100% Mabo†: De‐Colonising People with Mental Illness and their Families

Abstract

Pointing the name “Mentally Ill” at people in our midst has led to some unfairly dire consequences for their lives and their families. These include: forced extrusion, separation and disconnection from their families; incarceration in remote gulags, where they may be vulnerable to physical, emotional or sexual abuse; being stigmatised and sequestered as unmarriageable moral lepers; and being dispossessed of their full humanity, through loss of their identities as people, their everyday human rights and their entitlement to full membership of their own local communities. We mental health professionals have colluded in the systematic colonising of the “mentally ill” by becoming their politically anointed custodians or foster families “for their own good”. In the process, we have inadvertently broken their spirits, disempowered them and their families, and deskilled the community from knowing how to look after their own. Aboriginal and Maori people have had to contend with this on more than one front; not only have they been dispossessed by white society but also they have often been dispossessed of appropriate and effective mental health care. It is time that all service users reclaimed title to their own mental health territory.Well, here is the news:Firstly, the consumers are coming, they are after us, and so are their families. They are challenging our descriptions, our practices and our presumptuous ownership of their lives, and settling out of court with us for joint custody will soon be unacceptable to them.Secondly, evidence is emerging that many traditional cultural dimensions of healing may well contribute to better outcomes for those with the most severe psychiatric careers or disabilities, and their families.Thirdly, these political and cultural developments are compatible with converging evidence of the best clinical practice in comprehensive local mental health services.So there is no need for professional defensiveness, or for war to be declared between idealised notions of traditional culture and modern technology. The bottom line here is that we need both to talk to each other, to synergise the effects of the best of both, just as we need service users, families providers, health management, and local communities to engage each other in “seeking common ground”. De‐colonising of the mentally ill, like the dismantling of apartheid, is not without its dangers of backlash. But with an orderly transition of power it could be mutually rewarding, and may well signal a renewal and rebirth of the more caring community.