Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to continue my questions to the Minister of Health and Social Services in regard to the mental health services provided in our small communities.
The Minister’s Forum on Addictions and Community Wellness, Healing Voices, has 67 recommendations and 12 members that visit 21 communities. In there, in the recommendations, 47 to 51 talks specifically about mental health in our communities and these recommendations are very, I would say, shallow. So I want to ask the Minister, this indication as to the type of mental health support in our small communities, it’s really, really shallow in terms of people not really understanding, as my colleague Mr. Blake talked about, even for the youth.
What has the Minister’s department done to follow up and strengthen or implement these 67 recommendations under the Minister’s Forum on Addictions and Wellness?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Mental Health and Addictions Action Plan that came out from the Department of Health and Social Services moves a long way to supporting the recommendations that are in the Minister’s Forum.
We do have community counsellors in most of the communities in the Northwest Territories who can provide direct counselling, whether its addictions related or whether its mental health related. There’s also NWT Helpline that we strongly encourage people to call if they’re unable to talk to anybody else. In the communities they’d have nurses. The nurses are also there to provide referral services to individuals who are seeking addictions treatment or have other mental health issues that they’d wish to address. They can certainly get referrals to other practitioners throughout the Northwest Territories right from their communities.
So there are a number of things that are available within the communities themselves. We also have programs in the schools like the Talking About Mental Illness, we’ve got the promotion campaigns that are out there, the Feel Real Radio which is transmitted everywhere that CKLB transmits, encouraging people and youth to talk about mental health issues as well. Thank you.
I read a report on the impact of residential schools and other root causes for poor mental health in Aboriginal people and students who attended residential schools and the devastating effects is has on mental health. We have reports on the residential school survivors that cannot access treatment programs right now in the Sahtu region, people who are being denied. We cannot close their files because they cannot fulfill a treatment program under the mental health Minister’s Forum on Addictions. We’re failing terribly at the community level.
How many mental health workers are right now working in the Sahtu and which communities do have mental health workers?
I can’t honestly remember which communities are actually currently filled and which communities are not filled. We do have turnover in these communities, but I will commit to getting that information for the Member.
I’d also like to ask the Member if he could share that document with us that articulates the individuals he feels are being failed and we can have further discussion on that as well. Thank you.
The last count, as the Minister of Education said, there’s 5,500 so far that he knows of, of people in the Northwest Territories who have attended the residential schools. I say that number is higher, up to at least 10,000. That is devastating in the Northwest Territories. If you look at the history of the residential schools and the terrible effect it had on residential school survivors and their mental health, we have yet to come a long, long way to provide good mental health. So I’d be happy to share this with the Minister.
I want to ask, has this department looked at any type of mobile training or mobile treatment for residential school survivors who aren’t able yet to get into a treatment program to look at their wellness issues?
Thank you. We are pursuing a mobile treatment option available to all residents of the Northwest Territories, some of who might actually be survivors of residential schools. I would also like to just remind the Member that based on discussions that we’ve already had, I’ve had the Executive and the Department of Health and Social Services get in touch with the federal government to find out what, if any, transition planning can be put into place as they exit the field around the residential school survivors. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At one time the Grollier Hall Healing Society was involved in the court process up in Inuvik, and the Grollier Hall Healing Society developed training modules, residential school treatment program models, care givers survivors, community survivors.
Can the Minister go back in history and see if these models can be used today? These were trailblazers in terms of helping the survivors in the communities. Can the Minister look and say, yes, the wheel has been invented, we can use this? Can he get a hold of those models and look for…
I’m not a great big fan of recreating the wheel if it’s already working well. But we would have to explore these programs. They may no longer be relevant; they might be relevant. We’re certainly willing to look at other programs, and I’d appreciate if the Member could maybe share some of his insight into these programs with us as well. In particular, which ones he thinks were really effective and which ones maybe weren’t so effective. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Moses.
