Rethinking American Indian Mental Health Services: Explorations in Alter-Native Psy-ence
Virtual: Zoom Since the early stages of his career, Joseph P. Gone has been examining depression and problem drinking within his own community on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. During this work, he interviewed a cultural traditionalist named Traveling Thunder, who linked substance abuse challenges to the historical and ongoing impacts of Euro-American colonization on community life. Building on these insights, Professor Gone proposes an alternative Indigenous mental health discourse, an “alter-Native psy-ence”, that contests and recasts mainstream psychiatric concepts and reframes “mental health” problems as postcolonial disorders.