Remoteness and its impact on the potential for mental health initiatives in criminal courts in Nunavut, Canada.

Remoteness in the isolated communities of Nunavut, Canada adversely affects access to mental health services. Mental health initiatives in criminal courts exist in many cities to offer healthcare alternatives to regular criminal court processing for people affected by mental illness. These initiatives do not exist in Nunavut.

Reciprocal Inuit and Western research training: facilitating research capacity and community agency in Arctic research partnerships.

Engaging community partners to work as co-researchers and research assistants for research involving Inuit communities or regions helps to ensure the equitable recognition of community and researcher priorities, mutual trust and respect, participation by local participants, inclusion of local knowledge and local uptake of research findings. However, research knowledge still in development among community members has been described as a barrier to effective Arctic community research partnerships. This paper describes two 3-day, cross-cultural research training workshops held in the Nunavut communities of Arviat and Iqaluit during Spring 2017.

"Symptoms of something all around us": Mental health, Inuit culture, and criminal justice in Arctic communities in Nunavut, Canada.

Rationale: Rehabilitation-oriented criminal court mental health initiatives to reduce the number of people with mental illness caught in the criminal justice system exist in many North American cities and elsewhere but not in the mainly Inuit Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut.

Objective: This study explores whether the therapeutic aims of these resource-intensive, mainly urban initiatives can be achieved in criminal courts in Nunavut's resource constrained, culturally distinct and geographically remote communities.

Method: A qualitative multiple-case study in the communities of Iqaluit, Arviat and Qikiqtarjuaq involved 55 semi-structured interviews and three focus groups with participants representing four sectors essential to these initiatives: justice, health, community organizations and community members.

Re: Mental health rehabilitation in therapeutic jurisprudence: Theoretical improvements.

Legal scholarship relevant to criminal court mental health initiatives that divert people with mental illness from prosecution to treatment has created the concept of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ), an approach that seeks to maximize the law's potential for therapeutic outcomes. Despite recognition that TJ includes a rehabilitative response as a key animating principle and that it advocates for interdisciplinary synthesis, TJ has developed mainly from within the practice and discipline of law and without reference to the discipline of rehabilitation science, in which approaches to mental health rehabilitation (MHR) have witnessed significant developments in recent decades. In particular, concepts of MHR have shifted from a biomedical focus to a psychosocial approach, such as the recovery model, that incorporates values of self-determination, independence, and empowerment.

Therapeutic Jurisprudence in Health Research: Enlisting Legal Theory as a Methodological Guide in an Interdisciplinary Case Study of Mental Health and Criminal Law.

Studies that seek to understand and improve health care systems benefit from qualitative methods that employ theory to add depth, complexity, and context to analysis. Theories used in health research typically emerge from social science, but these can be inadequate for studying complex health systems. Mental health rehabilitation programs for criminal courts are complicated by their integration within the criminal justice system and by their dual health-and-justice objectives.