Suicide major killer

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Views on Native suicides can be put into two general camps: a group which sees them as symptoms of a major problem in the community, and a group which remains skeptical about just how bad the problem is.

In some villages, there are rather startling suicided clusters; eight or ten dead by their own knife in a community of 200 in a one-year period. Clusters and groups of suicides are common within Indian families and villages, especially in isolated areas where little support exists. Overall, how many Indians actually commit suicide?

Five times the national rate, and growing.

Between 1978 and 1982, 146 Status Indians committed suicide in Alberta. This is a rate of 61 suicides per 100,000 Indians. The provincial rate was 16 per 100,000 residents. In British Columbia, the Indian suicidal rate in 1978 was 66.5 per 100,000, compared with a provincial rate of 17 per 100,000.

All of these are considered "high" - a "healthy" rate is supposed to be about 6 per 100,000 - although even that is not truly "healthy". In Newfoundland, where unemployment and other problems are hurting the province, the rate is less than 4 per 100,000.

Official suicide rates are deceptive; despite the high figures for Alberta and B.C., they actually under-estimate the situation. Researchers suggest the error is between one-third and two-thirds; the Alberta Task Force on Suicide says the error may be as high as 100%. That means that instead of 61 per 100,000, the suicide rate is as high as 120 per 100,000. As far back as 1976, suicide was identified as the leading cause of death among Albertans, and among Alberta Indians in particular.

How is that suicides are underestimated? Religious and social restraints, says the Task Force. "The influence of religious ad social taboos can be observed in concealment, at various levels, of the true cause of death; by the suicide victim himself in order to "spare" the bereaved survivors; by the significant others, in order to "protect the name" of the deceased; and by well-meaning officials (police, doctors, coroners) to spare surviving family members.

Problems with under-estimating suicides may not be as great now as they were in the past, says provincial suicidoligist Ron Dyck. Better reporting by the medical examiner has brought the error down to near 25%, in his opinion. On the other hand, the "official" rate for a recent year is up to 90 suicides per 100,000 Indians, and Dyck admits that even might be low.

Another area of deception is thinking that suicide is the only part of self-destruction. For instance, suicide attempts are not mentioned in the reports. "Non-accidental self-injury" is another form of self-destruction. This includes drinking to excess and illness, scratching one's face to ribbons, fighting a better opponent, and many other actions which, deliberately or not, have a bad effect on one's own body, mind, family, job, social standing and possessions.

Often self injuries will not appear that way, says Calvin Frederick, a researcher for the National Institute of Mental Health. "Deaths may be classified as intentional, unintentional and sub-intentional. The definition of an unintentional death might be a brick falling from a building and striking a passerby. A sub-intentional death is the psychological equivalent of suicide, an example being drinking or eating oneself to death," says Frederick.

This means that people can be tearing themselves to shreds - eating or drinking or fighting - all the time. Yet they are not officially recognized as "non-accidental self-injuries."

Dyck calls this deliberate self-harm, or "parasuicide". People who take more risky chances in driving or roughnecking can be committing a sorts of "parasuicide."

"People who in times of their lives are living on the edge might be engaging in parasuicidal behaviours. Take Peerless Lake, for example. These people are not dumb. They engaged in deliberate behaviour that they knew would hurt them. Their intent was not somuch to die...but to hurt themselves."

Most "non-accidental self-injuries" are probably not reported for similar reasons to suicides. The reported incidence in London, Ontario (the only report mentioned in the Task Force Report) says the rate is at 730 per 100,000. In Alberta Indians, the rate may actually be much higher.

What is even worse is the effect these suicidal activities have on surviving family and friends. Often when a member of the family commits suicide, it is worse than if they died a natural death, and sometimes kill themselves in remorse. For this reason, postventive, or after-suicide counselling is very important for families and friends.

A few years ago, Audrey Provost and Jean Collins of the Sikokkotok Friendship Society and Project Earth Mother presented a Native Suicide Awareness Workshop. In it, they showed how to find how many people were affected by self-destructive activities (they called it "calculating the magnitude and impact of suicidal behaviours").

According to these calculations, one seventh of the people in Alberta were "involved in suicidal behaviours in 1983." These were based on the official suicide figures of 17.7 deaths per 100,000 residents.

Using these same calculations for the Indian population, the official suicide rates indicated one third (in 1979) to two thirds (in 1980) of the Indian population were affected by suicide). However, if one accepts the report of the Alberta Task Force on Suicide that suicides are under-estimated by 100%, then the figures rise to one half (in 1979) to all (in 1980) of the Alberta Indians.

"There's no doubt about that," says Dyck. "When I go onto an Indian reserve to do a workshop, there isn't a single person that hasn't been affected by suicide. In Hobbema when I ask how many of them has been affected, all of their hands go up." Dyck recalls making a similar calculation based on Hobbema's suicide rate. He came out with a figure of 6,000 for those affected - the same as Hobbema's populaion.

Clearly suicide, like alcohol, affects the Indian community.