Awardees

This eleventh of twelve portraits in 2017, honoring alumni from thirty years of Roth Foundation programs, features New Zealand medical anthropologist Bonnie Scarth, currently wrapping up her dissertation at the University of Otago. In 2015-16, a Robin and April Winks Award from the Roth Foundation helped her cover expenses for a year at Cornell University, where she added a cross-cultural dimension to her research on the personal and policy repercussions for trauma survivors.

When I started my university studies, I was in my early 20s and had two young children. I was fortunate to get interesting part-time jobs, most often short-term contracts that would fit around parenting and studies. In these jobs, I dealt with a wide variety of issues, from interviewing cancer patients, to promoting sexualhealth, and coordinating family violence prevention. The research for my dissertation—Perceptions of Suffering and Suicide: Implications for Policy and Practice—grew out of many of these experiences, and then evolved further during my fieldwork, as happens with ethnography, given its open-ended, interactive methods. Launching into my year at Cornell, I was very grateful to receive the Roth Foundation’s Winks Award, which allowed me to buy me some excellent ethnographic methods books and other useful fieldwork tools.

As participant-observation, in Ithaca I volunteered at a crisis centre, where I worked with trauma survivors, among other things. I also gathered narratives through long, rich, unstructured interviews—in which the participant takes the lead and creates their narrative as they see fit, rather than having the researcher define what is important and structure the narrative. This methodology is especially helpful with sensitive topics. Trauma and suffering were the broad focus of the interviews, as well as how these experiences were integrated into people’s lives and the lives of those around them. The process of medicalization can be disempowering, as many medical anthropologists have noted; it’s important to remember that trauma survivors also have agency and make meaning from their experience on their own terms.

The concept of validating mental suffering was raised in a surprising way during my training at the crisis center. We were focusing on how to fight stigma, watching educational videos showing how unreasonable it would be if we treated physical ailments the way we treat mental illness. We then turned to a discussion of physician assisted suicide/euthanasia (PAS/E): did we agree that where PAS/E is available for people with non-terminal physical illness and “unbearable suffering” (the term used in the law), then by rights it should also be available for people with mental suffering (as it is in the Netherlands and Belgium)? This hugely controversial issue, which raises many questions about what “unbearable suffering” is, provided an important additional lens for understanding the concepts of suffering, medicalization, and the wish to die.

The majority of my US participants had suffered some kind of significant trauma in their life, including sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse. Ten had survived suicide attempts—often multiple attempts—since a young age. The majority had experienced suicidal ideation at least once, but for many it was an ongoing issue, and several participants had also suffered a close bereavement by suicide. A couple of participants were key informants who worked in suicide prevention. NZ has the highest youth suicide rate in the OECD, despite not having such easy access to firearms as in the U.S.; so it was interesting for me to hear about successful youth suicide prevention strategies in parts of the U.S.

My New Zealand fieldwork has had a somewhat similar participant group, in terms of survivors and experts; but, building on my time in the U.S., I now include questions relating to PAS/E laws and “unbearable suffering.” As in the U.S., in NZ discrimination and stigma are still described as a significant issue with regard to mental illness, trauma, and suicidality. Medicalization is also often seen as the solution… as if medicalizing something—giving it a scientific and biological explanation—will make it “real” and legitimate.” On the contrary, the things that people cite as helping them heal from significant trauma and suicidality often fall outside of medical and mental health services. A theme that arose repeatedly in both sets of interviews was that many participants felt like their suffering was heavily discriminated against and stigmatized in a way that other forms of suffering are not and that physical illness/suffering is validated in a way that mental suffering/illness is not. As one person put it: “We need to treat this (mental illness or suicidal ideation) just like we would cancer!”

But the most important insight shared by participants is that healing is not a straightforward journey. Many participants felt frustrated that they didn’t just one day “recover” from trauma and it was over; and a number said people get frustrated with them for not just “getting over it” and “moving on.” But, as described by participants, recovery is more like a gradual unravelling and un-layering process, followed by re-building, preferably on their own terms. And this takes time. It is not safe or possible to speed it up.

Suffering is subjective, impacted not just by a person’s internal self, but by multiple unique elements surrounding the person: culture, environment, support systems available at the time, whether or not they were believed and supported, among so many other factors. Basically, survivors of trauma want to be included in the community and respected like everyone else—truly heard and validated… and then allowed to have some autonomy over what constitutes healing for them personally. This might seem obvious, but as people’s narratives show, it is not that easy to come by.

For me, it has been such a privilege to have so many people share some of the most difficult topics with me—and to work toward a better understanding of how to help people get what they need. I’m really grateful to the Lois Roth Foundation for helping me undertake this research journey.

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This text evolved from correspondence between Bonnie Scarth and Skyler Arndt-Briggs. Thanks to Drew Barnhart, our Media and Outreach Manager, for producing our November Portrait.

This fifth of twelve portraits in 2017, honoring alumni from thirty years of Roth Foundation programs, features Ani Kainamu Murchie. Ani received the Robin and Avril Winks Award in 2013; unlike our other Project Support awards, which go to Americans going overseas, this one goes to a New Zealand Fulbrighter coming to study and/or do research in the United States. In her portrait, Ani explains the cultural roots of her ecological work.

To introduce myself, I am from Aotearoa New Zealand and I was educated in “kura Māori”—which is schooling taught in the Māori language. Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa; this type of schooling was established by the leadership of parents and grandparents to revitalise our culture. Attending both kura Māori and English schooling gave me insight into multiple ways of knowing—that is, into both Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge.

I have been interested in natural systems since I was a kid, as our diverse environment shapes our culture. My dissertation research at the University of Canterbury and Hawai`i Pacific University focussed on the sociocultural- and science-based values and indicators of estuarine shellfish in NZ and Hawai`i. The study looked at food safety, shellfish health, shellfish population abundance (and changes), land-use, and management effectiveness. Shellfish are utilised across the world as scientific indicators of environmental condition. Indigenous and Traditional ecological knowledge inherently involves indicators of environmental conditions, which have guided sustainable management of natural resources. Both knowledge systems are important and guide management best when utilised in parallel with each other, so it is important to address and protect both sociocultural and ecological values in legislation.

In developing my project, I was guided by the indigenous environmental philosophies ki uta ki tai and ma uka ma kai, meaning “mountain to sea,” in Māori and Kanaka Maoli, respectively.  This is a holistic concept of environmental management that includes an integrated ecosystem approach, and challenges our contemporary compartmentalised approach. An example of this approach is the aquatic fisheries systems (loko i`a/fishpond) on O`ahu Island, Hawai`i. These systems were designed by Kanaka to work with the environment by enhancing brackish conditions for herbivorous fish and shellfish. They are fundamentally part of the ma uka ma kai integrated ecological system—from the streams upland, to the terraced wetlands, to the loko i`a, and then the coast and sea.

The support I received from the Lois Roth Foundation enabled me to assess trace metal contamination—a very important indicator of environmental health. Shellfish in waterways are active filter-feeders, providing sediment stability, food for people and other organisms (such as birds), and cultural-ecological interaction. Trace metals can negatively impact shellfish species and hence also disrupt the important ecosystem services they provide within brackish estuary systems. My study showed that in watersheds using more natural land-use and practices, the shellfish were “healthy” and safe to consume.

I completed my doctorate last month and am very excited to have been awarded a post-doctoral position as an Environmental Scientist in the Te Kūwaha team (National Centre of Māori Environmental Research) at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). One research program I will be involved in—called “Ngā Kete o Te Wānanga: Mātauranga Māori, Science and Freshwater Management”—is investigating how to bring multiple knowledge systems together to improve our decision-making in freshwater environments. The project works at culturally-defined spatial scales—from upland streams to estuary “sinks”—to investigate how to best protect and support the socio-cultural values, uses, and opportunities associated with our waterways.