Suicide in First Nations youth:
Identity development & cultural collapse
Michael Chandler
(University of British Columbia)
Chris Lalonde
(University of Victoria)
An Agenda In Two Parts
• Not counting time set aside for discussion at the end, my colleague Chris
Lalonde and I each have been given approximately 40 minutes to share with
you what has become more than a quarter of a century of collaborative
research – research about youth suicide in Canada’s First Nations
communities.
• We mean to divide up this task in such a way as to make it plain that
something like “a social determinants approach to well-being” is demanded
by the evidence in hand. More particularly, we intend to persuade you that
the best hope for doing something constructive about the disturbingly high
rates of youth suicide present in many Indigenous communities is that
individualistic accounts of such tragedies will never ( could never) do.
• What more familiar individualized accounting strategies can not explain is
that, not withstanding the fact that the overall suicide rate among certain of
the world’s Indigenous groups is heartbreakingly high; it continues to be the
case that, in many Indigenous communities, youth suicide is essentially
unknown.
An Agenda In Two Parts
• It is this variability — this radical divergence in suicide rates from
one Indigenous community to the next — that obliges us all to look
beyond individual woes, and to direct attention to socio-cultural
factors that drive up suicide rates in some communities and not
others. Doing so is important, we will work to show, because the
identification of community factors protective against suicide allows
for the framing of intervention efforts that fall within the orbit and
control of Indigenous communities themselves.
• In broad strokes, our way of dividing up these tasks is that I will
begin by working to document that the high rates of youth suicide
that mark certain First Nations communities are not uniformly
distributed across the province of BC’s more than 200 distinct
bands, but occur in some, but not other, of these cultural groups.
Then Chris will follow with an account of our ongoing efforts to
trace out those particular socio-cultural determinants that
effectively distinguish bands with many suicides from others in
which youth suicide if essentially unknown.
PART ONE
• In addition, and in advance of presenting hard
evidence that youth suicide rates are not the
same from one Indigenous community to the
next, I want to say a few words about the
conceptual framework that has guided our
program of research.
• The focus of these efforts is on the process of
‘identity development,’ and how it plays itself
out, not only at the level of individual youth, but
with regard to whole Indigenous communities.
Self- & Cultural-Continuity
• In broad strokes we mean to argue:
• In PART ONE, that what holds each of us (as
individuals) back from the prospect of suicide is that
the very possibility of selfhood is temporally vectored,
and necessarily requires that we each find ways of
owning our own past and as yet unrealized future; &
• In PART TWO that, like individual persons, persistent
peoples (e.g., groups with low to absent suicide rates)
succeed as they do because they act to own their own
shared past and collective future.
Self-Continuity and Youth Suicide
I want to begin, then, by first saying something
about:
a) why the notions of selfhood and personal
persistence are ‘constitutive conditions’ of
individual identity; and
b) Why, in the absence of ‘self-continuity,’ suicide
becomes a live option.
The “One Self to a Customer” Rule
• If they are to remain recognizable as instances of what selves
ordinarily taken to be, both individuals & whole cultural
communities must satisfy at least two constitutive conditions:
1. Both are forced by the temporally vectored nature of our
public and private lives to constantly change.
2. Inevitable change not withstanding, both individuals and
cultures must be understood to somehow remain recognizably
the same.
• As such, personal and cultural continuity (which embed
both sameness & change) are not elective features of
persons or whole cultural groups, but constitutive of
their coming into being.
• That is, without some notion of persistence,
some way of identifying and then reidentifying one and the same person, all
notions of self- or personhood would become
nonsensical. As such, any person that did not
own their own past and future would simply
fail to satisfy the requirements of what
persons are ordinarily taken to be.
• As William James put it:
Bows & Sterns
“Life is like a skiff moving through time with a bow as well as a stern”
William James
• The claim that the earlier and later manifestations of a life or
culture must somehow count as belonging timelessly to one
and the same continuant is true for at least two persuasive
reasons:
– One of which is quintessentially historical and backwards
referring;
– The other forward anticipating, and so all about securing
our own as yet unrealized futures.
The link between
Self-Continuity failures & Suicide
• Although continuity (whether at the level of single individuals or
whole cultural groups) is, as James argued, both ‘backward
referring’ and ‘forward anticipating,’ when efforts to maintain
continuity fail, it is their failure to link to the future that
especially connects them to suicide. Whenever such future
prospects fade, life becomes cheap. Few individuals manage to
maintain any stake in the prospects of a world that does not
somehow include them, and whole cultural communities with
no sense of ownership of their past or future similarly tend to
wither and die.
• Whether these notions do in fact provide an interpretive frame,
equally useful in accounting for suicides in both individuals and
whole cultural groups is, of course, an empirical question.
• The findings that have emerged from having
individually interviewed some 400+ adolescents
make it plain that almost all of these young persons
confidently reported that they themselves were
continuous, self-same, and numerically identical,
despite many acknowledged personal changes.
• The single exception to what Flanagan (1996) has
described as this otherwise general “one self to a
customer rule,” was provided by those of our
participants who were both hospitalized and marked
as actively suicidal. As can be seen from an
inspection of Table 1.
Self-continuity in suicidal and non-suicidal youth
Type of continuity warrant by suicidal status
Suicide Risk
Continuity Warrant
Less
More
Complex
Complex
None
(Levels 1 & 2)
(Level 3+)
High
15 (83%)
1 (6%)
2 (11%)
Low
2 (9%)
18 (78%)
3 (13%)
Control
0 (0%)
15 (37%)
26 (63%)
Cross-cultural Comparisons
The choice between narrativist
and essentialist self-continuity
warrants as culturally sanctioned
“default strategies”
• The final bit of evidence that I want to briefly
summarize here is more about cultural
differences in self-continuity warranting
strategies than about suicidality per se, but it will
prove useful in setting the stage for the data to
be brought out by Chris.
• One sidebar piece of information that is
important in making sense of these data is that
while, as suggested above, rank and file young
persons generally do hold to the view that they
are continuous in time, their efforts to justify
such claims ordinarily fall into one or the other of
two broad categories that we have coded as
being either Essentialist or Narrative-like in
character.
A Typology
• Two solution strategies for solving the
paradox of personal persistence:
– Essentialist arguments: (Self as an enduring
“entity”)
• Find some aspect or feature of the self that endures
despite change in other quarters
– Narrative arguments: (Self as a followable
story)
• Identify relations that weave together the multiple
time-slices of our lives
Urban / Rural Communities
Aboriginal Story Materials
Participants
Location
Cultural Group
Urban
Rural
Aboriginal
90
90
Non-Aboriginal
90
--
Form of Self-understanding
by Cultural Group
Reliance upon “essentialist” Vs. “narrative”
forms is strongly associated with culture
100%
Narrative
Essentialist
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
Native
Non-Native
Cultural Group
• As can be seen from an inspection of the previous
figure, respondents from the culturally mainstream
relied primarily on Essentialist strategies for justifying
their claims for personal persistence, while more than
80 percent of the First Nations adolescents made
exclusive use of more Narrative strategies as their
default solution to these same continuity problems.
• The argument to be developed below is that groups
whose cultural narratives continue to be most savaged
by ongoing colonial practices are just those
communities with alarmingly high levels of youth
suicide.
• In short summary, what all of these bits and pieces of
data are so far meant to make clear is that, at least at
the individual level, the measured concept of selfcontinuity does in fact show some real promise in
offering up a conceptual scheme useful in promoting a
better understanding of suicide in individual youth.
What remains open (and the question to which Chris
Lalonde will shortly turn) is the weightier issue of
whether this same conceptual machinery (these same
considerations about persistence in the face of change)
can also be brought to bear in illuminating efforts to
understand variable rates of suicide in whole cultural
communities.
• Before that, I want to spend my remaining minutes
saying something brief about the epidemiology of
suicide in BC’s First Nation youth.
The Epidemiology of Suicide
in Aboriginal Communities
Cultural Continuity as a protective
factor against suicide among
Aboriginal youth in Canada
First Nations Suicide
• Canadian First Nations suffer from the
highest rate of suicide of any culturally
identifiable group in the world
• First Nations suicide rate is 3 times higher
than the rate for the general Canadian
population
• First Nations youth are 5-20 times more
likely to die by suicide than are their nonnative peers
Population (British Columbia)
Aboriginal
Non-Aboriginal
3%
97%
Aboriginal persons represent less than
3% of the total population of BC
Suicides by Population
Aboriginal
Non-Aboriginal
9%
91%
Population Statistics: Youth
Youth
Other
54%
46%
Over half of all Aboriginal suicides
are completed by young persons
Aboriginal suicide rates as
actuarial fictions
British Columbia within Canada
British Columbia’s Area
Suicide by Census District
900
800
Native
Non-Native
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Census District
Youth Suicide Rate by Band (19872000)
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
NOTE: More than half of communities
had NO recorded deaths by suicide.
0
Band (names removed)
Youth Suicide by Band
(1987-2000)
Part II
The Open Question
What distinguishes First Nations
communities with no youth suicides
from those in which the rate is
alarmingly high?