Table 3 Design a holistic and culturally rooted mental health system (Theme 2)

• Support capacity building opportunities within the community. Allocate funding to train and hire Indigenous mental health workers or Indigenous mental health navigators from the communities who can provide cultural supports and traditional healing to Indigenous residents

• Employing people in the community builds local capacity

• Engage Elders and Knowledge Holders from the communities as ‘cultural mentors’ to be involved in the training and education of mental health professionals

• Engage Elders in the Schools to teach youth about cultural and traditional practices

• Hire Elders to work alongside health professionals by participating in home visits

• Move away from the medical model of wellness/sickness to include Indigenous ways of knowledge on health and healing (i.e., use the Medicine Wheel)

• Reclaim traditional healing practices such as native counselling and offering traditional foods (not market-based/western foods) in the communities

• Focus on the ‘whole person’ (individual, family, and community needs) to promote healing

• Promote cultural sensitivity across the spectrum of care, from prevention to promotion of mental health

• Embed Indigenous culture and values into healing and treatments for mental distress

• Addiction and counselling services should be offered across the individual’s life span

• Acknowledging and implementing the TRC recommendations across organizations

Participant Quotes

“Staff or provider turn-over is a big challenge. Providers outside of the community are going to invest very differently in a community when they don’t expect to stay, because they don’t put down their roots [in the community].”

“Community-led, community-run facilities are needed to address mental health. We are always going to encounter turn-over and lack of trust from community members [of providers] if we don’t have these services and programs embedded in our communities.”

“And we are building the capacity of our members and our residents who are there because they do have the knowledge, they have the connections and their relationships, and they do have their hearts in the community.”

“…and that means moving away from mainstream education simply in your classroom…and going back to our Elders, and whether that’s involving Elders in a sort of formal education system or if that’s Elders educating professionals, I don’t know. We need to do that, but I think we need to look to our Elders who have that knowledge.”

“In order for the health system to better meet the needs of Indigenous people, first of all it has to respect and value

the people, the language, the culture, and then it has to be equipped to be responsive to whatever needs that exist.”

“I think we need trauma-informed services and support, which means we are grounding our supports in a non-judgmental, non-oppressive, non-violent approach, [encouraging] empowerment, choice and safety.”

“Trauma-informed care asks what happened to you rather than what’s wrong with you.”