Problem:

Government approaches to Closing the Gap don’t prioritise healing and prevention, or Aboriginal community-controlled solutions.

Government policies – past and present – drive systemic inequity on basic foundations like access to finances and economic security, housing, and education. These shortcomings contribute to stalling or regression on several Closing the Gap targets, including several justice-related targets and rates of suicide. These issues are interconnected: closing the gap on justice requires closing the gap on mental health, and vice versa. Closing the Gap requires structural transformation on foundational things like child removals, inappropriate approaches to substance use, and over policing. Closing the Gap funding must be directed to Aboriginal community-controlled approaches that work to transform systems.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are more likely to need mental health care, and less likely to be able to access it, than non-Indigenous people. Being removed as a child, having your own children removed, being incarcerated, or being in close community with people who’ve experienced these things cause trauma. These are justice issues with significant mental and physical health impacts.

Aboriginal mothers can fear seeking mental health treatment because of the well-founded fear that the government will remove their children if they admit they are having mental health struggles. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who use criminalised substances as a coping mechanism for trauma are often arrested and punished rather than being provided with health support. Financial, housing, education and employment inequity drive poorer mental health outcomes.

People with mental illness, especially those who are unable to access appropriate treatment, are at greater risk of being criminalised and of experiencing other legal problems. Criminalisation and unresolved legal problems can, in turn, compound trauma.

Being placed in out-of-home care away from kin and culture strips Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids and adults of their identity. Prisons do the same. Access to Aboriginal community-controlled legal assistance reduces the number of First Nations people who experience these traumas, which improves both legal and health outcomes.

Aboriginal community-controlled legal assistance services provide critical support connected to key Closing the Gap targets including those on incarceration, domestic and family violence and child removals. Yet, they are generally the poorest funded of all service types in the chronically underfunded legal assistance sector.

Despite significantly higher rates of suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than among non-Indigenous people, mainstream mental health systems aren’t set up to meet the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, many of whom are wary of approaching them because of historic and contemporary experiences of mistreatment.

All First Nations people should have access to a culturally supported safe space they can go to if they are experiencing mental health issues, where people and whole families can get the holistic care and support they need to heal from the traumas they have experienced. There must be significantly higher investment in Aboriginal community-controlled preventative approaches to mental health – empowering communities with the tools to recognise signs and provide appropriate support early.