3 November 2009
A new foundation supported by Monash will focus on healing the hurts of colonisation.
During his early 20s, Greg Phillips took on the exhausting role of drug and alcohol counsellor at Cape York Health Council. His brief was to focus on legislative changes – increasing prohibition, altering trading hours, changing glass containers to unbreakable plastic receptacles. In short: harm reduction.
His attempts to convince stakeholders that the root of the problem needed to be addressed, and not just patched up with punitive measures, fell on deaf ears.
"Alcohol, drugs and gambling are pervasive in some communities. They're usually a function of people who are powerless and they're a function of people trying to gain power, and a result of trauma and traumatic histories. Most interventions are either political, punitive or administrative, rather than therapeutic," says Mr Phillips.
"Sure Methodone and Maltrexone are going to be useful, but you can't think that the problem is going to be solved with these alone. What we need to do is come up with a whole new paradigm, and that's what healing represents."
A descendant of Waanyi and Jaru grandparents ("Waanyi is just north of Mt Isa and Jaru is in the Kimberley at the back of the Bungle Bungles"), he is Interim Chair of the interim board of the independently run Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Foundation. Mr Phillips is also completing a PhD at Monash and advises the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences on Indigenous issues. The foundation, which has strong Monash support, has been funded by the Federal Government for $26.6 million, to be spent over four years.
Mr Phillips believes that doctors, nurses and other health workers who work in Indigenous communities are currently being sent blind into an "unseen epidemic": "a wall of grief". He likens the effects of 200 years of oppression to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), although a form of PTSD that spans individuals, families and communities and is formulated differently to classic PTSD.
The mission of the Healing Foundation is to unravel this underlying trauma, focusing instead on reinforcing strengths and building pride in Indigenous identity. He gives the example of a project in Western Australia that used football as a way to bring the community together behind a common goal of helping the boys to excel in the sport.
"We want to focus on not standard mental health and violence programs, because governments should continue those, but what's needed is the glue in between, which is about identity and belonging and about believing that we're good enough in this world," says Mr Phillips.
Part of the philosophy of the healing foundation is that all of our existing and planned efforts to close the gap – housing, employment, education – assume and rely on the foundation of social functioning in communities, and we don't have that, by and large."
The healing model is based on North American experiences, and particularly those of the Canadian Healing Foundation, which was established by the Canadian government in 1999 and funded for the sum of $350 million.
In the strongest bureaucratic argument for the healing model, the successes of the Canadian foundation were evaluated as costing just half of what the usual western health approaches would.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian foundation, Mike DeGagne, will speak as part of the Indigenous Health and Healing Symposium – 'Investing in better public policy' – at BMW edge on Monday.
Mr Phillips and other members of the Healing Foundation team recently travelled to and consulted with 20 communities across Australia. They have collected 48 written submissions, and on the basis of those have narrowed the goals of the Australian Healing Foundation to three main aims: capacity-building for healthcare; health promotion and education; and research and evaluation.
Closing the gap also relies on a boost in the numbers of Aboriginal health workers, and on educating non-Indigenous workers on cultural issues.
And the knowledge of how to cope with fresh challenges must permeate the lives of all Aborigines.
"The most critical issue is the skills in the people, so that people learn how to heal themselves and to heal others. That's the most sustainable thing the foundation needs to invest in for the long term," Mr Phillips says.
"So what does a grandma do when her young son is threatening to suicide? She needs skills. She needs to know how to intervene, who to ring, what to do: those basic natural helper skills."
