The Sunday Herald, 13 April 2008. Alastair McIntosh reflects on connections between physical, psychological, and spiritual health.

I'm writing this from the Great Plains. I’m over here teaching and learning with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Department of Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.  

The day that I arrived I read last week’s Sunday Herald article about health in the West of Scotland. What hit me was the line, “Higher mortality rates were driven by an increase in deaths involving suicide, alcohol, drugs and violence among men in the 15 to 44 age group, and higher rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke and liver disease in women aged 45 to 64.”  

Here in Canada I’ve quoted that all week long. The native elders nod knowingly.  

For 26 years my father was the North Lochs doctor on the Isle of Lewis. He used to say, “Medicine is both a science and an art. We’ve become good at the science, but we’ve forgotten the art. That’s a problem, because illness is only partly in the body. It’s also in the mind.” 

When I tell this to the Cree elders, they say, “we know that’s true.”  

It’s why we won’t solve Scotland’s health problems only by urging life style change and more hospitals. In addition, we need to tackle issues at the bedrock of the psyche.  

I live in Greater Govan where I’m on the board of a community organisation, the GalGael Trust.  

Hard-pressed young people come to our Ibrox workshop. They’re given a piece of locally-sourced wood, a hammer and a chisel. Our trainers help them to make something beautiful.  

They go down the Clyde on boats built in our yard, and discover the nature of … Scotland!  

They reconnect with the elemental – fire, air, earth and water – and their creativity comes alive in context of community.  

I asked Billy, “What made you a heroin addict?” 

“I’ll tell you, Alastair,” he replied. “Heroin took away my pain. But it also took away my soul.” 

Twenty-something Kelly Anne was moved to tears by her first sighting of Loch Lomond. Despite living all her years in Glasgow, a trip with GalGael was her first ever sighting of the ‘bonnie banks’ and she was breath-taken by the natural beauty confronting her. 

Let me cut to the quick. The West of Scotland is full of people descended from those once uprooted from the land.  

The trauma has never been dealt with. I believe it passes on intergenerationally.  

When your only window on nature becomes a TV up a hi-rise, something withers from within. 

If the soul’s denied nourishment, virtual reality fills the emptiness - drugs, alcohol, computer pornography, consumerism. 

As John Lennon said, “the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.”  

And when the empathy’s gone, that’s when violence kicks in towards self and others. 

What’s the evidence for this? For me, the evidence is the way I’ve seen people come alive when given an alternative. 

I saw it on Eigg after land reform. I see it most times I drop in to the GalGael. Battered faces start to shine again. Dependence on antidepressants and methadone falls.  

On Monday I listened to Professor Willie Ermine of the First Nations University. He said, “Whatever happens to the land is going to happen to the children. Disengagement from the land has injured the people." 

That’s the challenge to Scotland – to call back the soul of the most broken of our people. That’s the deepest importance of Scotland’s land reform programme. 

This is an agenda that needs a new and creative integration of policies for health, education, economics, environment and culture.

It’s a tall order, but it offers back life.