Rethinking Native mental health and wellness: A training event for social services workers

Two Feathers–a local organization serving as a national leader in Indigenous mental health work– hosted a training event at Blue Lake Casino with a guest speaker talking about rethinking Native mental health and wellness.

“A big part of the training was concerned with thinking through how you can offer services like counseling and therapy or alternative kinds of services that would better advance the well-being of Native and Indigenous people today,” said Dr. Joseph Gone, a professor of anthropology and global health and social medicine at Harvard University. 

At this training event, people listened to the words of Dr.Gone and his experience working with Indigenous communities to rethink community-based mental health services to have a focus on traditional culture and spirituality for the past 25 years. 

“I want[ed] it to be more helpful to a broader swath of our community at home and so that’s why I spent my career trying to think outside of the box of psychotherapy as usual, psychology as usual, to instead think about Indigenous approaches to healing and well-being,” Dr. Gone said. 

At Two Feathers organization, Jennifer Oliphant, the clinical director, said they’ve pulled inspiration from Dr.Gone’s work for their program design, “So it’s just been such a huge honor to get to hear him talk and have him come to Humboldt County.” It’s events like this one that bring people together to network, collaborate all for the future of social services work. 

“I feel like with all these organizations here, it’s a very good understanding for people to get to walk around and get to know each other and then build connections and then collaborate on projects together,” said Grace Colegrove, a senior youth ambassador at Two Feathers. “And I feel like with that, it’s going to help the community out a lot because it’s not just one organization doing it now. It’s all of them working as a whole.”