Advancing Indigenous Mental Health Research: Ethical, conceptual and methodological challenges

Abstract

The articles in this issue of Transcultural Psychiatry point the way toward meaningful advances in mental health research pertaining to Indigenous peoples, illuminating the distinctive problems and predicaments that confront these communities as well as unrecognized or neglected sources of well-being and resilience. As we observe in this introductory essay, future research will benefit from ethical awareness, conceptual clarity, and methodological refinement. Such efforts will enable additional insight into that which is common to Indigenous mental health across settler societies, and that which is specific to local histories, cultures and contexts. Research of this kind can contribute to nuanced understandings of developmental pathways, intergenerational effects, and community resilience, and inform policy and practice to better meet the needs of Indigenous individuals, communities and populations.

Keywords: Indigenous peoples; cultural psychiatry; historical trauma; mental health; social epigenetics.