Indigenous Australians: The Social and Emotional Well-Being Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction

This critical analysis will be devoted to Indigenous Australian people’s social and emotional well-being. In a formal sense, emotional well-being “is the ability to successfully handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times” (National Institutes of Health, 2022, para 1). As for social well-being, it can be defined as “developing and maintaining positive interactions with other people and with local and global communities” (Ramirez-Duran, 2021, para 9). Although the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2014) presented numerous reports about Indigenous Australians’ emotional and social well-being, this short-written response will also use some external research articles from recent years. The aim is to critically reflect on new information, challenges, and facts that were fundamental for the learning unit.

New Findings

What was new in the unit is the scope of the problem, which I did not realize at full scale before. As Terare and Rawsthorne (2019) point out, “health inequalities experienced by Australian First Nations People are amongst the most marked in the world” (p. 2). This problem is complicated because Australian public policy to increase indigenous people’s social and emotional well-being was insufficient and did not bring feasible results (Terare & Rawsthorne, 2019). Thus, the unit uncovered for me the great health disparities that exist in Australian society.

Challenges

The way how indigenous Australians perceive their lifestyle may really challenge a researcher. While they report low emotional well-being, they are likely to say they are satisfied with life (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2014). This fact inspired me to research this paradox more. In fact, many studies show that this status quo should be changed by giving indigenous people a say about their problems. Being silent about obvious social and emotional problems, communities reproduce the vicious circle of discrimination. For example, Dudgeon and Holland (2018) indicate that indigenous people under 18 constitute 30% of suicides among this age group during 2007-2011, although indigenous people represent 5,5% of the overall Australian population. Thus, it is clear that emotional and social well-being directly relates to being heard by the community.

Most Resonating Aspects

The topic of Indigenous Australian well-being resonates a lot with me because it is hard to imagine how there could be such a divergence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups in a developed country like Australia. This idea may be similar to one raised in other sections, but it is impossible not to admit that the current situation as a whole highly resonates. Researchers indicate that the problem may be in the lack of quality data and methods to assess social and emotional well-being (Gubhaju et al., 2019). This fact motivates me to continue to study this problem and contribute to the creation of a systematic solution to the problems of the Australian Indigenous people. After all, the real desire to change the rooted hierarchies begins from this resonance of a sense of social injustice.

Personal Disagreements

One aspect with which I may disagree is the fact that all the literature is centered on the perspective of an English language speaker. Firstly, by analyzing literature with sociological data, it was seen that many authors conduct surveys only in English. As a result, such an approach excludes a considerable proportion of Indigenous Australians who live in remote regions and speak on Aboriginal language (Gubhaju et al., 2019). Such misrepresentation sustains the claim that Indigenous Australians are continuously excluded from social life, which results in deteriorated social well-being.

Secondly, during policy implementation, the absence of specialists in Aboriginal language contributes to the partial effect of a public policy. As authors from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2014) admit, the data provided to specialists may not be representative because of language factors. The exclusion of some stakeholders may negatively influence not only these particular groups but the whole community. Therefore, the unit’s content showed that the English language-centered scholarship, which was discussed the most, may reproduce hierarchies and oppression. The solution to these problems could be recognizing Indigenous Australians’ culture and language through engagement with their lifestyle and invitation of Aboriginal language speakers to research.

Conclusion

To sum up, the unit allowed me to see the scope of problems in Australia concerning Indigenous Australians’ health disparities. The biggest challenge was to understand how their deteriorating situation could be fixed. The most resonating issue was the inability of scholars to suggest effective measures to combat bad social and emotional well-being. Finally, the greatest disagreement was the centrality of English as a primary means of communication with Indigenous Australians. The reason is that it may exclude many people who do not speak English properly from consideration.

References

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2014). Determinants of wellbeing for Indigenous Australians. Web.

Dudgeon, P., & Holland, C. (2018). Recent developments in suicide prevention among the indigenous peoples of Australia. Australasian Psychiatry, 26(2), 166-169.

Gubhaju, L., Banks, E., Ward, J., D’Este, C., Ivers, R., Roseby, R., Azzopardi, P., Williamson, A., Chamberlain, C., Liu, B., Hotu, C., Boyle, J., McNamara, B., & Eades, S. J. (2019). ‘Next generation youth well-being study: Understanding the health and social well-being trajectories of Australian Aboriginal adolescents aged 10–24 years: Study protocol. BMJ Open, 9(3), 1-8.

National Institutes of Health. (2022). Emotional wellness toolkit. Web.

Ramirez-Duran, D. (2021). What Is social wellbeing? 12+ activities for social wellness. Positive Psychology. Web.

Terare, M., & Rawsthorne, M. (2020). Country is yarning to me: Worldview, health and well-being amongst Australian First Nations people. The British Journal of Social Work, 50(3), 1-17.