Stress and Mental Health among Cree First Nation Peoples

A recent article published in Ethos by Naomi Adelson brings up several important points concerning indigenous peoples and mental health. Specifically, she highlights some of the disjunctions between Euroamerican mental health categories such as stress, and Cree First Nation Women’s understanding of this category and its place in their lives.

The Abstract

Allan Young’s classic thesis on stress discourse underscores the way in which the biomedical discourse of “stress” reflects and legitimizes existing social inequalities even as it removes the language of stress to the decontextualized domain of the clinic. In this article, I address the way in which the “stress discourse” of a group of young adult Cree women who live in a remote northern Canadian village reflects and reinscribes the social, cultural, and historical conditions of inequality as part and parcel of community life. This study, as a reflection of Young’s thesis, reveals that sometimes one is bound to replicate inequities because it is necessary to do so. The women with whom I spoke are entangled in an historical and social reality that they are wholly aware of such that the paths of inequity that are expressed in a rationale of “stress” cannot readily be challenged or changed.

Read more about Stress, Mental Health, and Cree First Nation peoples here.