Editorial

This special issue of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies includes all the papers presented at the symposium on recognition for Aboriginal people in Australia, in March 2017, called the Day After Tomorrow, convened by CASSE - Creating A Safe Supportive Environment.

CASSE is a psychoanalytic, not-for-profit organization. Its principal program is called The Aboriginal Australian Relations Program. CASSE is dedicated to saving lives and changing minds. The mandate of CASSE is to focus on violence and underlying trauma in the town of Alice Springs and remote Aboriginal communities in central Australia, Northern Territory. We have been working in this region since December 2011. Our head office is in the city of Melbourne and a CASSE team is located in Alice Springs. We have developed partnerships and collaborations with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal organizations and Aboriginal communities and liaised with stakeholders. Over this time, two principal projects have emerged in consultation with and determined by the Aboriginal people.

The context of the work is a post-colonial world of gross inequality, poverty, suffering, violence, homicide, suicide, assaults, domestic violence; a 60,000-year-old civilization staggering into the twenty-first century, challenged first by colonialism and traditional dispossession, and then by modernity and, more recently, again by government and army intervention. Successive governments promulgating the policies of assimilation developed missions, settlements and stolen generations of children, under the guise of protection. In August 2007, the Federal Government enacted the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill, in the name of protecting children from abuse, giving the Federal Government wide control over Aboriginal lands, families, and community services; and the Indigenous Affairs Minister total control over Indigenous community governance.

Curiously, mental health statistics have not been collected but