Research Project
Adapting NET to treat trauma in a Native American community: Yurok NET Wellness
The Yurok Tribe, the largest surviving federally recognized Tribe in California, continues to endure the sequelae of a colonial invasion that perpetrated massacres and assaulted the surviving children through abductions and forcing children into indentured slavery and boarding schools. These traumas disrupted culture-based protective factors, community systems, and parenting knowledge, which increased psychosocial risk and health disparities. Today Native Americans die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories, including liver disease, diabetes, injuries, homicide, self-harm, and chronic respiratory diseases. The suicide rate for Native/Indigenous adolescents is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites.
- Principal Investigator
- Liese, Kylea Laina
- Start Date
- 2023-01-01
- End Date
- 2024-03-31
- Funding Source
- Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation
Abstract
The Yurok Tribe, the largest surviving federally recognized Tribe in California, continues to endure the sequelae of a colonial invasion that perpetrated massacres and assaulted the surviving children through abductions and forcing children into indentured slavery and boarding schools.1 These traumas disrupted culture-based protective factors, community systems, and parenting knowledge, which increased psychosocial risk and health disparities.2,3 Today Native Americans die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories,4 including liver disease, diabetes, injuries, homicide, self-harm, and chronic respiratory diseases.4-6 The suicide rate for Native/Indigenous adolescents is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites.7,8 Proposed solution: Trauma spectrum disorders (PTSD and comorbid trauma conditions such as depression, anxiety, and substance abuse) are memory disorders. Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET), developed as an intervention to be delivered by non-mental health professionals, is the “gold standard” for consolidating trauma memory networks that drive the symptoms of trauma spectrum disorders in communities with high rates of childhood trauma and multiple lifetime exposures to potentially traumatizing events.8-11 NET uses a culturally relevant approach, draws on a robust evidence base,11-20 and has successfully treated PTSD in individuals in low-income settings around the world.8,9, 12-13 NET uses processes of “sharing testimony” and “bearing witness” which are especially salient for traumatized communities when built upon a foundation of mutual trust. Research Objective: Our goal is to adapt NET to create Yurok NET Wellness, as a culturally centered treatment to address individual and generational trauma and promote healing for the Yurok community. Funding will be used to support training costs and remuneration for Yurok Wellness Court advocates and clients who participate in the pilot research.