Yes. Many of our community members have found with the services outside of the community that they're likely to face racism, and that often the services are not culturally competent. The service providers are unaware of or not equipped to talk about those colonial traumas and don't recognize intergenerational trauma.
They often feel a sense of judgment or stigma when they bring up issues and they find that they're having to explain how that reminds them of residential schools, the sixties scoop and those other things. They find that these service providers don't really provide an adequate level of support, so they end up back in the communities and looking for those types of services.
As a practising psychologist, one of the things I have noticed is that over time we've seen far more complex needs of our members. They often come in talking about a simple issue like depression or anxiety, say, but once you start talking to them, they start bringing up substance misuse, violence, their own traumas and the traumas within their families. That complexity then requires a more wraparound approach to care.
I think that places a greater burden on our community services, which sometimes don't have enough people to do the work. Also, some of the people in the community sometimes don't have the requisite knowledge, let's say, from a wellness perspective, across education, employment, social services, housing and those other types of services, in order to help support people who need them to come with a trauma-informed care approach, I would say, recognizing that people need to be met where they're at and that they need the support in a way that helps them to move forward.
For example, they might be coming in and saying that they need housing, but we know that they have significant substance use issues, so departments will say they can't help with housing until they deal with their substance misuse. I think helping to get our workers on the same page, to come from that trauma-informed care approach, is one of the critical challenges, which I think overburdens us because we're seeing those inequities.