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Contributing to developing and supporting sustainable mental health and social well being for Indigenous Australians living in remote communities is complex, with much diversity within and between communities and individuals. Drawing from a brief literature review and our fieldwork in small, remote Indigenous communities in Australia from 2006 to 2011, we explore the contexts for what seems to work, and critically re-think the concept of mental health. Much of the conceptualizing around Indigenous mental health focuses on the processes of service provision and too much attention has been paid to indigenizing aspects of mental health and illness rather than to exploring the historical, cultural, social, economic, and other life contexts relevant to mental health – especially with regard to the community as a determinant of mental health. We emphasize that mental health policy and practice needs to be informed by deep understanding of contexts, not just epidemiological evidence, and must therefore involve community development. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Diffusion of responsibility appeared as a term in social psychology papers written in the early 1960s, perhaps first by Wallach, Kogan, and Bem (1964). It refers to the idea that, in some contexts, individuals within a group are less (or report feeling less) responsible for actions that occur than if they had done the same action outside the group by themselves. In broad terms, there are fewer consequences to any one person in a group from what that group does than if an individual person had done the action alone. Keywords: diffusion of responsibility; responsibility; group behavior; juries; bystander intervention; atrocities; lynching; speaking out; war crimes; social loafing; deindividuation

There is a pressing need to address prejudice, racism, and discrimination against marginalised groups in Australia. This involves change from the structural to the individual level. In this article, we discuss the merits of individual anti-prejudice mechanisms within the Australian context. First, we expand on nine mechanisms described in a previous paper and then review five new mechanisms. We conclude that while some mechanisms are likely to be useful regardless of location, others need to be tailored to the local context. We also conclude that effective interventions need to utilise multiple mechanisms. It is hoped that the synthesis of the different mechanisms provided here will assist anti-prejudice researchers, practitioners, and policymakers striving to improve relations among different groups in our society. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This booklet arose out of field work for the Sustainable Desert Settlements project, a core project of the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre. The aim was to study mostly small remote communities to find factors that promoted sustainability. Researchers worked closely with six communities in four Australian States/Territories for up to three years. In this booklet we have arranged some of the broad lessons learned from those communities and some questions people could ask in discussions about the future of their communities. One of the key lessons shown in our research is that: While some people think ‘problems’ in small remote communities are because of environmental or technical issues – such as supplies of water, food, housing, fuel, medical services – many of the really difficult issues were people issues – such as how to live together, access to relevant knowledge and education, gender and family needs, leadership succession, surviving changes in government policies and managing government memory of community meetings. People issues underpinned much of whether a community was sustainable or not.

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Fieldwork in two remote Aboriginal communities in arid South Australia found diverse considerations for sustainability. For Nepabunna in the Flinders Ranges, the main resource and environmental concerns were less problematic than social issues such as population mobility and the small number of young people remaining in the community. Pukatja in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, on the other hand, contends with serious resource and environmental issues. Both communities had sustainability issues for young people that looked similar but which were very different. For Nepabunna, because the number of young people has decreased, there have been flow-on effects of services being threatened, a lack of companionship for those remaining, and concern about future leaders. Pukatja has many young people but without access to better secondary education and employment, boredom is reported to have detrimental effects. All these issues have implications for policy formulation, in particular, the lack of contextualising the evidence for policy has meant that solutions to sustainability issues have not worked. For Nepabunna, policy that is determined by resident population size fails to recognise a larger dependent community, not necessarily resident. Government support for involving relatives and the wider community — who are not necessarily resident in the community — is one possible way to promote community sustainability despite population fluctuations. The real problem, then, is that government laws and policy are typically formulated as general or abstract propositions designed to be implemented in the same way over very diverse contexts. A sustainable, appropriate policy system needs to allow for locally created, managed and implemented policies to ensure rapid and context-driven adaptations to whatever contingencies occur. Our research found that a context driven policy process is more appropriate for diverse, small, remote communities. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Objective: To explore the psychological impact of a problematic industrial climate for citrus growers, their help‐seeking behaviour and perspectives on ways to encourage better use of rural mental health services. Design: Thematic analysis of in‐depth interviews .Setting: The Riverland of South Australia. Participants: Sixteen citrus growers (12 male, 4 female) from eight Riverland towns. Main outcome measures: Citrus growers' perceived factors relating to psychological stress, coping behaviours, impact of stress on well‐being, help‐seeking behaviours, barriers to help‐seeking and ways to encourage better use of rural mental health services. Results: Work‐related stresses grouped under broad themes, including ‘Uncontrollable events’, ‘Financial hardship’ and ‘Pressure’, had negative effects on participants' well‐being. Furthermore, it was found that significant difficulties arise because many of the stresses which growers endure are not controllable, and that the alleviation of strain with the help of mental health professionals is uncommon because of barriers preventing help‐seeking. Five broad themes of barriers to help‐seeking were extracted from the data: ‘Self‐reliance’, ‘Social image’, ‘Lack of knowledge’, ‘Negative perceptions of health professionals' efficacy’ and ‘Restrictive lifestyle factors’. A specialised model of occupational health for citrus growers was proposed. Conclusions: These results highlight the practical need to address the identified issues in delivery and promotion of health services when facilitating help‐seeking within this group. The findings also add to our knowledge of occupational health psychology broadly. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

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There are issues with living in remote regions of Australia that arise from the different forms of social relationships. In this paper we outline three forms of relationships that are useful in teasing out issues when living in remote regions. We then consider several ways that relationship issues might arise in remote communities and some solutions through examining the interactions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, settlers and service providers. We also show how a graphic drawing of relationships from the perspective of remote communities can be utilised to help communities to plan their own solutions. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

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Language use as a social strategy is reviewed and a new interdisciplinary taxonomy developed. Four categories are suggested for using language: to get people to do things, to get people to say things, to keep people's attention, and to maintain social relationships. Within these categories, all of the discourse and conversational analysis literatures are reviewed, allowing a common framework within which to make more systematic analyses. Reinterpretations of psychological theories are suggested, and fresh avenues for interdisciplinary research are created. A major imperative from the review is that some form of ethnographic data collection is needed for all analyses of conversations and texts to incorporate more of the social, economic, historical, and cultural contexts into both our observations and theorizing.

This paper outlines how economic systems are fundamental in understanding human social behavior, and a call is made to increase the use of intensive research methods for describing the social, economic and cultural bases in both behavior analyses and rational choice models. To show this it is first argued that when individualistic views of people are removed, economics can be seen as the very buildup of a person and their social relationships, and that economic psychology can study more than just people’s interactions with obvious western economic transactions such as banking, consumer choice, and saving money. This is made more concrete by outlining the social effects of monetary systems, and then contrasting this with those of a barter system. Until we know more about the economic and social relationships that make us up, and that form the very basis of how and when we can get things done with consequences, then models of consumer choices will be missing the point. Broadening social contingencies in this way shows how a new behavior analysis of consumer behavior can draw upon both traditional and post-modern approaches.

This article argues to replace individualistic explanations of behavior with descriptions of social and historical context. Eighteen ways are outlined that playing a guitar alone in a room can be thought of as socially controlled rather than dispositionally controlled. Despite having a skin containing a body, a “person” for the social sciences is a conglomerate of social relationships or interactions that spans space and time. Thinking of people and causes as within a body shapes individualistic biases in our explanations and interventions. Rather than propose a new philosophy, this article reviews 18 concrete ways to begin thinking about people as social interactions and not agentic individuals. This changes the interventions we propose, alters how we view cultural practices, prevents some perennial problems of psychology, and leads the way to integrate psychology in the social sciences. Moving from dispositional explanations to study the historical and social context of social relationships also requires that psychology seriously adapt some of the more intensive research methods from other social sciences.