DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

The CRCAH Program Statement for Social and Emotional Wellbeing indicates that initiatives in clinical mental
health care will be supported by CRCAH to the extent that they:
• Incorporate a focus on developmental prevention [sic];
• Engage families and communities in care oriented to enhancing social and emotional wellbeing;
• Entail intersectoral, community oriented capacity building; and
• Demonstrate the objective of building social and cultural competence in services aiming to support social and
emotional wellbeing (CRCAH n.d.:7).
For this to occur, the concept of Spirituality needs to be at the core of clinical mental health care, informing the
diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions.
The CRCAH’s social and emotional wellbeing program is concerned with mental health issues among Indigenous
people—from social adjustment and maladies identified as depressive illnesses, and the self-medication that
occurs with alcohol, petrol, marijuana and other drugs, through to acute psychiatric care. And it is concerned
with making available to Indigenous people services that are appropriate to their cultural ways of interpreting
the world and their relationships within it. Approaches informed by Aboriginal philosophy, and the meanings
and behaviours drawn from it, are crucial to the successful treatment of Aboriginal people. Reser, a psychologist
who has researched Indigenous mental health issues and worked extensively with Aboriginal clients, explains
that an adequate understanding of psychopathology (among Aboriginal people)
will be realised only when there is a more widespread and genuine understanding that there exist basic cultural
differences with respect to how the world, the self, and distress are experienced and responded to (Reser 1991:221).
He argues that a shared humanity is not sufficient to be able to understand ‘the causes, meanings and consequences
of disturbed behaviour in another culture’ (Reser 1991:221).
The CRCAH Program Statement for Social and Emotional Wellbeing rightly identifies colonialism as the root
cause of a loss of wellbeing:
bringing radical social, economic and cultural change, forced disruption of social and cultural systems of family
life and welfare through policies of assimilation and child removal… and the development of distinctive but
limited forms of economic participation (CRCAH n.d.:3).
The impacts of colonialism have been profound and are ongoing. The ways in which Aboriginal Australians have
been incorporated into the workforce have been highly exploitative (Kidd 2007) and involved the violent takeover
of Aboriginal lands (Reynolds 2006). It is also important to consider the wholesale denigration of Aboriginal
philosophy and the associated lifeways of Aboriginal people as primitive, stone-age and unable to change to meet
the challenge of modernity as contributing greatly to a loss of social and emotional wellbeing. This attitude to
Aboriginal culture has also led to the idea that Aboriginal people should be grateful that they were colonised
because this saved them from a kind of stone-age hell. As an Australian Minister for Immigration said, ‘We’re
dealing with people who were essentially hunter-gatherers. They didn’t have chariots. I don’t think they invented
the wheel’ (CNN.com 2001). So there is another manifestation of disregard and the ongoing nexus of oppression.
Although the impacts of colonisation have been pervasive, it is also important to recognise these as not
necessarily collective but as encompassing a diversity of impacts over time and geographical space. Similarly,
the responses to colonialism have not been uniformly negative and it is important to emphasise the strengths,
as well as the weaknesses, of responses to colonialism, and this can best be achieved by a regional, local and
family approach to the histories of Aboriginal people. For example, the historian Crawford found that the people
of the northwest Kimberley were, in their opinion, the victors in the colonial war: ‘We won the victory!’(Crawford
2001:15). Although this is a result one would not expect to be common, the fact remains that the colonial takeover
of Aboriginal lands and lives has been played out in different ways and to different effect in the diverse
and various parts of this country.
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