The Decibel - Why we need to think of health as an ‘us,’ not just a ‘me’

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

We often think of health as an individual action – drink more water, exercise, eat well. During the pandemic, we thought more about the health of people around us as well – with social distancing, masking and vaccinations. But there’s a lot more that goes into our health.Today, we’re talking to the Globe’s health reporter Wency Leung about why it’s so important to expand our understanding of health beyond our bodies. Then we talk to Indigenous psychologist Dr. Rod McCormick about how he helps people connect with communities and nature to find healing.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

We know there's certain things we can do to keep ourselves healthy. Drink water, exercise, eat well, get enough sleep. And during the pandemic, we talked a lot about how our health also depends on others, through things like social distancing, wearing masks, and getting vaccinated. But there's also a lot more that goes into our health. Today, we're going to talk to The Globe's health reporter, Wenci Leung, about how our health is tied to factors outside our bodies. And then we'll talk to Dr. Rod McCormick. He's an Indigenous health researcher, psychologist, and professor at Thompson Rivers University in BC. He'll tell us how he helps

people find healing through connections that you might not have thought about. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Wensi, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me. It's good to see you again. When we think about being healthy, we tend to think about getting more sleep or drinking more water or exercising. And these are very individual things, like things that affect me personally. What are we missing, though, when we think about health only in that way?

Yeah, and I would say, first of all, all those things are good for you, no doubt. But I think what we kind of miss out is the fact that our health really depends on the health of our communities and on the health of our environment. Those things like eating well, sleeping, those only get you so far. And a healthy individual can't really be healthy if their community and environment is not. Like when you say community and environment, what kinds of things do you mean? Well, yeah. So, I mean, I think the COVID-19 pandemic has exemplified how this works. You know, no matter how many personal precautions you might take, if you're surrounded by people who are infected and you're breathing in air that has virus in it, your personal protections can only go so far. But I think, you know, this sort of principle applies to all sorts of other things as well. You know, when we're talking about, say, extreme heat waves from climate change or, you know, environmental carcinogens or toxic work cultures that increase your stress and burnout. All those sort of things you can't sort of self-care your way out of. For quite a number of years now, there's public health experts and physicians have really come to understand

that there are these social determinants of health, you know, things like income, you know, are you able to afford to live in a place that is unpolluted? And are you able to afford to, to eat healthy foods, that kind of thing. Also, you know, your your housing situation, your education level, all of these sorts of things that are not necessarily medical, but they do impact how healthy you are. How does education impact this? Like you just mentioned education as one of these factors. Can you kind of explain that a little bit? Oh, sure. I guess like one of the more concrete examples might be when it comes to your risk factors for dementia, for example. People who have higher education levels tend to have more of a buffer against cognitive decline.

Wow, that's really fascinating. And I think this idea of collective health or thinking about health collectively is really interesting. And I think a lot of people, as you mentioned, we think of the pandemic when we think of this idea of individual versus collective. And I know, Wensi, you've been covering the pandemic since the beginning of it. I guess I just wonder, how did you see this idea of the individual versus the collective health play out in the pandemic? Yeah, it's interesting. I'm sure that you probably remember in the early days there was, you know, people were saying, we're all in this together. And that sort of sentiment sort of fizzled out pretty quickly. And public health messages that kind of replaced that sort of were about taking personal precautions and, you know, assessing your own risk and, you know, adopting public health measures as you see fit and as sort of a personal choice. And I guess from even from the start, we'd hear often questions around what is the best mask to wear to protect me from getting COVID?

Or when the vaccines started rolling out, it was a matter of like, which vaccine offers the best protection for me. So there was that sense of, you know, how do I protect myself? Dan Werb, who is the author of The Invisible Siege, this great book about the rise of coronaviruses. He had this wonderful line in it about how vaccines are not meant to protect a person from infection, but they're meant to protect a community or a population from epidemics. The same sort of concept applies to masks too. The idea is you're trying to protect people en masse, not just one specific person. One of the things that came up a lot in the pandemic was loneliness. Of course, people were separated from their loved ones, particularly during the lockdowns.

So I wonder, what impact does something like loneliness have on someone's health? Oh, yeah. So there's this one study that's really frequently cited. It was a study from Brigham Young University that kind of equated the detrimental health impact of loneliness to smoking like 15 cigarettes a day. And yeah, so people who are lonely, they do tend to have worse health outcomes and do even have a risk of dying earlier than people who are not lonely. One way, which is pretty easily explainable, is if you're lonely, you probably don't have somebody to take care of you. And you probably aren't taking care of other people. So perhaps you're not getting out as much.

Perhaps you're not, when you're sick, you have nobody to to care for you. So loneliness, you can kind of equate it to like, say, chronic stress on the body. Wow. Wensi, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Thanks so much, Meenika. We'll be back in a minute. To get an idea of what this might look like in practice, we talked to Dr. Rod McCormick. He's an indigenous psychologist and professor at Thompson Rivers University in B.C., where he started a research center focused on indigenous healing and wellness. Rod, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, happy to be here.

So you run the All My Relations Research Center at Thompson Rivers University. Can you just start by telling me, what does All My Relations mean? It's an expression often used by Indigenous people that in some ways it sort of summarizes our philosophy of being in this world in that we're all connected, we're all related. And by that, it doesn't just mean your extended family, it means your community, your nation, as well as the natural world and the spiritual world. You often see people will sign their letters, Indigenous people, you know, respectfully or yours or whatever, they'll sign it, all my relations, which just sort of affirms that interconnectedness.

So we're connected to the people we're writing the letter to, but we're also connected to all of creation. And I guess with the idea of connectedness, are there gradations of that or could you become disconnected? Is that also kind of, I guess, tied into this idea as well? Yeah, for sure. If you're disconnected, then you're not doing well. So you're not connected to your sources of strength and empowerment and identity. And elders have often said that, that I've heard is you get sick when you're disconnected. And most of my work over the years in research and in my clinical work,

I found that to be true, that the path to healing for many people is to become reconnected. And it might be reconnected to their community or culture, or it might be their traditional lands. Wow. I know you talked to Wensi here at The Globe a little bit earlier. We also talked to Wensi a bit earlier about this idea of collective health. And I think this sounds like it kind of relates to what you're saying here, Rod, but maybe you can just kind of tie this together a little bit here for me. How does the philosophy of all my relations, how does that tie into the idea of collective health?

Well, when you buy into that concept of all my relations that were all interconnected, then with it, not only does it expand a tremendous amount of resources for people, healing resources, which they may never really have thought about, but it also comes with it, responsibility. And responsibility, not just for your own health, for the sake of your family, but your family, your extended family and community members' health as well. So you see when somebody's in need, you'll see people bringing them food

and volunteering to look after their kids. And if you've ever been to an indigenous funeral, for instance, the whole community comes and there's people cooking and people cleaning and everyone's got a role. It really brings people together. I want to ask you, so according to the, I guess, the philosophy behind All My Relations, what are the factors or the elements that would make up somebody's health and their well-being? A lot of the teachings have to do with balancing the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. And so that medicine wheel model, which is quite common, not universal, but it's a model that people aspire to, balancing the mental, physical, emotional,

spiritual. It's not always possible or feasible, but it's something that people aspire to. And just quickly, for people who may not be as familiar with the medicine wheel, can you just remind us what that is and what it looks like? Yeah, the medicine wheel is a model that's existed for some time within North America, primarily. So you see these wheels represented. You might see them in fields with stones,

and some of them are hundreds if not thousands of years old, representing this wheel with the four quadrants. It's often depicted with four different colors, white, yellow, red, and black. The teachings are that one is mental, another is physical, another is emotional, and another is spiritual. And the philosophy is that you have to try to keep those four parts in balance to be healthy. In addition to that medicine wheel, there's sort of a connectedness wheel with the individual in the inner circle and then the family extended family circle outside of that and then beyond that you'd have the culture or the nation and beyond that would be the natural world and then the spiritual world so you've got this expanding circle

colleague once described it as self-transcendent model, as opposed to, say, a Western model of self-actualization. So a self-transcendent model would emphasize going beyond the self. And that, if you look at it, our experience as Indigenous peoples is we were separated from those outer circles. And from my own research, I found that reconnecting to those outer spheres beyond the self is what seems to lead to people's healing. And when you talk about reconnecting there, I mean, is there something specific that you found that helps to reconnect people to their community and culture?

Well, it's ironic. I'm calling you from a university. Often students that come here have been disconnected from their culture and their communities. And ironically, they might attend their first sweat lodge or go to their first cultural teachings classes while they're at university, which is a strange place to be learning about your own culture. Prisons is another place a lot of indigenous people go to their first sweat lodge or talk to their first elder or learn about traditional practices. But there are many cultures have kept alive ceremonies. So identity ceremonies, for instance. Can you tell me about that? What would that include? So one research study I did was looking at people who,

Indigenous people who recovered from being suicidal. And I think out of that group of 25 something like at least half a dozen mention getting an Indian name so those that practice is kept alive at least on the west coast in many many tribes and communities and the ones I've attended are quite powerful because I mean I'm generalizing because there's lots of variation in the way people do it. But the ones I've attended, the whole community shows up and the family is the host. And it's powerful because they give the person this name, they explain the history of it and the responsibilities that go with it. And the community witnesses this, and so they hold the family accountable

if the person's not living up to that name. And it really is a wonderful way to connect people with their culture and their community. And what did your study find out about what impact that actually had? Feeling like you belong, that people care about you. Because often when you're suicidal, you're isolating yourself. You're not thinking clearly. You feel like no one would care if you don't exist anymore. And this just changes that for people because they realize

that they are cared for and that they would be missed and that they do have an important role to play within their family and their communities. So this is what we've just talked about is kind of connecting with people, reconnecting with people. But there's also, it sounds like an idea about connecting to the natural world here too. Can you tell me about your land-based program at the university? Because I think this is kind of the idea behind this program. So we have two courses. One's learning from the land and one's healing from the land.

And I teach the healing from the land. Actually, I co-teach it with local elders and knowledge holders. So what I've done is because I've interviewed so many people over the years about their healing journeys, Indigenous people, and nature is always a big component of it, is I share with the students the stories that I heard about how people use the land in their own healing. So the course I run is five days. Day one, we focus on trees and forests. Day two, on rivers. Day three, mountains and high places. Day four, lakes. And day five, the earth and sky. So we focus on, okay, here's examples of how people use this. So we'll send people out then in the

morning on campus, go spend some time with the trees and think about the ways in which you've heard that other people use this and come up with your own ideas in terms of healing. So we'll get back into the group and say, what did you do? while i just sat underneath this this apple tree and just having my back against the tree i felt really grounded so yeah there's just a multitude of of either lessons to be learned or ways to help yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually through observation. So one of the first things we teach is humility and how to ask the water, for instance, to cleanse you or to give you strength. And if you don't approach it with humility, it's not going to work for you. So if by the end of the five days, people have a different attitude about nature, realizing, wow, this is a huge resource for me in my own healing and in my

education, then we've been successful. Rod, what does it mean for people to reconnect like this? What have you heard from them about the significance of this? Sort of changes the way they see the land because it makes it more welcoming, I think, for them. But as well, it expands, I think, their philosophy of life to be exposed to different cultural teachings. I know I once interviewed a bunch of psychiatrists in training. It was at Riverview Hospital when I was at UBC. And I said, so what do you guys do for your own health and to de-stress and so on? Oh, I go with my buddies on hunting

trips and we spend like a week in the bush and so on. And somebody else might say, yeah, I go horse trekking or I go to my cabin. I've got a boat and spend a lot of time out on the lake and do you catch many fish? Sometimes, but mostly it's just to be out on the water and hear the water slapping against the hull of the boat. It's just so

de-stressing. I say, okay, well, a lot of you guys are mentioning nature as part of your annual healing pilgrimage. So how do you use nature with your patients? They said, oh, well, we don't. I said, why not? You've got all this land out here.

It's not really the medical model, the Western medical model. But there's a lot that people can get from it, it sounds like. Yeah. And we'd be way less likely to exploit the environment if we appreciated it for what it does for us. Because if it's, I mean, if you see the land as your hospital and as your place of worship and as your place of education, you're less likely to clear cut it and up a parking lot. Rod, it was so wonderful to get to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Oh, you're very welcome. I'm happy to have shared a little bit with you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.