The Multidisciplinary Alliance for Translational Research and Innovation in Neuropsychiatry (MATRIX-N) brings together researchers and trainees at the DMCBH and beyond to connect foundational science, clinical practice and patient needs. To broaden the perspectives that inform this work, in 2025, the cluster created the MATRIX-N Learning Circle focused on Indigenous issues and approaches in mental health and substance use research and care.

As part of the MATRIX-N Learning Circle, trainees reviewed more than 15 Canadian resources developed by Indigenous organizations and researchers representing First Nations, Inuit, and Métis perspectives. Across the discussions that followed, self-determination, cultural safety, community leadership, and recognition of colonial and intergenerational harms emerged as essential foundations for mental wellness.

Resources explored

A Path Forward: BC First Nations and Aboriginal People’s Mental Wellness and Substance Use: This 2013 ten-year plan uses the Seven Sacred Teachings as guiding values and organizes action through four quadrants: holistic wellness, community care, integrated care and specialized care. It centres First Nations and Aboriginal peoples in efforts to improve services, supports and outcomes across the lifespan.

In Plain Sight: Addressing Indigenous-specific Racism & Discrimination in B.C. Health Care: The 2020 review documented widespread Indigenous-specific racism and stereotyping across B.C.’s health system, including profiling related to substance use, and concluded that these failures had caused serious harm and death. It issued 24 recommendations addressing systems, behaviours and beliefs, plus a dedicated recommendation for implementation.

First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework: The framework sets out a lifespan and continuum-based model spanning health promotion, prevention, early intervention, crisis response, treatment, care coordination, and aftercare. Its central message is that First Nations individuals and communities should define and lead their own mental wellness pathways.

First Nations Health Authority resources on mental wellness and the toxic drug crisis: The materials explored mental health and wellness, cultural safety and humility, pathways to wellness, and the toxic drug crisis through a shared vision grounded in self-determination, wholistic healing, and system transformation. Together, they stress that wellness requires more than clinical treatment, including confronting colonial harms and racism and restoring connections to culture, land, family and community. The toxic drug resources highlight disproportionate harms for First Nations people and call for culturally safe, stigma-free, trauma-informed and community-led responses.

Honouring Our Strengths: A Renewed Framework to Address Substance Use Issues Among First Nations People in Canada: This renewed framework contextualizes substance use and related mental health concerns within colonization, intergenerational trauma and social determinants of health. It calls for a shift from individual blame, isolated services, and crisis response toward shared responsibility, prevention, community capacity, and Indigenous-led care integrated across health, housing, education, and justice.

Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: This report centres the experiences of Indigenous women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who have survived violence, poverty, houselessness, and systemic discrimination. It shows how harms are structurally produced across policing, child welfare, housing, health and social services, and calls for urgent Indigenous-led, trauma-informed, and culturally safe reform.

National Inuit Suicide Prevention Strategy: The strategy outlines evidence-based, Inuit-specific actions at national, regional, and community levels to reduce suicide. Its upstream approach prioritizes protective factors and addresses root causes before crisis, placing Inuit identity, resilience and self-determination at the centre of community wellness and systems change.

The Cedar Project: This community-governed, Indigenous-led cohort was established in 2003 in Vancouver and Prince George to build evidence with young Indigenous people who use drugs. Its publications examined various topics such as mobile health, colonial harms and HIV and hepatitis C, child apprehension and suicide, survival sex work, residential school resilience, racism, and concurrent public health emergencies. Together, they connect health inequities to ongoing settler colonialism and systemic discrimination, while identifying pathways toward resilience through culture, language, ceremony, family reconnection, motherhood as medicine, healing-centred engagement, Indigenous-led care, and mobile health.

What trainees took away

Three themes stood out: storytelling, circularity, and the role of community and culture. Storytelling captures lived experience and cultural context that conventional measures can miss. In mental health and substance use research and care, these dimensions can shape how symptoms, treatment response and outcomes are understood.

Circularity reflects continuous monitoring, reflection and adaptation rather than a linear path from discovery to implementation in translational research and clinical practice. Trainees connected this principle to the need for ongoing feedback between preclinical, clinical and community settings, helping research remain relevant, responsive and accountable.

Finally, community and culture emerged not as optional additions to care, but as central determinants of wellness and healing. The MATRIX-N Learning Circle reinforced that rigorous, translational mental health and substance use research can be strengthened by Indigenous knowledge, self-determination, and sustained community partnership, helping bridge foundational research, clinical practice, and lived experience.

Written by Sarah Ng, MATRIX-N Junior Scholar