Understanding the role of culture in the delivery of mental health programs in Indigenous communities: Narrative review of online mental health resources and perspectives on culture as treatment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultural adaptation is an integral part to the implementation of mental health programs in Indigenous communities. Previous research has suggested that culturally adapted programs can increase program uptake and address the specific needs of Indigenous communities. In fact, Indigenous community members may see the teaching components of culture as a form of healing. “Culture as treatment” refers to the notion that strengthening and restoring cultural knowledge, traditional beliefs, and identity can have a preventive or curative effect on mental health related problems. However, there has been limited scholarly attention, especially supported by empirical data, exploring notions of culture as treatment. Moreover, with the onset of COVID-19 and government regulated health measures, mental health programs have had to adapt to online platforms, which poses new challenges to how culture may be integrated into mental health promotion. This thesis aims to address the gaps in the literature to better define notions of culture as treatment and best methods for implementing culturally adapted programs online. First, I conducted a narrative review of 33 articles with original data to better understand the resources required to implement online mental health programs and to review their effectiveness. The narrative review suggests that online mental health resources are a feasible strategy to implement services in Indigenous communities, though issues with access to high-speed internet and electronic devices, issues with the implementation, and questions about how to best culturally adapt materials remain. Second, to understand perspectives on the role of cultural adaption in mental health programs, I interviewed 11 program facilitators involved with the Listening to One Another to Grow Strong (LTOA) program. LTOA is a strength-based, mental health promotion program designed for Indigenous youth across Canada. Each Indigenous community across Canada culturally adapts the program to meet their local cultural and mental health needs. Interviews with program facilitators indicate that there is high value placed on culturally adapting programs. While there is a focus on ensuring the programs fit the local cultural and mental health needs of the community, participants in this study understood the teaching of local culture can be healing to communities they serve. Suggestions for introducing and teaching cultural elements online are further presented in this study
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".