In Southern Canada, 90 per cent of suicide is associated with individual mental illness, but in Nunavut this connection does not apply. In Nunavut, most Inuit suicide is not associated with mental disorders, Psychiatric issues in the Arctic appear deeply interwoven with interpersonal, socioeconomic, and societal changes; effective community mental health services must address a broad spectrum of psychosocial issues beyond the medical model. Nunavut’s highly elevated suicide rate is not the result of elevated rates of mental illness as conventionally defined. The rate of suicide by Inuit men in Nunavut between the ages of 19 and 24 is roughly 50 times that of all men in Canada in that age bracket, but there is no evidence that young Inuit men in Nunavut suffer from mental illnesses at anything like 50 times the rate at which their peers in the South do.
The work of Nunavut researcher Jack Hicks suggests that, “Social determinants,” in particular, “Adverse childhood experiences,” and other forms of childhood trauma, are the reason why so many young Nunavummiut consider suicide.
Suicide rates in Nunavut were very low in the 1950s and 60s with just one suicide on record in the 1960s. It was in North Alaska in the late 1960s that young Inuit began to take their lives. Youth suicide rates in Greenland rose dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then in Nunavut in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. Hicks notes that this order (first Alaska, then Greenland, then Nunavut) is the same order in which Inuit living in those regions had previously undergone processes of, “Active colonialism at the community level,” such as being coerced into moving into settled communities, having children subjected to a foreign educational system, and having the active adult hunters largely reduced to unemployed non-wage earners. Kirmayer says that as, “Small Indigenous societies,” of Inuit were, “Enveloped and transformed by colonizing powers…meaning and the sense of individual and collective worth [was] undermined…and people feel like refugees in their own land.”
From 1999 to 2003, the rate of suicide in Nunavut was 11 times higher than in the rest of Canada. Forty-three per cent of all suicides in Nunavut were carried out by young people under the age of 20. Three-quarters were committed by people less than 25 years of age. Unfortunately, suicide response protocols for Nunavut’s nurses, developed by the territorial government in 2001, were not distributed until 2007. Similar suicide response protocols for schools, developed in 2003, had not been circulated by 2007, and may not be in use today. In the face of this tragedy, Regional Inuit Associations (RIA), community organizations, and other agencies have developed on-the-land programs, resilience workshops, and suicide prevention resources. Notable are the approaches developed by the National Inuit Youth Council and its Inuit Youth Suicide Prevention Framework, as well as workshops on resilience and community wellness developed by our Elders.
http://www.niyc.ca/niyc/index
http://www.itk.ca/Inuit-Approaches-to-Suicide-Prevention
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