Mental Health Services
At Siksika Health, our Mental Health Services aim to help individuals address their complex trauma so they can live in the here and now.
At Siksika Health, our mental health services aim to help individuals address their complex trauma so they can live in the here and now. To do this, our team of psychologists offers a healing program that is tailored to address each person’s individual needs. We all have different, yet equally valuable stories. Because of this, there is no mental health magic wand or silver bullet. Every individual requires a different approach, because every individual is different, with their own unique story.
Our program supports healing of body, mind and spirit by:
- Helping individuals connect uniquely with their body, their mind, and their spirit.
- Grounding individuals in the here and now.
- Helping individuals observe and reflect upon themselves.
- Helping individuals to progress forward in life.
What is Mental Health?
Mental health can be defined as the state of mental well-being that allows people to cope with life’s stresses, learn effectively, build relationships, and contribute constructively to their communities. Mental health is a basic human right, and it is more than just the absence of mental disorders.
While every year, 1 in 5 Canadians experience a mental illness or mental health issue, 5 in 5 of us – that’s all people – have mental health, so it’s important for us all to take our mental health seriously.
Siksika Mental Health Services Support Healing from Trauma
Siksika Health Services’ mental health programs & services aim to address trauma, to get at the ‘roots’ of peoples’ mental health conditions and journey alongside them towards true healing.
The role of a Mental Health Therapist: When you come see a Siksika Health psychologist, you can expect your therapist to jump into your world, and support you in your journey towards healing. Therapists don’t give advice, because this would require them to base their input on their own experience. Rather, their role is to support a person through that person’s experience towards wholeness.
Your role in seeing a Mental Health Therapist: Your role is to do the work! Sometimes people think that 3 sessions will be enough to effectively heal, but this is often not the case. Stick with it, and iikaakimaat (“try hard” in Blackfoot), to see the benefits of mental health therapy.
What is Trauma?
Trauma is the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event. Experiencing a traumatic event can damage an individual’s sense of self and their identity, their feeling of safety, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. Every person on Siksika Nation is a trauma survivor, whether you experienced the effects of Indian Residential Schools directly or indirectly.
Trauma isn’t remembered in a linear story; it is recalled in experiences, reminders, memories as they come up over time. Trauma impacts the brain, body, and relationships in different ways, each of which can be healed through mental health supports.
Trauma impacts the brain by creating disconnections between important neural pathways, resulting in impulsivity, stress, loneliness, restlessness, and poor relationships.
Trauma impacts the body by causing overproduction of adrenaline and cortisol, which can result in both short and long-term exhaustion, tension, numbness, overstimulation, irregular heart rate and/or breathing patterns, and discomfort.
Trauma impacts relationships by causing insecure attachments, which can result in a person being overly avoidant, overly clingy, or a mix of both depending on the situation.
How Trauma Impacts the Brain:
The brain comes online in three distinct phases, and in this order: first is the emotional brain, then the mapping brain, and finally the rational brain.
In trauma, the brain goes offline in reverse order: first the rational brain, then the mapping brain, until people are left with only the emotional brain.
When trauma reduces a person to the emotional brain for an extended period of time, their threat detection system becomes overly sensitive. False signals misinterpret what is harmless as a threat.
Trauma damage expresses itself in the inability to regulate and restore a person from a state of false threat to a state of peace. Because of this, we take a multi-pronged approach to healing:
- Top-down approach: dealing with the brain impacts first, and then this trickles down and impacts the body
- Bottom-up approach: dealing with the physical impacts first, which then impact the brain
- Sleep, nutrition, exercise are top 3 interventions
- Helping people regulate their bodies
- Biofeedback, yoga, breathing
The Mental Health Mobile Crisis Response Team (formally Siksika Crisis and Victim Services) provides 24/7 support to prevent mental health crises and support people through them if they happen.
The Mental Health Mobile Crisis Response Team (Crisis) completes an initial assessment and directs clients to the appropriate departments for follow-up. Siksika Crisis provides free and confidential services 24 hours/day, 7days/week, 365 days/year.
Boxing, martial arts, yoga, and dancing are modified in our gym for reconnection of the mind and body, because “what fires together, wires together.”
Programs offered at the Many Guns Boxing & Fitness Centre are specifically designed for reconnecting the mind and body of our clients.
Although all the positive physical benefits of working out in the gym are still a real potential, our emphasis is drastically different, focusing on calming down the amygdala and igniting the limbic system and prefrontal cortex. The aim of the gym is less biological and more neurological.
We do this through various programs, placing participants in conditions of an active and agitated state, and then restoring them to a state of calm and rest.
Regular activation and relaxation on a repeated basis increases what is known as heart rate variability, giving a person the tools needed to regulate themselves, restore calm, and a state of peace, thus allowing the mapping mind and rational mind to be restored. In the rational mind they can calm down the threat response and generate a sensation of peace once again.
Boxing connects mind and body because you have to be in the moment and strategizing, and use breathing control.
Yoga teaches heart rate regulation and mindfulness.
