Working with communities - Introducing illness - Grog, gunga and gambling - Reasons for use - Strategies to address use - Solutions from Canada - Factors involved in healing and change.

Helping to promote healing in Aboriginal people with addiction and mental health issues requires specialized knowledge and unique skills. Health, social service and justice workers must first have a grasp of history and the emotional legacy that today's generation of Aboriginal people carry. They must also be prepared to blend Aboriginal and Western approaches to match their clients' unique world views. Journey to Healing is a comprehensive and practical evidence-based resource. It was written to help prepare students and professionals to provide counselling and social services to Aboriginal people with mental health and addiction issues in urban, rural and isolated settings. The scope of the book is broad; each chapter focuses on a specific topic. Many of the authors are Aboriginal and all are respected experts in their fields. Each author shares his or her scholarly learning, insight, wisdom and experience of addressing addiction and mental health issues in Aboriginal populations. The guide is intended to serve as a course text for health, social service and justice programs in universities and community colleges. It will also be of interest to social workers, addiction and mental health service providers, and prison, probation, parole and police officers working with Aboriginal communities.

This open access book deals with community-based attempts on the part of Aboriginal communities and groups in Australia to address harms arising from alcohol misuse. Alcohol-related harms are viewed as both a product of colonisation and dispossession and a contributor to ongoing social, economic and health-related disadvantage, both in Australia and in other countries with colonised Indigenous populations, such as Canada, the US and New Zealand. This book contributes to an evidence-base by bringing together a selection of existing Australian documents considered by the editors to have continuing relevance to all those concerned with dealing with alcohol-related harms among Aboriginal peoples, These are contextualised in original chapters that recount key events, ideas, and programs. The book is a practical resource for all people and groups concerned with addressing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander alcohol-related harms, both at the community level and at the level of policy-making and administration.

Traditional knowledge systems are also innovation systems. This book analyses the relationship between intellectual property and indigenous innovation. The contributors come from different disciplinary backgrounds including law, ethnobotany and science. Drawing on examples from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, each of the contributors explores the possibilities and limits of intellectual property when it comes to supporting innovation by indigenous people.

This is a fascinating account of traditional socialisation and Indigenous forms of learning in Australia and Melanesia. It draws from rich ethnographic, historical and educational material. There has never been a greater need for a socially and historically informed, yet critical account, of the mismatch between traditional ways, realities of life in Indigenous communities, villages and enclaves, and the forms of education provided in schools. Raymond Nichol, a specialist in Indigenous education and pedagogy, surveys the links, too often disparities, between ethnographic detail of life ‘on the ground’ and the schooling provided by nation states in this vast region. Most importantly, he explores and suggests ways community developers and educators, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, may work to bridge the gaps in social rights, educational and economic development. This is relevant for all Indigenous communities, their survival and development. Many vexed issues are discussed, such as race, ethnicity, identity, discrimination, self-determination, development, and relevant, effective pedagogical, learning and schooling strategies.

The world of mental illness is typically framed around symptoms and cures, where every client is given a label. In this challenging new book, Professor Bernard Guerin provides a fresh alternative to considering these issues, based in interdisciplinary social sciences and discourse analysis rather than medical studies or cognitive metaphors. A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader: how we attribute ‘mental illness’ to someone’s behavior why we call some forms of suffering ‘mental’ but not others what Western diagnoses look like when you strip away the theory and categories why psychiatry and psychology appeared for the first time at the start of modernity the relationship between capitalism and modern ideas of ‘mental illness’ why it seems that women, the poor and people of Indigenous and non-Western backgrounds have worse ‘mental health’ how we can rethink the ‘hearing of voices’ more ecologically how self-identity has evolved historically how thinking arises from our social contexts rather than from inside our heads. Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.