A Conversation About… Culture, Connection and Indigenous Flourishing – Part 1

Host (00:01):

Hi there. Welcome to Mental Health Professionals Network podcast series MHPNs aim is to promote and celebrate interdisciplinary collaborative mental health care.

Alan Rosen (00:17):

Welcome to this, the first of two episodes brought to you by MHPN Presents, A Conversation About Indigenous Flourishing. My name is Alan Rosen and I’m joined here by Pat Dudgeon and Abi Bray. So welcome both Pat and Abi. We’re talking today about Indigenous flourishing, but first of all, I want to acknowledge that I’m speaking from a Gadigal land and I’m on the intersection really between Wangal and Gadigal tribal land. I also welcome everybody who’s come to listen to this and also acknowledge the land they’re coming from to listen to this as well. I’m a community psychiatrist. I also have academic appointments to Sydney University and Wollongong University, and I’ve been involved in the development of community psychiatry and I’ve been involved as an ally in Aboriginal psychiatry working in rural remote regions of New South Wales most of my career. So over to you, Pat, and then to Abi.

Pat Dudgeon (01:21):

Okay, thanks Alan. I’ll fill in some of the blanks for you. Alan’s been well known in the Indigenous psychology, mental health space. He’s been a supporter and an advocate, I think, and an important ally. He’s also helped us in his own space, challenged the western Hegemony and look to how can we value and where’s the place for Indigenous knowledges. So some of that will come up in our talk, but thank you Alan for introducing us. My name’s Pat Dungeon. I’m a professor with the University of Western Australia. I live and work on beautiful Noongar boodjar on beautiful Noongar country that’s in Perth in Western Australia. But my people are actually from the Kimberley, so I come from the Bardi people of the Kimberley. I was born and grew up in a beautiful Larrakia nation. So I was born and grew up in Darwin and I came down to Perth many, many years ago back in the ice age actually, to study psychology because there were no universities in Darwin at the time.

(02:28):

So that’s telling my age. But my background is in psychology, so I’m a psychologist and a lot of my work over the last 40 years has been concerned with nurturing Indigenous knowledges, knowing that we did not fit into the mainstream discipline and making space for us to fit. So the landscape, the academic and intellectual landscape is very different to when I started out, and I’m really pleased to have been a part of this change and probably contributed a little bit to it as well. So I’m feeling very optimistic and I’m looking forward to our conversation. So that’s a bit about me. I’ve sat on many committees and councils, and I actually was stacked down from a lot of them last year because it’s time for new people to come up, new Indigenous leadership to start emerging. But also I’d like to just do research and write more papers. So that’s my plan, my game plan at the moment, that’s all about me. I’d like to acknowledge like Alan, all the listeners who might be listening to this podcast and the beautiful Indigenous countries that you might be sitting on listening to this hopefully interesting podcast. Over to you, Abi.

Abigail Bray (03:47):

Hi, my name’s Abi Bray. I’ve been working with Pat for about 10 years, initially at the University of Westin Australia. I’m of Celtic descent living in the south of France, surrounded by thousands of trees in a valley, which I really like. It’s a sanctuary. Me and Pat have worked on different projects over the years, Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Flourishing, Indigenous knowledge systems, and I feel quite strongly about all of that. Witnessed a lot of racism in Australia when I was living there, which was quite confronting and quite committed to all of this.

Alan Rosen (04:23):

I think the other thing is that both you, Pat and Abi have been pioneers in bringing in the concept of Indigenous Flourishing interview and into the spotlight and also questioning some of the origins of the term flourishing, which has certainly sparked a few neurons and thoughts with me, many more than a few. So thank you for that. So what are we going to talk about today? The foundations really of flourishing and the concept of flourishing. First of all, the social science conceptual understanding and uses of flourishing, which Abi has looked at in detail, and also the decolonizing of the Western models of mental health recovery, which Pat has looked at in detail, and also the role of Social and Emotional Wellbeing, how to look at life in an ecocentric rather than egocentric, individualistic way, and the various domains of social and emotional wellbeing and flourishing, which I think we can build on top of the SEWB concept. So at this stage, we’ll ask Pat to start on the basis of the social and emotional Wellbeing Foundation and where we go from there.

Pat Dudgeon (05:40):

Okay, thanks Alan. We’ll be putting the links to most of what we speak about in the podcast so you can access that. But I usually start with Social and Emotional Wellbeing. Look, it’s only one Indigenous knowledge. It is an Indigenous knowledge, but one model of many. So one of the great privileges that I have is seeing the emergence of different Indigenous conceptions of wellbeing, if you like. And it’s been around for a long time. It was back in the 1980s that Indigenous health leaders were talking about. There’s the western model of health, which is great, but there’s an Indigenous one too that will need to be holistic. Don’t just look at health as a clinical issue, but it’s all the other parts of being a human being that needs to be considered as well. And that’s where the concept of SEWB started for us. So I think there is a western concept of social emotional being, but I feel that Indigenous Australians have claimed it very much and now it’s become our concept.

(06:47):

But later on, the Ways Forward report, which everyone should know about, it was a brilliant, groundbreaking piece of work by Pat Swan or Delaney Now and Beverly Raphael and I actually was part of the consultations of that and went to a brilliant national conference that we had on Indigenous wellbeing, and that all came together to create the Ways Forward report. And I was very proud and newly out of psychology I think when that all happened. So that was fantastic to be a part of that historical process. But in that, the Ways Forward is our Bible, I guess, and Indigenous mental health, but social emotional wellbeing comes in part from that report as well. Later, a policy document, a framework was developed and it was called the National Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander People’s Mental Health and Social Emotional Wellbeing Framework. And it had synthesised much of the ways forward report, and it was pretty brilliant.

(07:51):

US Indigenous psych’s were very impressed by it, but it was never implemented. So the government, after it expired, the government said, let’s renew the SEWB framework, which we were very excited about and very involved in. And by then we had developed a diagram. We had boiled down all the information in that very rich and fantastic first framework into a diagram. So we had self in the centre and we split all the different domains that made up social emotional wellbeing. So obviously there’s connection to your mind, how your mind functions to be healthy or unhealthy. There was a connection to your body because we are a physicality, and then that’s where it departed. Then there’s a connection to your family, so is very important for Aboriginal people, connection to community, connection to country, very important. And that’s what I’ll come back to later on in my discussions.

(08:56):

It’s the connection to country that we’re going to focus on today, but also connection to culture and to connection to spirit and ancestors and spirituality. So that’s the diagram around it though it’s not in a vacuum and it’s not static. It’s very dynamic. And Graham G, this fabulous Indigenous psychologist, he actually really had a lot of input to our diagram and he said, how people learn all of these different domains, they’re our connections and we learn them, we experience them, and then we express them. And that becomes our human reality. But it’s not in a vacuum around it or behind it is a history of colonisation. So historical determinants were very important. There’s also contemporary issues and challenges that we face. So social determinants where one’s born, your income, your education, your employment experiences of racism, so the classical social determinants definition if you like.

(10:02):

So that’s in there as well in the background. And also political determinants because I was very concerned recently in the Australian federal elections because had the other group got in, I was very worried that some of the initiatives and good programmes and some good work that have been done by Indigenous communities, people and communities might be lost. So we’re always at risk of these politics that happen around us, the whim of governments, the whim of not only at the Commonwealth, but at the state and territory levels as well, that impacts on our wellbeing. And then finally, we’d also put in cultural determinants because more and more Indigenous people are saying culture is at the centre of everything. And not only culture in its expression, but culture as Indigenous knowledges and the need for self-determination for cultural difference to be recognised and valued, but also Indigenous knowledges that need to be part of the equation if we’re going to have healthy, thriving communities and people.

(11:13):

So that’s a bit about their social emotional being background. There will be a link listeners for you to go to and to read up on it and become a bit knowledgeable. As I said, this is one of the Indigenous knowledges and wellbeing that we have. There’s a whole host of different programmes and different models that are coming forward that are really fantastic. I know that Professor Helen Mill is very concerned with the role of cultural or traditional healers that needs to come into our activities. She’s got her own model called Dance of Life. That’s some really fabulous, and in Broome, there’s a group of people that have worked on a wellbeing model, which at the centre of it is concepts of Liyan the soul spirit, and to keep that steady. So we’re seeing a proliferation of different models, which I’m totally encouraging, and that’s never happened before. Often our realities or our perceptions, they’ve been largely written up by non-Indigenous people. So I think things get lost in the translation when that happens as well. So I’m going to hand over to Alan back.

Alan Rosen (12:28):

I’m going to come back to the political determinants that you mentioned there, Pat. I too am relieved that there is a government that wants to carry on the work that needs to be done in both mental health and in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing’s. But on the other hand, there was also during The Voice, a concentrated group from the other side who were really trying to get the yes vote up too, like Ken Wyatt and Julian Lisa. And I think there’s a kernel there of bipartisanship that may grow. And I think that the other issues around the yes case, I think it contributed to the election result here too.

Pat Dudgeon (13:06):

Yeah. Well, my take on it, Alan, is that the people who voted no were so ashamed as they should be. But yeah, something happened and the forces of darkness did not succeed.

Alan Rosen (13:20):

Yeah, I think there were some virtuous forces that came together around issues rather than around just around the political labels. So that’s really good to know. But what I wanted to ask you about, pat, was about the colonial origins of what has been happening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but also how we came to the point of having to face the decolonizing of the Western models of mental health.

Pat Dudgeon (13:47):

That’s a big question. Look, I think mental health in itself is progressive. So I think 150 years ago, we treated people, well Western culture, in any case, treated people with mental ill health very badly. So a lot of the progression from that is good. But I think that it has been largely a European based and then American based discipline and profession. And in its eagerness to be considered as a science, it has neglected people from other cultural backgrounds, and it has become a force in itself, and it should too. I’d like to see more attention and resources going to mental health overall. But I think until recently, it was quite rigid and it was, in our view, it’s part of the colonial project. We weren’t mentioned in early mental health considerations, or we were seen as the exotic, others who had a lot of problems and wasn’t worth anyone’s while.

(14:50):

I think that we probably were part of the social Darwinism thinking that was around at the time that justified colonisation, that if Aboriginal and other people, other non-white people that is, could be seen as lesser human beings, then it was okay to assuage white guilt, if you like, for the terrible and colonising processes that happened all across the world. So it did come from a western source. So not only were lands taken, genocide, people removed from their country, but part of the project was to take culture and to neglect or to invalidate Indigenous knowledges and wellbeing. And that’s just recently turned on social media, you still get a lot of racism. One of the racist narratives that I see is, oh, Aboriginal people didn’t invent the wheel, well neither did white people actually, I think it was the Sumerians and Chinese that did. So I don’t know why people are claiming that they’ve got the wheel. But anyway, regardless, so those notions of somewhat biological hierarchy persist and are denigrating to Aboriginal people to justify the situation they’re in now and what happened to them. So the colonial project is still happening all around us. We have got racism, we’ve got systemic racism and cultural racism. So I think that we are still living in it, but it’s starting to be undone again. I think I’m very pleased that I’m here at this time now to see change. The potential for great change happening.

Alan Rosen (16:33):

First of all, invention of the wheel wasn’t everything. It denoted the rack at one stage and people on the rack. And so people were tortured on the wheel. The wheel wasn’t everything. But I understand the critical point that you need to make about it. But the other issue is that our institutions, including not just the academic institutions of psychology and psychiatry, but the collegiate guilds were embedded in the eugenics movement, particularly psychiatry, my college, and we’ve been involved before, we were named the Royal College of Psychiatrists. We were the association. And one of the presidents of that early on was Bostic, who was very much a raging eugenicist in a sense, in that he was very weathered to the idea of there being different levels of humanity. So this also had a big impact in what psychiatry did do with Aboriginal people, which was institutionalise them and incarcerate them and out of proportion to their numbers in the community. And it was relatively easy to be institutionalised for life, including in the time of my training.

Pat Dudgeon (17:39):

Yes, because of lack of understanding. I take it.

Alan Rosen (17:43):

Yes, and also another form of institutional incarceration as an alternative to some of the others that are around, including the forensic institutions. OK, over to you, Abi. And I was just wondering from a social science point of view, how this connects with the understanding and uses of the term flourishing, how we got there.

Abigail Bray (18:02):

Oh, okay. Just backtracking a bit. I was just thinking of what Pat was saying about this resurgence of Indigenous paradigms of healing. It’s really a global phenomenon as well. And it’s part of the cognitive health justice movement that came out of Latin America. And one of their slogans is there’s no health justice without cognitive justice. So recognising that authority and sovereignty of different knowledge systems about healing and wellbeing is really pivotal. And I think there’s been a shift across the world in lots of different disciplines, kind of coinciding with the relational turn in psychiatry, anthropology, neuroscience and stuff. And it’s a turning towards recognising that everything’s interconnected and relational. So moving away from that sort of uptight western individualism, which is pretty much a fiction, quite capital in some ways, it’s a colonial fiction, it’s been instrumentalized as a kind of vehicle for domination and control. So opening up to a recognition that we’re not alone, there are sentient beings all around us, country, coming back to country and the sacred entanglement with other epistemologies, other ontologies, and that’s a huge contribution from Indigenous knowledge systems. And it’s embedded in the social and emotional wellbeing model as well. And it’s a gift to Australian psychology. It’s part of the collective intangible heritage of Australia. It’s a very powerful awakening. I think that’s going on on lots of different levels that are sort of greening of consciousness.

Pat Dudgeon (19:47):

We are seeing it now happening. I’m quite active on social media. Mind you probably, my algorithm only shows me like-minded people, but they keep on finding more and more animals that are sentient. I heard that some of the meat industries are suffering with climate change, but also a larger consciousness, a global consciousness that, hey, we can’t treat living things in such a cavalier way. Some people are shocked when I’ve objected to how we use animals and kill them. And they go, oh, well, but that’s what they’re there for. No, they’re not. They have a right to this earth as much as we do. And it’s strange that people, they are starting to see it. And I remember that movie that came out, the one with the aliens and Tom Cruise I think was in it, War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds, the big machine alien machines were plucking up people and sucking them in and then was chomping them up to make fuel. And everyone would go, oh, the horror. The horror. That’s what we do. That’s what we do

Alan Rosen (20:51):

Indeed. Biofuels, if you like.

Pat Dudgeon (20:54):

Yeah, that’s what we are doing to the animals and these machines were turning the landscape into this barren wasteland that would make it more comfortable than them. I’m surprised that people don’t see the mirror image that presented.

Alan Rosen (21:09):

Yeah, that’s right. And it connects with, I think why there’s a greater mass of people who are getting involved with protecting the earth planetary health. And that is because you can’t do climate change amelioration without thinking about having the mother earth or the planet earth, the global movement to protect the earth as a basis for all life. And having to start thinking not egocentrically and individualistically, but thinking egocentrically. And I think people are understanding that much more. It’s not just the young people, but the young people are the power behind this as well. But of course they suffer for it unless there can be some way they can get active hope rather than passive hope and despair. And we’ll come to that separately. But what’s happening is I think many more generations are now challenging that human supremacism, which Aboriginal communities always had, recognising that all life forms have the right to life and justice and the one health movement that it’s emerging in Aboriginal communities as well, which they always had as part of their cosmology really. And Stewart Sutherland, who also has been part of this group working together with us, he is taking on very strongly at the moment, at ANU in Canberra,

Pat Dudgeon (22:32):

When we originally did that first paper on climate change, Abi and I was shocked because Abi had done the background research to show the animals that had become extinct. So Abi, I don’t know whether that’s disappeared into your memory, but I was shocked at the level or number of animals that have become extinct just in Australia. Just in Australia.

Abigail Bray (22:55):

The highest extinction level in the world of mammals in Australia through food, farming. Yeah, it’s a crisis. It’s a massive crisis. And it affects us in ways we probably don’t understand, that grief of loss for kinship with the world, the natural world is real. And I think psychiatry psychology are recognising that we have a sacred attachment to the earth that’s overlooked, and that is a source of healing and nurturing.

Pat Dudgeon (23:25):

And we were supposed to be the caretakers, not the exploiters.

Abigail Bray (23:29):

Yes. And that’s what’s wonderful about Indigenous knowledge systems because they have a sort of sacred golden rule running through all of them across the world. And in Australia especially maybe. And our purpose is to care for the earth to be a guardian custodian of Mother Earth, which creates purpose and meaning and kinship obligations as important.

Alan Rosen (23:54):

Still there are those who get proud of anything that Australia is the best at, that unfortunately, we happen to be best at extinction of species. Some people will do anything for a number one for Australia. Where does this take us in terms of the developments in social science? I mean, I could talk more about where we should be going or where we’ve been going with psychiatry, but I think all the social sciences have taken their time to develop from the individualistic to the collective and to the concentration on looking after whole families, whole communities, and taking responsibility for that. So I’m just wondering, Abi, where did the social sciences go and how far did they become very individualistic in their focus, and how have they started to come back?

Abigail Bray (24:43):

Gosh, that’s a massive question.

Pat Dudgeon (24:44):

I think it’s too optimistic to say that right now, Alan, but I think you are tapping into a change that’s starting to happen. I think it’s too early to say that they’ve become enlightened. Certainly not.

Alan Rosen (25:00):

I don’t think we are enlightened. I think it’s the influence of people who have become concerned enough about the planet and the earth who are joining in the move towards becoming ecocentric rather than egocentric. I don’t think it’s led by the social sciences. I dunno if you agree with that.

Pat Dudgeon (25:20):

I think there’s pockets and they’re becoming stronger and more prevalent. I think there’s still a lot of hard work to be done. I can only speak from one of my experiences. For instance, we’ve always roused our discipline of psychology and insisted on our inclusion. And we actually had this project happening at one time back in 2013 I think it was, where we were trying to systemically put Indigenous studies into the psychology curriculum and also to increase the number of psychology students at the time, may I say, in fairness to my discipline, they were one of the first disciplines to do a public apology to Aboriginal people, which we were very proud of. That was later on followed up in the US when the American Psych Society Association rather did their apology. So that’s one great step forward that our discipline did make. It needs to follow it up with other good action as well, I think.

(26:25):

But the discipline has changed. So back in those days, it was hard going. We did this big project and these frameworks, it did have impact. It started to impact on the competencies that were essential in psychology. And then recently, a few years ago, we decided to do phase two of the same project. So we’d just won a big research grant and we thought, oh, let’s revive the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project. I personally envisaged that it would be a small group of us that would come together, conferences, write the odd paper to challenge the power and do what we’d done before. Basically things had changed Alan, it was really surprising and even suspicious because there was a groundswell of support and people wanting to be involved. And it took me by surprise. Now we’ve got over 80% of schools of psychology and universities signed up to our project and the executive committee, all the regulators of psychology.

(27:33):

And it’s just this amazing and phenomenal change that I did not expect. And I was thinking, I thought, what has brought about this change? And I think that what’s happened is that there’s a new generation of psychologists, and it might be psychiatrists, social workers that have come about, and all the old rather limited vision ones have gone off and retired, which is good. And it’s the young ones that are coming through now, and they’re much more woke, dare I say it, I’m doing rabbit ears for listeners if you can’t see. So they’re much more aware of the inequities in our society, the issues in our global planetary health and everything else. So they’re the ones that are going to drive the change. So we’re talking about one lifetime and two projects that happened maybe 10 years apart, and the absolute different response that was seen previously. We were marginalised with probably a specialty group that everyone had to tolerate. But in the second iteration, we were so welcomed and that project continues, and it’s a part of all the little grains of sand that make up a greater change. I hope that will happen. But back to you, Abi. I think I started hogging your question there.

Abigail Bray (28:59):

Yeah, well, I mean, I think for some reason they are evolving through the relational turn. As I said before, towards the recognition of interconnected existence. There’s been lots of new things happening, like psychedelic studies and consciousness studies where the concept of mind is being expanded and explored in ways that are right outside the type prism of western individualism. So I dunno how that’s going to impact everything, but there’s definitely a hunger for a new paradigm, exploration of new paradigms. There’s a slight danger that Indigenous knowledge systems are going to be appropriated. That’s happened. The history of the social sciences. There’s lots of unacknowledged debts to Indigenous knowledge systems. Even in the modern human turn, with Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, he slightly poaches off Indigenous understandings of connecting to sentient self-organizing country systems. So recently Pat was approached by a team of neuroscientists who are looking at relational systems of consciousness. So we’ve contributed the model of social emotional wellbeing to that and posited the idea that it’s a form of cognition, place-based cognition, developed in the wild and looking at it as a form of consciousness. So we’re looking at that kind of stuff.

Alan Rosen (30:28):

And that’s a network of neuroscientists is it?

Abigail Bray (30:31):

A group of neuroscientists, yeah.

Pat Dudgeon (30:33):

From England.

Abigail Bray (30:34):

Yeah. And I think when we’re talking about western psychology, western psychiatry, yes, it’s done barbaric things to people that is coded as mentally other, racialized and stuff. But I think within the Western tradition, there’s been another sort of narrative. Think of the pre Socratic Greeks. They had this elemental, poetic ontology of the earth. They understood that the earth had a soul. And you can trace all of that through Western philosophy and arts and culture as well. It hasn’t been dominant. The dominant thing has been the machinery of extractive capitalism and environmental destruction and so forth. But even like Nietzsche said, stay true to the earth and Spinoza’s love of the soul of the earth. There’s a long history of Western philosophy and pockets of humanist, psychiatry and psychology, eco psychiatry that have this thirst full recognition of our place on the earth. So I think there’s a sort of colliding or a melding of these two traditions and ancient Indigenous tradition. And then there’s this other sort of slightly occluded western tradition, which hasn’t been attached to domination, and that is more seeking that relationship to the earth.

Alan Rosen (31:53):

I have a narrow band view of the social sciences. And for instance, psychology made a proposal that all the mental health professions should make an apology for what the social sciences and the psychological and psychiatric sciences had done over incarcerating, over diagnosing people with disorders, which left them in institutions far too long sometimes for their lifetime, that there had never been an apology for that, for the really downgrading of people who were in that situation, including treating Aboriginal people or all Indigenous people as lesser beings. And the APS grabbed that, the Australian Psychological Society in 2016/ 17, and did an apology in their own terms and in their own words, and I’m sure nudged along by a pattern of leaders. But the psychiatrists did not follow. The psychiatrists had done a landmark apology that Helen Milroy had really put her heart behind and got that through.

(32:56):

And that was about the stolen generations, and that was important. But the college thought they had done it because they had apologised just for that part of the history where there is a much greater history of people certainly concentrated with the people who are in the stolen generations, but other people too, who had been over incarcerated, misdiagnosed, over diagnosed, diagnosing, sorry businesses, depression and protestors as personality disorder and schizophrenia quite often in its various expressions. And that our college has felt that we’ve done this other apology, they’ve done part of it, they’ve done some stepwise step work towards it, but they haven’t grabbed the whole picture. Whereas I think the Australian psychologists had a big impact on the American psychologists and in fact on the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, who also made an apology except that they muddied their apology by doing a group apology, if you like. But they were, I think almost in parallel to the APA psychology. There’s two APAs. There’s a psychology and a psychiatry. The APA psychology really followed in what the APS did, and they did it at a national meeting to huge acclaim. So an apology is not a be all end all after that. You’ve got to have a programme to say what’s going to happen to make sure it doesn’t slip back there again.

Abigail Bray (34:19):

Absolutely more than that, it can’t just be an apology that can be a kind of neoliberal sort of tactic to brush off implementation. The apology, it’s nothing without implementation and change. So I’m not sure if that’s happening very quickly.

Alan Rosen (34:35):

It’s a starting point really.

Abigail Bray (34:37):

And it’s symbolic, signalling symbolic change as well, which is also important.

Alan Rosen (34:43):

And the same goes for truth telling that we have to get going more widely in our community now. So the truth telling is certainly a really important element in the process, but it’s part of the way towards a real reconciliation through understanding. So issue I was trying to get to was what positive psychology and positive psychiatry have done. I think they’ve done some interesting things in reframing those sciences, but they have been particularly individualistic. And I was just wondering, Abi, if you want to say something about the difference between the individualistic focus and the more collective focus.

Abigail Bray (35:26):

Yeah, they have, like Seligman’s did have a slightly relational understanding of wellbeing and positive psychology, but the Indigenous model of flourishing wellbeing is much more expansive really. And it also has a sacred dimension. The issue of spirituality is often lacking in western positive psychology paradigms. The spirituality is connected to reverence, the country and obligations in custodial practises, and that’s a grounding for wellbeing, community, collective grounding. So that is definitely something that’s missing within those traditions. I think there’s turn towards that.

Alan Rosen (36:08):

We’ll come back to that and the second one. So thank you for joining us on this episode of MHPN presents A Conversation About the whole idea of flourishing of the mental health professions and in social emotional wellbeing. We’ve covered a fair bit of territory in bits because it’s been so conversational, which we hope would’ve been value to you. And if you want to learn more about Pat, Abi or me, or what we’ve been doing, or if you want to access the resources that we’ve mentioned, go to the episode’s landing page and follow the hyperlinks and stay tuned for the second episode in this short series, which will be released on Wednesday fortnight. So this is a series of two. In the upcoming episode, we’ll talk about how Western approaches to mental wellbeing have misappropriated Indigenous approaches, and what western models can and should learn from Indigenous approaches about reciprocity, kinship, holistic ways of working, and much more. Talk to you then.

Host (37:14):

Visit mhpn.org.au to find out more about our online professional programme, including podcasts, webinars, as well as our face-to-face interdisciplinary mental health networks across Australia.