NIH National Native American Heritage Month Celebration

Dr. Joseph P. Gone will share his thoughts and discuss American Indian therapeutic traditions and modern health treatments.

Dr. Gone's bio: In the effort to remedy American Indian mental health inequities, clinical-community psychologist Dr. Joseph P. Gone explores the disquieting disconnect between local construals of wellness and distress within Indigenous settings on the one hand and professional conventions governing clinical practice in mental health services on the other hand. An enrolled member of the Gros Ventre tribal nation of Montana, he has undertaken collaborative research partnerships with Indigenous communities for two decades. Through these projects, Gone has attended to the distinctive cultural psychologies of tribal communities to identify local concepts of wellness and distress; uncovered the principles and logics of Native therapeutic traditions relative to conventional psychosocial interventions; considered the relevance of Indigenous traditional knowledges for evaluating intervention outcomes; and reimagined the clinical enterprise from the perspectives of Indigenous community members. Along the way, he has published 75 scientific articles and chapters on these topics. A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Illinois, Dr. Gone taught at the University of Michigan for sixteen years prior to joining the faculty of Harvard University. A recipient of several fellowships and career awards, he completed a residency at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2011. In 2014, he was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is currently a Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.