The Culture of Silence and Inuit Mental Health in Post-Pandemic Greenland: Reconfiguring Silence and Voice Beyond the Talking Cure

Abstract

Abstract

Over the past three decades, psychological trauma has become a central framework in Indigenous mental-health research, shaping how silence, disclosure, and healing are interpreted. Within this framework, Inuit silence has been framed as a collective pathology-a "culture of silence"-and a risk factor contributing to suicide in the Arctic. In this article, I draw on pandemic-era public communication and professional narratives collected at a large health event in Greenland to critically reflect on cultures of silence and confession. The article demonstrates how crises such as the pandemic bring to the surface tacit or neglected dynamics, and highlights how hegemonic knowledge frameworks, which prioritize disclosure-centred models of care, shape contemporary mental health governance in Greenland. The case study identifies three recurring patterns: (a) disclosure is framed as both a cure and a civic duty; (b) local practices of quiet that sustain dignity and relational safety are overlooked; and (c) institutional logic of disclosure redirects blame and responsibility from structural conditions to individual and collective failures. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, anthropological and historical scholarship on silence and violence, and decolonial approaches to knowledge production, the article highlights the risks of disclosure-centred frameworks. It argues that such models may misrecognize culturally grounded practices of quiet as absence or pathology, rather than as meaningful relational forms of coping and care. It suggests the need for approaches that attend to multiple forms of communication and care, and avoid equating well-being with verbal disclosure and silence with deficiency. By reframing silence as a relational and culturally situated practice, the article contributes to ongoing debates in transcultural psychiatry about the limits of universalizing therapeutic models. It also contributes to scholarship on structural violence, Indigenous mental health, and the potential mistranslation of illness and wellness.