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Counsellors are being urged to stop looking inside their Maori and Aboriginal clients for problems, and start looking outside to restore their relationships with other people and their land.
Maori psychiatrist Mason Durie and Australian Aboriginal psychologist Tracey Westerman told a trans-Tasman addictions conference in Auckland yesterday that Western ways of delving into people to find out "what went wrong at the age of 3" did not work for indigenous people.
"The Maori approach to counselling places more emphasis on relationships beyond the person, so the search is not inside for what went wrong at the age of 3, but what is my relationship with the people around me, the environment and the land around me?" Dr Durie said.
Dr Westerman said many Aboriginal people were diagnosed with addictions or mental illnesses when they were actually "sick for their country" because they had been separated from their land.
The two speakers addressed the conference, organised by the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs, in the light of serious problems of alcoholism and drug addiction in indigenous communities in both countries.
In June, Australian Prime Minister John Howard banned alcohol in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and "quarantined" welfare payments to Aboriginal families to stop benefits being spent on drink, after a report pointed to widespread alcohol-fuelled child abuse.
In New Zealand, an analysis presented at the conference of a 2004 Ministry of Health survey of 13,000 people found that 35 per cent of Maori, 21 per cent of Pacific people and 18 per cent of Europeans and others had drunk in a hazardous way in the previous year.
It also found that 9 per cent of Maori, 5 per cent of Pacific people and only 3 per cent of Europeans and others had used alcohol or other substances in the previous year in a way which indicated either addiction or repeated negative impacts at work, school or home.
The gaps between Maori and others were reduced, but not eliminated, after allowing for socio-economic differences.
Dr Durie said Maori had actually made remarkable progress in tackling such problems in the past 25 years.
"If you had held this conference in 1982 there would have been hardly any Maori here. There was virtually no Maori participation in the health services," he said.
"There has been a transformation."
Today, he said, a quarter of the country's addiction counsellors, and a fifth of Auckland University medical students, were Maori. The number of Maori health agencies had grown from three to 270.
He cited Maori workers such as the late Sonny Waru, who took young glue sniffers off Auckland streets and spent several months with them on Taranaki marae.
"All he did was expose them to marae culture. At the end of that time what emerged was a group of young people who had a radical reformation of lifestyle," he said.
"He never focussed on the glue sniffing. He talked about other things."
Dr Durie said the changes in the past 25 years had been led by Maori community leaders taking responsibility for social problems and using the health professionals as "technicians", not bosses.
"Public health for Maori will be much more than a medical discipline. It will be led by communities," he said.
"We have very high levels of Maori achievement. To see only the problems is to see a very small part of Maori development in the last 25 years."
