Lack of services perpetuates indigenous mental health crisis: frontline workers
Indigenous leaders say rampant child sexual abuse on many reserves across the country is an underlying contributor to mental health crises — particularly among young people — but a lack of funding and co-ordinated programs is leaving residents without desperately needed counselling services, which could help break the chain of despair and hopelessness enveloping entire communities.
In Ontario, for instance, mental health services on reserves are “at best probably minimal and at worst non-existent,” said Sol Mamakwa, health adviser for Nishnawbe Aski Nation, an organization representing 49 aboriginal communities within a vast area of the province’s north.
“Even within the NAN territory, with the different regions, the different health authorities, there is no mental health or addiction strategy that exists in the communities,” said Mamakwa, describing the hodgepodge of services that do exist as reactive rather than preventive.
“We are basically going from crisis to crisis to crisis. And sometimes I refer to it as a perpetual crisis.”