September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day. Each day eight Australians die by suicide and it’s the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15 to 44.
Though for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, the suicide rate is twice that of their non-indigenous counterparts and people in rural populations are two times more likely to die by suicide.
Dr Tracy Westerman, a world leader in Aboriginal mental health, cultural competency and suicide prevention, is trying to change that statistic.
Dr Westerman is a proud Nyamal woman from the Pilbara region of Western Australia and has received national and international recognition for her work.
She was named Western Australia’s Australian of the Year in 2018, was inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame, recipient of the Curtin University Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2020 was the winner of the Telstra Women’s Business award, Small Business Category (WA) amongst many other accolades.
Dr Westerman has to developed nine unique Aboriginal mental health related psychological tests, unique Aboriginal mental health assessment models, multiple training packages and community intervention programs.
She has also trained over 30,000+ practitioners across Australia since 2000 which arguably makes her one of the most in demand trainers in Australia.
We talked to Tracy about her work and how she became a leader in her field.
How did you reach your level of success?
Just finding something that I love is probably the most important thing. I decided I wanted to become a psychologist quite young at 15 years of age. I found something that I really love, that I’m passionate about and fortunately something I’m technically very good at. And then the trifecta in life is doing something that makes a difference to the lives of our most vulnerable communities. To be honest, I didn’t really anticipate success or awards, I just woke up every day and loved what I did. Those three things all really aligned. I’m very lucky.
There’s this really great saying “People who covet success very rarely realise it,” so for me it was really just finding the thing that I absolutely loved. I clearly saw a need for it and being Indigenous myself it became a little easier to identify the gaps. A lot of the things that I’ve done have been Australian firsts and some of them world firsts.
How did you find your purpose?
I think for me it defined itself. The rates of suicide sadly were escalating even when I was a young student. Australia has had the highest rates of child suicide in the world in Indigenous communities for a couple of decades now. On top of that when I first came down to study psychology from a remote community, the thing that was the most shocking was that I sat in lectures and the word Aboriginal was not mentioned once in my three years of undergrad. Clearly the training did not match the statistics of what most psychologists were dealing with every day. That was probably the only time I questioned psychology because it just didn’t fit at any level. Indigenous people were effectively invisible in the training. I see everyday people being sent out to remote communities and they can unwittingly do harm because the culture is so complex. It is possible that people can do things that are right from a clinical perspective but completely wrong from a cultural perspective and not understand the difference. They’re just not trained appropriately and it’s not good enough.
How do you incorporate elements of culture in psychology?
The complexity of what I’ve done over the years has made people realise that it’s not as simple as altering an answer. It starts from the basic core counselling skills that have been developed effectively with non-indigenous people. Basic counselling engagement is actually something that has quite a few elements that are wrong in terms of how you engage with an Indigenous person. And all the way through to assessment, most of the assessment tools in terms of assessing for mental health and suicide risk, they’ve all been developed from a mainstream perspective. So often the tools that people use to assess for depression and suicide, they’re all not valid when you use them with aboriginal people.
Something I’ve been talking a lot about lately because I’ve just published the first paper on it in Australia, are these really interesting things called culture bound syndromes. They are things that culturally are considered to be quite normal, that from a mainstream perspective are seen as indicators of mental illnesses. A very great example is things like when someone passes away in an Aboriginal community, it’s a very common thing that we have a spiritual visit from the person that’s passed away. Often when you look at that from a mainstream perspective, you’d think this person’s psychotic. No, it’s no surprise that Aboriginal Australians have the highest rates of diagnosis of psychosis in Australia.
These things actually exist with Indigenous cultures globally, but what no one’s been able to do before is train practitioners around figuring out the difference between something that’s culturally bound and somethings that’s a clinical disorder like mental illness. So you see how important this stuff is. You get assessment wrong; you get treatment wrong so often what happens is you’re getting indigenous people that are just assessed inappropriately and come into contact with mainstream mental health systems when they really don’t need to.
How do you find the determination to complete so much work?
People often say, do you ever sleep Tracy? And I do laugh at that. I do look at some of the things I’ve developed and quite often go “how on earth did you find the time for all that.” As I said before, it’s just finding something you love. I don’t ever think of it as work. And the next thing is just being technically good at something. The first example is the psychometric test that I developed for my PHD, the Westerman Aboriginal Symptom Checklist for Youth which was the first unique screening tool for Aboriginal youth at risk of suicide. Now that had never been done before, in terms of developing something from the ground up. That was really tough. Obviously, it’s really hard to develop psychological tests from the ground up, but the thing is once you’ve done one, it’s like anything, it becomes a lot easier. So that’s what I mean in terms of being technically good at something. And then the next bit I guess is I see so much need out there with the number of people I’ve trained. I see the need every day and people are desperate to want to do better and so it becomes a responsibility, because you’ve got practitioners out there desperately trying to do the best work they can. No one wants to create damage, no one wants to do harm, that’s not what we get into this business for.
Universities have essentially dropped the ball when it comes to making sure that people are trained in accordance with where the needs lie. It’s always been a passion to make sure that people are skilled. We’re heading down this direction now of making the universities ensure that there’s indigenous curriculum in the psychology degrees and taking their responsibility a bit more seriously than they have been in the past.
What would you say is your biggest achievement?
In 1964 my mum wasn’t even a citizen of her own country as an Aboriginal woman and had to go to court to become a citizen of her own country, and in one generation she’s raised a daughter with a PHD in clinical psychology. I love Stan Grants take on it when he said, “You can close the gap in one generation.” The greatest reward that you can ever achieve in life is to be an inspiration to others and they are inspired by this story.
And also, I tick every single box that should’ve never been a success. I’ve come from a remote background, had to do school via the air to get into university. There’s enough disadvantage there for people to say, “Well, if Tracy can do it then so can I.” So it’s a very relatable model.
With my young psychologists from the scholarship I always say to them, “Your disadvantage is your greatest advantage.” What it means is that the things that are unconscious to other people are not unconscious to me. Every day I’m thinking in terms of remote, indigenous people, communities, females, every single person that is disadvantaged or marginalised. The average person doesn’t think about those people every day whereas for me that’s just a natural way of thinking.
How do you overcome hurdles and setbacks?
I’ve always been a goal-oriented person. The interesting thing with setting goals is they have to be achievable and realistic ones because sometimes the setting of a goal actually makes you feel like a bit of a failure when you don’t achieve them. So I’ve always constantly had goals whether they’re small or big. It’s always been a goal that’s responsive to obvious needs in communities and something that’s within my skills.
There’s always going to be naysayers. I accepted a long time ago that when you are in a leadership role, you have to accept that there are going to be people that are going to have negativity around you. I talk about this to a lot of my scholarship recipients, that the minute you are a leader in anything, or you accept a public profile, you accept everything that goes along with it. It’s been mostly positive, but you just learn to tune out the negative stuff.
What was the inspiration behind creating the scholarship?
I’m just a natural mentor of others and I think because I train people so much that it was a natural fit. But what actually triggered it was reading the latest inquiry, into the 13 deaths by suicide of beautiful young Indigenous children in the Kimberly. I was actually an expert witness at the 2016 parliamentary inquiry and then there was a 2018 senate inquiry and the 2009 inquiry into the Kimberly. Every single Inquiry concluded the same thing, and that was that children are dying in our country of suicide as a result of system failure. Effectively that’s a nice way of saying a lack of access to services or a lack of access to culturally competent services. I thought that’s actually a pretty bloody practical thing that can be fixed. So I picked up the phone that day and rang Curtin University and said I’d put $50,000 of my own money into a scholarship in my name, but it has to be a program. Within 24 hours there was a media release, Governor Kim Beasley jumped on board right away as a patron and then we announced five recipients in May last year.
What are you working on now?
About four months ago the scholarship outgrew one university. So what was happening was people were going, “Well hang on a second I’m at Murdoch university,” or “I’m at UWA”, and then we had South Australia also saying they wanted to be included. So what I did was I incorporated a charity that is called The Westerman Jilya Institute for Indigenous Mental Health. We’re launching the Jilya Institute on World Suicide Prevention Day we’ll also announce the first Jilya scholarship recipient on that day. “Jilya” means ‘my child” in my Nyamal language. For this is about our children and giving them a world that provides them equal opportunity to thrive.
The reason why we’re doing it on World Suicide Prevention Day is we want to brand it with Jilya, and the reason why is despite the fact that we have the highest rate of child suicide in the world, indigenous people are basically invisible on world suicide prevention day. So we’re trying to brand it in a way that raises attention, hope and optimism to get people treated and to get people to donate to the scholarship, because that’s something that people can do at a practical level. When you hear these rates you become quite overwhelmed and this is a way that you can make a difference.
