Using Horses to Help to Heal Indigenous Mental Health | Mind Games

Описание: Amanda Balsillie is the owner of Four Directions Holistic Counselling in Beaver County, Alberta. She is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a fly-in community, in northeast Alberta.

In this Mind Games exploration, Balsillie shares her motivation to provide her services using horses as part healing to Indigenous clients, however, she is not able to bill to NIHB, Canada’s Non-Insured Health Benefits Program for Indigenous peoples. She is able to bill other insurance providers. She says the experience has been upsetting. Balsillie says being out in nature is an integral component to the healing of Indigenous peoples as Indigenous culture is very connected to horses.

In a two-year investigation TVO, the IJB and Toronto Star journalists revealed gaps in Canada’s NIHB program for Indigenous peoples. The journalists interviewed over 60 current and former clients, therapists, physicians, and Indigenous mental health advocates, many of whom described a “broken” system that, they claimed, sometimes does more harm than good.

TVO, the IJB and the Toronto Star reached out to Canadian federal officials overseeing the NIHB program. They denied that the system suffers from serious flaws.
https://ijb.utoronto.ca/news/indigeno...

Is Canada’s mental-health system failing Indigenous people?
https://www.tvo.org/article/is-canada...

Canada’s Indigenous mental health program is meant to be a lifeline. Instead, it’s so mired in red tape it seems ‘set up to deter people from accessing’ care
https://www.thestar.com/news/investig...

A murder conviction. Sex with an ex-client. Defending residential schools. Why a program for Indigenous patients uses therapists with troubling pasts.
https://www.thestar.com/news/investig...

Chiefs of Ontario deeply concerned about mental health providers enrolled in the Non-Insured Health Benefits program
https://chiefs-of-ontario.org/chiefs-...

#IndigenousHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #NIHBProgram