I'll start.
It's a huge challenge. Somebody comes into the community, and it takes them.... They might come in on a contract that's six weeks long, or they might come in on a contract that's two weeks long. They fly in. They spend most of their time trying to figure out where they are. Flying into a community on Baffin Island is not like driving down the road. It's really different. There are all kinds of trauma you're going to see and hear about because you're in a small community. There is a lot of trauma. We have mental health workers who leave. They fly in, they get traumatized, and they leave.
If you're a client—and this happens all the time—people will come over to our office and they'll complain about the mental health worker who just flew in. They'll say things like, “I went in there and I had to spend the first 30 minutes explaining to them Inuit history, and about residential schools, and what is the dog slaughter, and how all this stuff is impacted. I even had to tell him why it's super expensive to live up here. I couldn't speak Inuktitut to him, and the mental health worker wanted to bring in a translator, or he is related to me, or he's my ex-boyfriend.”
It's a small community. There are 1,000 people. If you're a fly-in mental health worker it's tough, and it's not fair for the clients. I would go as far as to say that it's not ethical for a mental health worker to fly in and pretend they're counselling when they don't speak the language, or when they are not sure of the capacity of their interpreter, or how the interpreter is even related to the situation they're talking about. They don't know enough about the community to know the basic history.
I've had clients say they felt like they should have been paid to provide the mental health worker with an orientation to the north, and they didn't feel like they got anything out of it.
Then what happens is that the mental health worker leaves. They're there for six weeks, and you finally you get to trust them and you're working on a plan. Maybe you're going to go for residential treatment somewhere or something, and then someone else comes in and you start all over.