Indigenous Spirituality, Health, and Well-Being in the Young: Yarns With the Victorian Aboriginal Community.

The extant literature has scant detail about everyday spiritual practices that aid Indigenous young people. This paper systematically explores Indigenous Spirituality, health, and well-being through Elder-governed conducted via Zoom with 44 Aboriginal Elders, Healers, and Senior and Junior people involved in health and well-being of the Victorian Aboriginal community. These were analyzed through an innovative, constructivist, multi-perspectival discursive grounded theory method.

'Doing culture' in contemporary south-eastern Australia: how Indigenous people are creating and maintaining strong cultural identities for improved health and wellbeing.

Background: Indigenous people in Australia experience far poorer health than non-Indigenous Australians. A growing body of research suggests that Indigenous people who are strong in their cultural identity experience better health than those who are not. Yet little is known about how Indigenous people create and maintain strong cultural identities in the contemporary context.

Exploring the association of Indigeneity, social adversity status and externalizing symptoms in children and adolescents.

Objective: The relationship between Indigeneity, social adversity status and externalizing symptoms is complex and unclear. This study investigates how Indigeneity, social adversity status and externalizing symptoms are related in young people.

Methods: A total of 132 Indigenous and 247 non-Indigenous young people aged 6-16 years were recruited from a hospital mental health outpatient service.

The Development of Elder-Governed Adjuvant Cultural Therapy for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Young People With Mental Health Conditions.

A 10-year review of the 2008 Council of Australian Governments' (COAG) Strategy identified the lack of involvement of Indigenous people in developing policies as a key reason health disparities persist. It also posits that disconnection from and culture have been crucial factors. Physical and mental health cannot be separated from spiritual health and well-being amongst Indigenous Australians.

Country and community vs poverty and conflict: Teasing apart the key demographic and psychosocial resilience and risk factors for Indigenous clinic-referred children and adolescents.

Objective: Indigenous young people are known to have adverse demographic and psychosocial factors affecting worse mental health outcomes and some household factors aiding resilience. In Australia, there has been no exploration of these factors in clinically referred Indigenous young people assessed in a culturally appropriate way.

Methods: A total of 113 Indigenous children and adolescents, 217 non-Indigenous young people, age, gender, mental disorder symptom severity, symptom-linked distress and impairment matched, and 112 typically developing participants, age- and gender-matched were recruited.

Whose place? Lessons from a case study of a guardianship determination for an Australian Indigenous child.

Whose values matter when considering which environment is healthier for a child whose guardianship is contested? The biological mother from a remote Australian Aboriginal community, who voluntarily relinquished her but has now requested her return? The foster mother who has cared for her in a metropolitan centre in another State of Australia, thousands of kilometres away? The welfare professionals who also live in that city? Or the child herself, who left her birth home and community five years earlier at the age of two? Drawing on a case study of a seven-year old Aboriginal girl, the authors argue that non-Indigenous values trumped Indigenous values without the realisation of key players who were empowered to make such determinations. The article uses Manuel DeLanda's neo-assemblage theory to consider the range of processes that exert themselves to shape place-values and social identity in colonised nations. It will also draw on Erik Erikson's and Lev Vygotsky's theories of psychosocial development to consider competing sets of values that raised feelings of dissonance within the child.

Key demographic and mental disorder diagnostic differences between Australian First Nations and non-First Nations clinic-referred children and adolescents assessed in a culturally appropriate and safe way.

Objective: Increased point prevalence rates of oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder have been reported in American Indian and Canadian First Nations children and adolescents. To date, in Australia, there has been no published examination of standardized mental disorder diagnoses in First Nations children and adolescents, determined after addressing key cultural methodological issues.

Methods: In all, 113 First Nations children and adolescents and 217 non-First Nations young people, aged 6-16  years, age, gender, mental disorder symptom severity, symptom-linked distress and impairment matched were recruited in a case control study.

Mental health care for Indigenous young people: moving culture from the margins to the centre.

Objective: Recently, Indigenous academics have evolved an Indigenist discourse that centralises Indigenous 'ways of knowing, being and doing'. Through this dialogue, Indigenous 'ways of knowing and being' augment Western biopsychosocial treatments.

Methods: This paper outlines the authors' clinical encounters with young people from the Koori community and ongoing consultation with Koori community Elders in Victoria that led to engaging young people and their families in an Indigenist dialogue.