Australasian psychiatry : bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists
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Australas Psychiatry · Aug 2009
Using policy and workforce development to address Aboriginal mental health and wellbeing.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the New South Wales (NSW) Aboriginal Mental Health and Well Being Policy and its key workforce initiative, the NSW Aboriginal Mental Health Workforce Training Program. ⋯ The Policy provides a strong framework guiding the development of Aboriginal mental health and wellbeing programs throughout NSW Mental Health Services. However, the effectiveness of the Policy will be determined by the success of its implementation. The NSW Aboriginal Mental Health Workforce Training Program will support implementation of the Policy by growing an Aboriginal mental health workforce in NSW.
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From July 2004 Tom Calma has been the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission. This role was created in 1992 to provide an ongoing monitoring agency for the human rights of Indigenous Australians and involves, inter alia, producing the Social Justice Report, an annual account to the Federal parliament on the status of enjoyment and exercise of human rights by Indigenous Australians. Commissioner Calma gave the opening oration to the 2006 Creating Futures conference and returned to open the conference in 2008 on 22 September in St Albans Anglican Church, located in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, 60 kilometres from Cairns. This is the text of that speech.
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Australas Psychiatry · Aug 2009
Biography Historical ArticleSoaring on the wings of the wind: Freud, Jews and Judaism.
This paper looks at Freud's Jewish identity in the context of the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe after 1800, using his family history and significant figures in his life as illustration. Sigmund Freud's life as a Jew is deeply paradoxical, if not enigmatic. He mixed almost exclusively with Jews while living all his life in an anti-Semitic environment. Yet he eschewed Jewish ritual, referred to himself as a godless Jew and sought to make his movement acceptable to gentiles. At the end of his life, dismayed by the rising forces of nationalism, he accepted that he was in his heart a Jew "in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial". The 18th century Haskalla (Jewish Enlightenment) was a form of rebellion against conformity and a means of escape from shtetl life. In this intense, entirely inward means of intellectual escape and revolt against authority, strongly tinged with sexual morality, we see the same tensions that were to manifest in the publication by a middle-aged Viennese neurologist of a truly revolutionary book to herald the new 20th century: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's life and work needs to be understood in the context of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Mitteleuropa, the cultural renaissance of Central Europe, resulted from the emancipation and urbanization of the burgeoning Jewish middle class, who adopted to the cosmopolitan environment more successfully than any other group. In this there is an extreme paradox: the Jewish success in Vienna was a tragedy of success. ⋯ Freud, despite a deliberate attempt to play down his Jewish origins to deflect anti-Semitic attacks, is the most representative Jew of his time and his thinking and work represents the finest manifestation of the Litvak mentality.