Power of Connections: How a Novel Canadian Men’s Wellness Program is Improving the Health and Well-Being of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Men

Abstract

The DUDES Club is a novel men’s health and wellness organization founded in 2010 in Vancouver, BC. Since 2017, the DUDES Club has rapidly expanded in Northern BC and, with the help of a partnership with the First Nations Health Authority, has grown to include 40 sites in British Columbia and 2 sites nationally. In this study, we analyze interviews (n = 5) and 15 focus groups (n = 101) conducted as part of a program evaluation with DUDES Club members, Elders, providers, and health care professionals. We focus on men’s experiences with the DUDES Club to identify four main themes in the data: brotherhood and community, accessible health care information, disrupting colonial constructions of masculinity, and systemic and structural challenges. We conclude with policy recommendations.

Connecting Masculinities to Men’s Illness Vulnerabilities and Resilience

“…After prostatectomy for prostate cancer, men’s vulnerability and caution was used to label their conservative (and wise) recovery enhancing approaches to physical activity (Gannon et al, 2010). Health inequities have also been used to lobby tailored health promotion interventions for vulnerable male sub-groups including Indigenous (Efimoff et al, 2021) and sexual minority men (Lee et al, 2017). Taken together, men’s illness experiences and disease disparities can be understood as shaping and being shaped by context-specific individual and sub-population vulnerabilities.…”

Grounding Wellness: Coloniality, Placeism, Land, and a Critique of “Social” Determinants of Indigenous Mental Health in the Canadian Context

“…Inevitably, the words and sentences in such papers are set into neat and tidy columns, divided out into paragraphs roughly the same size and with anchorage in various citations that demonstrate familiarity with other research, all of which is tidily summarised in a summative but forward-gesturing conclusion. We have written many such papers, including many that have considered issues of physical and mental health, especially as determined by colonialism for Indigenous people in Canada and beyond, but including a focus on other broadly marginalised people and places who live with the grave health inequities meted out to: people in northern, rural, and remote geographies; those who are LGTBQ2S+, experiencing poverty, disabled, and/or deemed fat; those with addictions and/or mental illnesses; the elderly and institutionalised; and/or racialised and immigrant people [7][8][9][10][11][12]. All these people, as much of our writing and research has established, live and have for a long time lived with greater burdens of poor health when compared with other Canadians (because the majority of our research is Canadian-focused) who are settler/white, economically privileged, heterosexual, fit/ablebodied, neurotypical, and/or living in urban geographies.…”

Applying a Critical Policy Lens to Contracting in Indigenous Mental Health: An Ethnographic Study with Urban Indigenous Providers

“…To redress this legacy and improve health and health care equity for Indigenous Peoples, the 2015 Calls to Action of the TRC of Canada underscore the urgent need "to recognize the value of Aboriginal healing practices and use them in the treatment of Aboriginal patients in collaboration with Aboriginal healers and Elders" (p. 210). Repeated calls for a deliberate decentering of the dominant culture of the mental health system are supported by a growing evidence base suggesting that Indigenous-led traditional approaches to health care can play an important role in improving access and wellness outcomes for Indigenous Peoples (Allen et al, 2020;Efimoff et al 2021, Firestone et al, 2019Graham et al, 2021;Greenwood et al 2022;Hole et al, 2015;Kirmayer et al, 2014;Rowan et al, 2014;Tu et al, 2019;Venugopal et al, 2021). An important theme emerging from this literature is "culture as intervention," which posits Indigenous traditional culture as a treatment for addressing the mental health concerns experienced by Indigenous Peoples as a result of colonialism (Gone, 2013;Rowan et al, 2014).…”