Suicide numbers may be buried in bureaucracy

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The apparent suicides of 39 young people in the last 18 months has employees at the Mission Indian Friendship Centre pressing the government help to set up a healing centre.

But a major stumbling block is the difference between what officials consider a suicide and what the friendship centre calls a suicide, said Raymond Young, the centre's executive director.

While Young said the centre has documented expenses for bereavement counselling for 39 families who all insist their loved ones killed themselves, B.C. coroners have recorded only five Native suicides in 1993 and two in 1994 in the area served by the friendship centre.

"We found that people going to the hospital who hadn't died yet were recorded as accidents, not attempted suicides," said Young. The deaths of people who shoot themselves or lay down on railroad tracks are often classified as accidental because the victims were drunk.

"I don't know what they call jumping off a bridge," Young added.

The coroner's definition of suicide is "a death resulting from self-inflicted injury, with intent to cause death," said Tej Sidhu at the Office of the Chief Coroner in Burnaby.

Coroners follow certain criteria to determine if a death is a suicide. Intent is defined as "...evidence (explicit, implicit, or both) that at the time of injury the decedent intended to kill himself or herself or wished to die, and that the decedent understood the probably consequences of his or her actions."

Nancy Maloney, mental health co-ordinator for the Mission area, said many of the deaths were attributed to accidents or death by unnatural causes.

"A lot more deaths that were potentially suicides were not categorized that way," Maloney said. "Maybe it's easier for the families to accept that this is an accident rather than a suicide."

Joel Pettit, who is co-ordinator of the suicide prevention program at the University of British Columbia, was not surprised at the discrepancy between the friendship centre numbers and the coroner's numbers.

"It's recognized quite wildly that the number of suicides is under-reported."

The Aboriginal youth-suicide rate is six times higher than the national average, and young Native men are 10 times more likely to die violently than non-Natives, federal statistics show.

The high suicide rate is in part a refection of the hopelessness Natives feel at being caught between two cultures while their own traditional cultures are fragmented, Pettit said.

Young people want to move ahead and make gains in mainstream society while retaining part of their cultural heritage and it's tearing them apart, he said.

Alcoholism, drug abuse and poverty are symptoms of the larger problem, Pettit added.

Many of the Aboriginals in the Mission area have come from other provinces and find themselves alone, without a support network or a supportive family, Maloney said. This contributes to feelings of alienation and hopelessness.

The centre has formed an umbrella society to develop a wellness camp, Ama-Aleech, which will provide life skills, education and job training. The society has been working with the Attorney General and the Ministry of Health to get funding of $1 million a year for operating costs, Young said. Mission city council has agreed to lease land for the camp at nearby Sayers Lake for $1.

"Hopefully it will make a difference," Young said.

The Mission centre serves a huge area, stretching from Burnaby in the west to Lillooet in the north, some 75 kilometres away, east to Merritt, several hundred kms away, and south to the U.S. border. There are at least 37 bands in that area and the Native population is more than 20,000 and growing rapidly, he said.