even more at stake. Challenges to culturally derived personhood from therapies based on Western concepts
of personality development and normative assumptions of the individual’s relationships and beliefs—challenges
that eschew wholistic views of the world and the role of Spirituality—can be dangerous. The application of
Western-derived therapies to Aboriginal individuals can cause disjunction: that is, a state of being separated,
which occurs when an individual has to incorporate competing values, beliefs and worldviews into their sense
of self. That is, in effect, the collision of cultures, trying to sit together within their ways of being (Reser 1991).
It is notable that Aboriginal respondents in a research project designed to ascertain Aboriginal knowledges of
Western psychological services in two locations in metropolitan and rural Western Australia were concerned
that the Western models of treatment do not account for the Aboriginal worldview and cultural beliefs about
mental illness. They also were of the opinion that depression could not be addressed by Western treatments and
were fearful of the Western mental health system. The authors also recognise a dissonance between Western
and Aboriginal conceptions of mental health (Vicary & Westerman 2004). In this connection, Bolton points to
the importance of understanding Aboriginal personhood in the light of an entirely different philosophical and
cultural base for the development of personality when he observes that:
Today, Aborigines may wear the white man’s clothes, speak his language well, and adopt some of his customs,
but it is necessary for us to go beneath the surface of conformity, for it is here that we can discover what it is
that Australian Aborigines refuse to part with. Here you have the key to Aboriginal psychology… the change
is only on the surface (Bolton 1994).
These superficial changes that belie the subjugation of knowledges that Moreton-Robinson (2000) has identified
in Aboriginal women’s life writings, and the continuing intangible cultural values and ways of being in urban
communities (Grieves 2006a), though often ‘unseen, unheard, unspoken’ (Grant 2004), are already associated with
other stress factors from psychological disjunction in the lives of the Aboriginal minority in a settler colonial society.
Although Aboriginal psychologists can criticise Western psychology from a wholistic perspective and see it as
failing to deal with the whole person (Dudgeon, Garvey & Pickett 2000), they are yet to interrogate the very basis
of this psychology and develop the new radical approaches that Phillips has called for. The main position seems
to be that the approach can be ‘eclectic’ and draws on Western and Aboriginal approaches (Dudgeon, Garvey &
Pickett 2000); that it can be modified by changes at the practitioner and system levels of service delivery to increase
the access of Aboriginal people to mental health services; that it can become more culturally appropriate by the
introduction of minimal standards of cultural competence for practitioners and ongoing cultural supervision
with monitoring and the use of cultural consultants (Westerman 2004); and that by incorporating Aboriginal
people into the design of culturally appropriate health services, ‘ultimately a blend of Indigenous and Western
psychologies [can be] delivered by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal practitioners’ (Vicary & Westerman 2004).
There is no doubt that such initiatives are valuable and necessary and that a variety of approaches needs to be
developed to make services accessible and to fit the particular needs of diverse individuals and communities.
However, the concern expressed is for an interrogation of the basis of Western practices and the advisability
of their application in Aboriginal contexts, and the support and development of practices based on Aboriginal
concepts of personhood.
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Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health • Discussion Paper Series: No. 9
Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy
The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing