Addressing skyrocketing rates of suicide among Indigenous Australians will require governments to trust Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to take control of mental health support and suicide prevention, two senior advisers to the Australian government on mental health have said.
Prof Pat Dudgeon, chair of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership in Mental Health group and a Bardi woman from the Dampier peninsula in Western Australia, and Prof Ian Hickie, the co-director of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, both sit on the National Mental Health Commission. They were guests on the ABC’s mental health week episode of Q&A on Monday night.
Dudgeon, asked whether an “urgent taskforce” was needed to address high rates of suicide and attempted suicide in Indigenous communities, said communities should be supported to make themselves well.
“We need to empower communities themselves and Indigenous people to take charge of their own issues, and help them develop programs and implement them that can deal with all those issues,” she said.
The suicide rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is 2.6 times the rate for non-Indigenous Australians. In some remote Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, the suicide rate is close to 100 times the national average and children as young as 11 are taking their own lives.
Dudgeon said any attempt to tackle mental health concerns in Aboriginal Australia needed to take into the account the ongoing intergenerational trauma of colonisation and dispossession, and that “it may well get worse before it gets better”.
“A lot of people when they hear about colonisation say, ‘Oh, you know, get over it. That was a long time ago,’” she said.
“That’s still with us. We did have the takeover of our lands, we had people being put into missions and reserves, and we were treated very much like second-class citizens, and that’s close.
“I’ve actually read my own family’s native welfare files, as they call it, and I was also serving on the parole board of WA at the time and the things that Aboriginal people had to go through just to live a normal life.
“They had to ask permission to move towns, permission to get a job and so on and so on, and it was like they were on parole. And if you did anything to breach that, you could be put away, you could be sent to a mission or a reserve far away from our own country.”
The health minister, Susan Ley, admitted this year that government had not done enough to curb Indigenous suicide rates.
Hickie said attempts to improve mental health rates in Indigenous communities had failed for not being Indigenous-led.
“We have a terrible tradition of white-guy solutions being imposed on Indigenous communities that fail repeatedly, and that’s the frustration of the wider Australian society [who say], ‘Oh, look, we’ve done lots but it doesn’t work,’” he said.
“Do we really trust Indigenous people to take the actions? If you want to solve the problems, these are the solutions.”
The panel also included the deputy New South Wales mental health commissioner, Fay Jackson, the former AFL player and mental health advocate Wayne Schwass, and the NSW Institute of Psychiatry director, Dr Roderick McKay.
Jackson said the refusal of many with a mental illness to accept their diagnosis was one of the biggest barriers to recovery. “[For me] it was far more important to pretend to everybody else that I was healthy and well,” he said.
Jackson, who has bi-polar disorder, said the health impacts of living with a mental illness and relying upon medication which caused side effects, like the lithium that made her hands shake throughout the show, were often ignored in a dialogue that only talked about the death toll associated with suicide.
“A lot of us become really morbidly obese and get diabetes and heart failure and those sorts of things, and we die much younger … 77% of us who die younger, die younger because of poor physical health,” she said.
The Q&A host, Tony Jones, wrapped up the sombre program – which was capped off by a performance by the Yolgnu singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu and the musician Paul Kelly – with an apology to the South Australian Liberal party senator Cory Bernardi, who was apparently concerned that Jones’s jest the week before that he would set up a splinter conservative party named “Cory Bernardi’s Golden Dawn” unfairly linked him to the far-right Greek political party Golden Dawn.
“That was not my intention and I do want to make it clear that I don’t suggest that Cory Bernardi supports fascism,” Jones said to laughter from the audience. “That’s not funny,” he said, and smiled as the laughter went on.
• For information and support in Australia, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636
