Biography

In the effort to remedy American Indian mental health disparities, clinical-community psychologist 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. A citizen of the Gros Ventre tribal nation of Montana, he has undertaken collaborative research partnerships in a handful of reservation and urban Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. 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. A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Illinois, Gone has taught in the Departments of Psychology (Clinical Area) and American Culture (Native American Studies) at the University of Michigan for over a decade, where he has published 65 articles and chapters pertaining to the cultural psychology of Indigenous community mental health. A recipient of several fellowships and two early career awards for emerging leadership in his fields, Gone received the 2013 Stanley Sue Award for Distinguished Contributions to Diversity in Clinical Psychology from Division 12 of the American Psychological Association. In 2014, he was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.