Rebuilding Community and Improving Mental Health in the Aleutian Islands
From every point of view, Leslie Bennett, a mental health clinician in King Cove, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, is sitting top of the world. A graduate of St. Louis University, Missouri, with a master's of social work, Bennett works for Eastern Aleutian Tribes Incorporated at its Behavioral Health Clinic. She regularly travels further north by bush plane to remote Aleut villages requiring her services.
Bennett characterizes working in this remote region as an opportunity to share her gift for rebuilding a community and improving the health of its members.
"It all started shortly after I connected with my own Native American heritage," Bennett says. In discovering the importance of community and family in her own search, she recognized that these values can also be used to improve the quality of mental and behavioral health in her Native patients. In the high north, survival had always depended on community members working together to provide food, shelter, and spirituality. The key to restoring balance in individual lives, therefore, lay in restoring the community that surrounded them.
Bennett's attraction to remote Alaska and its indigenous people was sparked by an opportunity to take part in the National Health Service Corp's SEARCH (Student/Resident Experiences And Rotations in Community Health) program in her last year at St. Louis University. The NHSC SEARCH program provides health professions students and other health professionals in training with the opportunity to work on interdisciplinary health care teams in diverse underserved communities during school breaks or practicum sessions. Bennett's SEARCH placement was in the adolescent wing of the Anchorage Psychiatric Unit (PSU), a catchment area facility for the State of Alaska. Here she first worked with Native Alaskans who were struggling to overcome substance abuse, codependency, and addiction problems. And it was here that she realized that the key to recovery for Native patients lay in rekindling their pride and connection with their communities.
After graduation Bennett headed back to Anchorage and the PSU. But before the year was out, she realized that there was a greater need for her particular skills in the interior tribal communities working with people before they ended up in Anchorage. When the opportunity to work at the Eastern Aleutian Tribes' Behavioral Health Clinic arose, she accepted it with enthusiasm. "I ended up on a bush plane headed to this remote place, as beautiful as anything I have ever seen," Bennett recounts.
Now, Bennett starts her day surrounded by mountains that seem to "jump up right outside my door," the steel blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, and the music of countless seabirds. Her extensive list of duties take her daily to the Behavioral Health Clinic where she provides one-on-one and group care to her many patients. Duty also takes her to remote Aleut villages and many more individual patients, including groups of teenagers and Elders.
At first, Bennett found that outreach programs focused primarily on the youth of the communities she served. Her understanding of the importance of interrelationships in Native culture though, coupled with her training in social work, pointed her in another direction. She saw that the way to develop self-esteem and confidence in the young people lay in reestablishing their connection to their heritage as Aleuts. And the way to accomplish this was to reconnect them with the Elders of their communities and families who are the traditional keepers and teachers of language, history, and culture.
Bennett has worked with village-based Native counselors and liaisons to initiate a number of programs that bring community youths in contact with their Elders in a variety of settings. These programs include providing a venue for the two groups to share traditional food, accordion playing and dancing, crafts, and stories. To finance such activities as community feasts and celebrations, Bennett applied for and won grants from local and State government programs. In fact, she was able to bring her own NHSC SEARCH social work interns to King Cove, a small village of approximately 450 people, to help develop and organize the proposals.
"Elders don't like tape recorders," Bennett observes. "What they are really teaching the teenagers is to listen closely and commit the story to memory instead of magnetic tape." Elders teach by storytelling, humor, and analogy, delivered with a sense of reverence and timing. They leave their young audiences with the collective memory and wisdom their culture. In turn, the teenagers learn valuable lessons in respect, concentration, interpretation, and communication.
During their visits, the teenagers give something back by helping the Elders with chores and repairs. This way, they understand that they, too, play a vital role in their community. The Elders, on the other hand, see the work done on their behalf as an outward sign of the respect and reverence that the community and especially the young people have toward them. In the end, everyone benefits. Elders who would otherwise be isolated are now visited regularly by teenagers who care for their needs. Teenagers who may have spent idle time developing addictions or getting into trouble instead work within their community with a sense of purpose and pride.
"Other social workers have come and gone," says Bennett. "The remoteness of the location, the lack of services-some that might be considered basic-and the isolation tend to make rural Alaska a temporary stop for most." But for Bennett, the top of the world is a permanent place. "Alaska has grabbed my soul," she says with conviction and pride.
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