The "Mental" Health of Canada's Indigenous Children and Youth: Finding New Ways Forward.

Abstract

Focusing, as it is meant to do, on child mental health, this special issue of Healthcare Quarterly singles out for attention a distinctive category of concerns that, when viewed through lenses common to many Indigenous peoples, is arguably better left unmarked. That is, attempts to carve up the world in such a way that health concerns centre on matters of the "mind," on the one hand, and on "physical" ill health, on the other, are expressive of a form of self-understanding that is more consonant with the classic dualisms of traditional, "Western," Cartesian thought (e.g., the mental in counter-distinction to the physical; selves set off against societies), and quite out of place in those more holistic frameworks of understanding favoured by many of the world's Indigenous peoples (Chandler 2010). Why such putative cultural differences might make a difference - or at least a difference in what is written here - is that any account of health matters in which Indigenous people might actually recognize themselves requires, as a constitutive condition of its coherence, a kind of radical reframing - a shift in axes that replaces the arguably "false" dichotomy between mental and physical health with something better approximated by the much-overheard and more broadly inclusive notion of personal and community "well-being."