Cultural Continuity as a Hedge against Suicide in Canada's First Nations
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Citations
Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health
Indigenous health part 2: the underlying causes of the health gap
Social Identity, Health and Well-Being: An Emerging Agenda for Applied Psychology
Racism and Health: Evidence and Needed Research.
The embodiment of inequity: health disparities in aboriginal Canada.
References
The identities of persons
Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science
American Indian ethnic renewal : politics and the resurgence of identity
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Frequently Asked Questions (12)
Q2. What was used to calculate the number of communal facilities located in each community?
Community profile data from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and information obtained directly from individual band offices was used to calculate the number of communal facilities located in each community.
Q3. How long have the indigenous peoples lived in this isolated pattern of ecosystems?
The indigenous peoples living within this highly varied and often geographically isolated pattern of ecosystems have spent upwards of 10,000 years situating themselves with regard to their own local circumstance.
Q4. What are the main factors that make the whole province a cultural collective?
Different languages, kinship patterns, religious beliefs, and economic practices (to name but a few) have naturally sprung up, making the whole of this province’s First Nations a cultural collective only in the most abstract of statistical senses.
Q5. How many bands of BC Native youth experienced no suicide in a 5-year period?
In the present study, a total of 111 bands, containing just under half of all BC Native youth, experienced no youth suicides at all in a 5-year period.
Q6. What percentage of suicides occur in communities that have some measure of control?
A slight minority of the youth population (46.4%) live within communities that have some measure of control the provision of health care services and, as expected, an even smaller percentage of youth suicides (38.1) occur in such communities, resulting in comparative rates of 89.0 and 125.1.
Q7. What did the authors do to account for the differences in suicide rates among BC’s First Nations?
In their efforts to account for these differences, the authors worked to navigate around those often circular suggestions that youth suicide is the result of depression, or social isolation, or other personal or interpersonal factors that sometimes accompany (but poorly predict) suicidal behaviors, by searching more directly for possible connections between personal and cultural continuity.
Q8. What is the significance of the markers of cultural continuity used in this study?
Each of the six markers of cultural continuity employed here was found to be associated with a clinically important reduction in the rate of youth suicide.
Q9. How did the authors avoid the traps of stereotypy and blame casting?
In doing so, the authors struggled to avoid the familiar traps of stereotypy and blame casting by first bringing out the variability in youth suicide rates that characterize different aboriginal communities, and then by working to identify possible protective factors against suicide contained within the various efforts of BC’s First Nations communities to preserve and promote a sense of cultural continuity in their members.
Q10. Why did the BC coroner choose to omit the names of the tribal councils?
Because the youth population within certain of these separate groups is relatively small, and because such rates can misinform, Figure 3, which displays suicide rate by tribal council, omits the names of these councils out of their own wish to avoid identifying individual communities.
Q11. What are the expectations that have brought us to the hypothesis that the steps being taken by certain First?
at least, are the expectations that have brought us to the hypothesis that the steps being taken by certain First Nations communities to protect and rehabilitate the continuity of their own culture might be shown to work as protective factors against the current epidemic of suicide among native youth.
Q12. What is the reason to suppose that adolescents are at risk of going adrift?
That is, if navigating the usual course of identity development necessarily requires tacking one’s way back and forth between one qualitatively different self-continuity warranting strategy and the next, and if, while momentarily “between stays,” one is at special risk to temporarily going adrift by losing any workable sense of self-continuity, then the prospect arises that, adolescents, more than most, will also end up losing all proper care and concern about their own future well-being.