Centering Indigenous knowledge in suicide prevention: a critical scoping review
Indigenous peoples of Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand experience disproportionately high rates of suicide as a result of the collective and shared trauma experienced with colonization and ongoing marginalization. Dominant, Western approaches to suicide prevention-typically involving individual-level efforts for behavioural change via mental health professional intervention-by themselves have largely failed at addressing suicide in Indigenous populations, possibly due to cultural misalignment with Indigenous paradigms. Consequently, many Indigenous communities, organizations and governments have been undertaking more cultural and community-based approaches to suicide prevention. To provide a foundation for future research and inform prevention efforts in this context, this critical scoping review, published in BMC Public Health, summarizes how Indigenous approaches have been integrated in suicide prevention initiatives targeting Indigenous populations.
Impacts of religious faith on the mental wellbeing of young, multi-ethnic Pacific women in Aotearoa
This study, published in Pacific Health Dialog, employed a multi-faceted approach in the disciplines of Theology and Pacific Studies; three key areas of investigation were examined and included: how young Pacific women perceived images of God and faith; how it impacted upon their mental resilience and their responses to mundane and significant life events; and their personal constructs of mental wellbeing.
Nōku te Ao: Sovereignty of the Māori Mind
The purpose of this report, published by the Health Promotion Agency, is to present a Māori world view of factors that contribute to discrimination of people who have experienced — or continue to experience — mental distress. The focus in this research is on Māori and recognises that discrimination associated with mental distress has many causative factors including colonisation, racism, socioeconomic deprivation, different perspectives on ‘mental distress’, historic separation of mental health from other health problems, and the longstanding societal disregard for people who experience mental distress.