AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES IN MENTAL HOSPITALS

Abstract

A USTRALIAN physicians and anthropologists have the opportunity to establish <i knowledge in ethnopsychiatry, a field described by Sir Aubrey Lewis (1963) as an obscure, potentially rich area of inquiry. What are the mental illnesses of the Australian Aboriginal cultures ? What are the transitional illnesses occurring during the present epoch of re-enculturation ? Such inquiries are important not only for academic reasons, but for Australia's mental health and, perhaps, racial harmony. To determine the features of the traditional illnesses, fieldwork is needed with the rapidly diminishing groups of Aborigines who are still tribally-orientated. To gain a clearer idea of the transitional illnesses that beset the Aborigines' adoption of modernity, clinical material from hospital and institution wherever it can be found needs to be examined. Such a combined approach is part of the research programme of the School of Psychiatry in the University of New South Wales. An urgent question is: to what extent should Australian Aborigines, tribal and transitional, be regarded as a sick society in the sense used by Halliday (1948) ? In such a society there are raised indices of mental ill-health and symptoms in the industrial, criminal, cultural and political spheres. Would epidemiological study reveal such a situation, in which the resources and techniques of social psychiatry should be applied ? Hospital data, because of various forms of selection, have limitations from an epidemiological point of view. But they do provide the most readily available information about the incidence of mental illness. In order to bring together these data, letters were sent in January, 1964, to the Directors of the Mental Health Departments of the various States of the Commonwealth, except Tasmania. Courteous replies were received, from which it appeared that the statistics were limited. In the end, only two States, Western Australia and South Australia, provided information about the Aborigines in their mental hospitals. Victoria reported that few were being admitted. New South Wales and Queensland hospitals had larger numbers of Aborigines but did not have statistics available as a separate group. Plans are being made to study Aborigines at present occupying New South Wales hospitals, utilizing anthropological aid (Yeomans, 1965). The Northern Territory has no mental health service as such, though some Aboriginal