Collaborative and Indigenous Mental Health Therapy

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Māori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcribed 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, Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his worldview and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, a child and 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 Māori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Māori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing. With a foreword by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies.

Author Biography

Wiremu NiaNia was apprenticed as a child to a spiritual healer of the NiaNia whānau. In 2005 he became the cultural therapist at Te Whare Mārie, the Māori mental health service at Capital Coast District Health Board. He is now an independent healer, writer and consultant.

Allister Bush is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Te Whare Mārie, the Māori mental health service in Porirua, and at Health Pasifika (integrated Pacific mental health service, Capital Coast District Health Board).

David Epston is an honorary clinical lecturer at University of Melbourne and an affiliate faculty member at North Dakota State University.