Date of Award

August 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Justin D. McDonald

Abstract

Tele-mental health delivery reported by clinicians in Indigenous communities before, during, and after the pandemic has largely remained unexplored across psychology literature. Tele-mental health (TMH) is the utilization of technology tools to communicate and treat clients (Riding-Malon, 2014). TMH (i.e. mental health services accessed via zoom, telephone, etc.) is associated in recent research with effective rates for mental health care treatment comparable to in-person rates for both immediate and long-term outcomes (McCord, 2020; Lin, 2021). The current study examined self-reported mental health clinicians (n=104) serving North American Indigenous clients on a variety of TMH factors during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Exploratory findings for both clinicians and clients’ experiences during and after the pandemic give sample trends of both disparities and innovations implemented to provide TMH in Indigenous communities. Analysis results indicated TMH predictors were not statistically significant with willingness to conduct TMH in the future due to the unexpected high baseline of willingness to provide TMH in this sample. Additional analyses revealed clinicians’ years of experience were significant across a range of TMH factors. Finally, a range of TMH factors were found to have significance with urban, but not rural Indigenous clients, suggesting additional research into rural Indigenous populations TMH usage is warranted. Despite power limitations to analyses, the data collected in this study represent a unique minority population of clinicians and offer a foundation for further investigation of the implementation and practice of accessible mental health care with Indigenous clients in North American United State territories.

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