Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Defining Coyote Psychotherapy In the recent meetings of the Institute for Psychiatric Services in San Francisco, Barbara Mainguy and I presented material on how we work with psychosis. We are exploring what it is that we do, and we know that it is inspired by indigenous elders, that it is centered on the body, which registers our traumas and stresses, that we are wedded to the idea of story occurring in a social context so that we are embedded with others. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 8 of Australia 2013: Bairnsdale On the next to the last day of our Australian cross-cultural journey we visit our friend Wayne, who's now the Koorie Liaison Officer for AdvanceTAFE, an educational concern in Victoria. Our focus for the workshop that Wayne arranged for us was to consider how to better use culture to address problems in the community. The problems were the usual suspects -- drugs, alcohol, violence, gambling. What happens under colonization 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 7 of Australia 2013: Hearing Voices and Mind Mapping Day 7 found us working with the Prahran Mission's Hearing Voices Victoria about indigenous and narrative approaches to voices. We demonstrated the use of what I call mind mapping with the various voices we hear inside our minds. This technique works for everyone, voice hearers or not, for we all hear talk inside our heads, the question being where we think it's coming from. In mind mapping we identify the talk and talkers. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Health Care Costs and Schizophrenia I reflect on the cost of care for people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia. I muse about a moving lecture by Eleanor Longdon, PhD, who was once a schizophrenic and now is a clinical psychologist. She spoke about her own process at the Hearing Voices Conference in Melbourne, Australia. Eleanor echoed my observations, that the way we manage people who hear voices and suffer this kind of distress is costly and ineffective. 1 

Deena Metzger: Imagining a ReVisioned Medicine in 2012 ReVisioning Medicine brings medical doctors and health practitioners together with healers and medicine people as peers to create a new medicine that does no harm to patients, the community or the earth. ReVisioning Medicine is based in relationships and so is an antidote to our alienated culture always at war. Based on the best of medical knowledge in alliance with the wisdom and healing traditions of indigenous people...

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 14 of the Australian Journey 2012 Today is the end of the Australian cross cultural adventure. I fly back to the U.S. today and resume ordinary life. I write about the people I met whom I appreciate and what I learned and where we might go next.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Excerpt from Coyote Wisdom Chapter 10 This excerpt tells the story of my work with Tiffany, a young woman with cancer who was from the Christian faith and how we used Meister Eckhart as a way to bridge my Native American philosophies with Christianity to create a healing dialogue throughout the course of her cancer. this seems like an important story to me because it shows how we can create healing (meaning and purpose) even when the patient dies.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Reflections upon transitioning to private practice Just over 2 months ago I left the public mental health sector in New York to transition into private practice in Vermont. This article reflects upon those two months of changes and wonders what we can learn from the type of care available in Vermont compared to New York and from New York's apparent discrimination against paying private practitioners in favor of community mental health centers. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Thoughts after Sundance 2011 I reflect upon Sundance 2011 and what I have learned. I realize that Sundance is about love and compassion and following this red road that leads to these directions. Sundance gives us an opportunity to rise to become spiritual warriors, to find all the benefits and none of the detriments of battle, to create a community of fellow warriors within which we can feel strong, and to transcend our natural limits to become more. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Approaches to Trauma in the Indigenous Community -- Day 10 of the Australian Journey Today is Day 10 of the Australian Cross-Cultural Mental Health Journey. Today we talked about trauma in aboriginal communities and how to address that trauma. We collaboratively arrived at some ideas to propose. We agreed that narrativizing is necessary. We need to hear the stories of woundedness that people have to tell and to celebrate their resistance to abuse and to focus more on the resistance than on being a victim.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Implementing Narrative Practices: Day 9 in Australia The highlight of Day 9 in our Australian cross-cultural mental health journey was a workshop for indigenous mental health and human service providers on how to make their services more indigenous friendly. This involves, of course, conscious decolonization of our clinical practices. We talked about the need to become more narrative, to listen longer and more deeply to the stories people tell us and to hear stories of others.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Still More Similar Than Different -- Day 7 of the Australian Journey Today finds us in Day 7 of our Australian Cross-Cultural Mental Health Journey. They lessons of these week have been very consistent -- indigenous from anywhere in the world is more similar than different. An elder proposed an answer for this. He said, "When you listen to the spirits and to nature and show respect, you get the same guidance 'cause spirits talk to each other. They know how the world should go!" 1 

Saberi Roy: The Psychology of Family On the need to study family structures and family interactions in the Psychology of Family

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: What we can learn from Tucson and why not to overreact! The recent tragedy in Tucson has led some commentators to demand more inpatient beds, easier commitment laws, and forced treatment with medication. I argue that none of this would have stopped Mr. Loughner, since he had not come to anyone's attention yet. We need to refrain from overreacting and further stigmatizing the mentally ill, who are, by and large, not violent, and we need to think about ways to reach out more. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Ethics for Mental Health The history of the mental health industry involves the management of people who are socially unacceptable, who are defined as excessively different from the rest of us, who live at the extremes of emotions and behaviors. How we treat these people depends upon the stories we carry about how they came to be the way they are. Contemporary stories are impoverished and lead to mistreatment of those who suffer.