Collaborative and Indigenous Mental Health Therapy

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Maori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcripted interviews and detailed meditations on practice, it demonstrates how bicultural partnership frameworks can augment mental health treatment by balancing local imperatives with sound and careful psychiatric care. In the first chapter, Maori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his world view and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, an adolescent psychiatrist. The main body of the book comprises chapters that each recount the story of one young person and their family's experience of Maori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Maori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing.

With a forward by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies