The program will convene cross-cultural mental health researchers, clinically trained service providers, and Native American traditional healers for a series of exchanges designed to develop practical models for integrating indigenous healing practices and conventional behavioral health services for future pilot evaluation in Native community health clinics.
Structure
UM will host two gatherings for these purposes:
The first gathering during the Winter semester of 2010 will be comprised of three and one half days of events featuring 12-16 distinguished guests, including teams consisting of academics, healers, and clinicians who (ideally) have already collaborated extensively. These teams—possibly representing Lakota, Navajo, Cree, and/or Ojibway tribal constituencies—will afford diverse professional perspectives on the prospects and pitfalls of integrating traditional and healing and BH services. The gathering will be divided into two days of private informal introductions, orientations, preparations, and discussion addressed to a set of four related questions: (1) in your experience, which therapeutic practices have you found to be particularly helpful for Native people contending with significant distress; (2) in what ways do these practices continue, extend, refine, complement, conflict with or diverge from historical practices of indigenous healing (and with what implications for modern indigenous lives); (3) how do attributes such as gender, race, generation, spirituality, education, and reservation/urban experience impact both the relevance and results of these therapeutic practices for participants, and (4) how might we most responsibly represent these practices without succumbing to either summary marginalization and dismissal on one hand or cultural misappropriation and commercialization on the other by non-Native people? This private exchange will be followed by a day-and-a-half of public (and recorded) events structured as follows: 1. BH Experts (reviewing service needs, constraints, and desires); 2. Healers I (responding to BH experts); 3. Academics (reviewing implications of healing research for service delivery issues), and 4. Healers II (responding to issues raised by academics). Each session will be comprised of formal presentations followed by roundtable discussion. Time near the end of each day will be reserved for audience exchange.
Upon the conclusion of the first gathering, a small team of participants—including the project director—will be charged with summarizing take-away lessons and promising directions as the prelude to developing a written White paper describing 2-3 practical models for integrating traditional healing and behavioral health services. A follow-up gathering in the Fall of 2010 will be comprised of three days of events featuring a subset of ten of the original participants specifically dedicated to the purpose of collaboratively reviewing, critiquing, and revising the written White paper for future implementation and evaluation. One and a half days will be devoted to a private working meeting, and a final half day will be devoted to a public four-hour-long roundtable that will provide opportunity for the group to present, contextualize, explain, and discuss its findings.
Products
Products of the program will include (a) video recorded sessions from the public components of the first and second gatherings that will be edited into DVD format for widespread distribution, and (b) a revised written White paper—aimed at both scientific and community-based publication—that summarizes the process, conveys recommendations, expresses concerns, and sets forth future steps for implementing and evaluating such integrative efforts within Native community health clinics.
The program is directed by Joseph P. Gone, Assistant Professor of Psychology and American Culture. For more information, please contact him at (jgone@umich.edu).