Transcript
JACQUI LECKIE - I came up with the topic, but I'm a Pacific historian anthropologist and throughout my career I've been very involved in researching and working with people to uncover stories of Pacific people sort of been silenced, untold stories, under researched stories. I'm really interested in sort of secrets and silences in Pacific history, so with mental health and mental illness, what we are really looking at are some of the hidden and shameful areas that face our cultures today, so it is looking at suffering, but it's also a story of support and survival, so it's not just sort of a negative thing. What I'm trying to do is look at the past to try and get some light into these serious issues that affect Pacific communities today.
SELA JANE HOPGOOD - What particular areas within mental health will you delve into?
JL - I'm going to be guided a lot by any historian. You're guided a lot by what sources are available and then archival sources, but also what people are willing to talk about. Although that's where as a researcher and ideally collaborating with people, you can kind of probe things a bit, but you have to be really mindful of cultural sensitivities.
SJH - Absolutely yeah and because it's such a taboo thing for Pacific cultures especially with mental health nowadays...
JL - Yeah, I'm going to be starting a lot with written records, so I'm going to be using the colonial and administrated and health records, so I can start with that. I think one of the questions that I'm going to be looking at is really trying to get an idea of how those attitudes have changed overtime like stigma for instance. Has that actually got worse as institutions where people were locked up or became illegal to behave in certain ways or publically shameful, has that actually got worse overtime like as we've created institutions to deal with differences of mental state, has that got worse or on the other hand has that actually led to people getting more treatment and support and of course the church's role is incredibly important here too. I'm not barging in, sort of go talk directly to people to sufferers. That would be completely unethical, but I'll be looking a lot at what our written records tells us, looking at memoirs, looking at novels, poems, those kinds of sources as well and I'm also interested in migration, so migration from the islands to NZ and also people that migrated into the Pacific region as well. Migration often it's a process that's often quite traumatic and there's a lot of displacement, so I'm looking at that process, so I'll also be looking at some records written in NZ health institutions too.
