Trailblazer calls for more trust in services

Embrace Co-Director Professor Helen Milroy AM will use a presentation to 200 mental health workers today to call for more trust in services.

Professor Milroy will make the speech at the Maari Ma Social Emotional Wellbeing Regional Summit in Broken Hill, New South Wales.

The two-day summit for mental health workers and practitioners has a focus on culturally appropriate and trauma-informed practices.

“At the end of the day, the issue is trust,” Professor Milroy said to ABC Broken Hill ahead of the event.

We probably knew that but we’ve done all this research to find that out and we need to really think about that very deeply. Because for Aboriginal people it’s hard to trust, given our history and some of the discrimination and racism that we see today. But trust is one of those very primitive, very important aspects of life, particularly if you’re talking about mental health, sharing the intimate stories of your life.

Professor Milroy’s presentation will focus on the findings from cultural safety research from Embrace and UWA researchers. She will use a second address to discuss the importance of trauma-informed care.

“We’re moving away from the classic, ‘what’s wrong with you?’, which is a deficit-based way of understanding someone’s story, to ‘what’s happened to you – tell me your story’, and understanding what they have been through, in order to understand what they’re experiencing today,” she added.

Professor Milroy also recounted stories from across her trailblazing career as she became the nation’s first recognised Aboriginal medical doctor.

“They say I was the first Indigenous medical doctor in Australia, but I’m only the first Indigenous doctor that did western medicine,” she qualified. “We had traditional healers across Australia and at the time of colonisation we were among the healthiest peoples in the world, so I think our original doctors did a wonderful job.”

“My whole ethos has been, ‘why don’t we have the best of both worlds?’ We can learn from the traditional ways that we did things and … we have this western medicine now that can help with all the issues of today, so let’s combine both knowledge systems.”

Professor Pat Dudgeon (UWA), Richard Weston (Maari Ma Health CEO), and Professor Helen Milroy