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July 22, 2020 American Indian/Alaska Native Mental Health: Our Voices, Traditions and Values to Strengthen our Collective Wellness Victoria M. O’Keefe, Ph.D. (Cherokee/Seminole Nations of Oklahoma) Mathuram Santosham Endowed Chair in Native American Health, Assistant Professor, Licensed Clinical Psychologist Associate Director, Center for American Indian Health Department of International Health, Social & Behavioral Interventions Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health My late...

New benefits as of July 2020 Partnership is working to ensure that our members get effective and appropriate behavioral health care services ( mental health and substance use treatment services ) in all 14 counties we serve. Expansion of Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Services PHC’s 14 counties have long supported SUD treatment services through the Drug Medi-Cal program. Now, these services are greatly expanded in seven of our counties through our new Wellness and Recovery Program. Wellness...

Alongside two elders and a colleague, we arrived at the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. Our intention was to facilitate the first Canadian/American collaboration to heal Historical Trauma. I vacillated between feeling immensely excited and powerfully emotional; what an honor to be a black woman surrounded by First Nation relatives on Native land. Our first great work was to enter the sacred ceremonial space for prayer and cleansing. As a tribal African woman, I...

By Ana Sandoiu, July 6, 2020, Medical News Today. In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting Indigenous communities to a disproportionate degree. In this Special Feature, we bring into focus some of the mental health effects and challenges that Indigenous people face as a result of the pandemic. Since the pandemic started, it has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 affects certain communities to a disproportionate degree. Race , biological sex , age , and socioeconomic...

Fact Sheet from the Urban Indian Health Institute shares ways to support communities experiencing multiple trauma during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. How can organizations... Be more transparent about COVID-19? Emotionally support the people they serve through telehealth services? Support staff in caring for themselves and their communities? Support communities in handling their emotions? Work together to heal their communities? To download the fact sheet and/or view other COVID-19...

By Adriana Gallardo, June 27, 2020, Pro Publica. She was still small enough to climb on her mother’s back, too little to step from the family boat without help, when the violations began. “Touching games” led by older men with big smiles at her family’s fish camp, across the water from Kotzebue, a regional hub of 3,000 people known as the “gateway to the Arctic.” From those early years into her adulthood in distant Anchorage, Tia Wakolee, 46, says she was molested, raped or stalked nearly 30...

By The Times-Standard, June 23, 2020. From a Yurok Tribal Council release: The Yurok Tribal Council recently appointed Angie Brown as the COVID-19 Incident Command Team’s Public Health Officer. Brown brings more than 25 years of local, Public Health experience to the Incident Command Team. She will be overseeing the Yurok Public Health Task Force, which is responsible for developing and implementing plans to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on the Yurok Reservation. The veteran healthcare...

By Will Houston, May 4, 2018, Eureka Times-Standard. Though separated by about 2,400 miles, the communities and tribal nations in northeastern Humboldt County and Menominee County in Wisconsin share many similarities. They both are located in rural counties that have timber and fishing-based economies; they have similar populations; and they also share a history of trauma and the detrimental physical and mental health effects that come along with it. From these similarities, Hoopa resident...

Medi-Cal has just published new policy making family therapy a covered benefit for children and adults with mental health disorders and for children who are at risk for mental health disorders. This will be especially relevant for children with ACEs. Under the guidance of the California Department of Health Care Services, the Medi-Cal fee-for-service program aims to provide health care services to about 13 million Medi-Cal beneficiaries. The Medi-Cal fee-for-service program adjudicates both...

From Center for American Indian Health, Johns Hopkins University, June 2020 Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health is producing materials related to COVID-19 for tribes to distribute. [ Please click here to access resources .]

From Association of Health Care Journalists, June 10, 2020 For an in-depth look at how to report on the effect the novel coronavirus is having on Native Americans, AHCJ will host a webcast with Donald Warne, M.D., M.P.H., the director of the Indians Into Medicine program and director of the master of public health program in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of North Dakota. A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe from Pine Ridge, S.D., Warne will explain how the virus...

By Kim Wheeler,CBC.CA Radio, The Doc Project, June 18, 2020 My name is Kim Wheeler but some know me as Kim Ziervogel. Others will remember me as Kim Bell, and to a small group of people I will always be Ruby Linda Bruyere. But the name game doesn't stop there. Why would someone have so many different names? Are they all aliases? Are they hiding from their past? From the law? In my case, it's none of these. I'm a Sixties Scoop survivor and those names were given to me through birth, adoption...