Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

ANN ARBOR — Suicide is commonly treated as a mental health issue, but Indigenous communities, specifically American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN), often approach the issue as a social problem — one associated with settler colonialism. Addressing the issue from that perspective is the focus of a recent paper, which examines three suicide prevention efforts in AI/AN communities.

Lisa Wexler, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, is the lead author on a paper that highlighted efforts funded by the National Institute for Mental Health’s Collaborative Hubs to Reduce the Burden of Suicide among American Indian and Alaska Native Youth.  That initiative produced a collaborative paper “Centering Community Strengths and Resisting Structural Racism to Prevent Youth Suicide: Learning from American Indian and Alaska Native Communities,” published earlier this year in the Archives of Suicide Research. In it, Wexler and her coauthors describe three AI/AN suicide prevention efforts that center on culture and community strengths for prevention, and acknowledge the harms of colonization and ongoing racism that contribute to suicide.

“All of our Indigenous colleagues really focus on suicide as a social problem and a consequence of colonialism,” she said. “That link between social determinants or cultural determinants of health and suicide has been made since the 1990s in Indigenous communities because many of those communities had no youth suicides recorded until colonization.”

Considering youth suicide in light of colonial history expands the ways it can be addressed as a problem, leading to the unique solutions presented in the AI/AN communities with whom Wexler and her colleagues have worked. Specifically, suicide can be seen as a social issue rather than a question of individual mental health — which may apply to other circumstances as well.

“When we look at rural populations, when we look at people of color of any sort or marginalized group,  if we boil that down to only individual mental distress, then we’re ignoring all of the social harms that are put upon people. Thinking about it as a collective issue opens up the possibility for a myriad of ways to address it.”

The paper describes three approaches to youth suicide and different levels of prevention: 

• Universal prevention — Qungasvik: cultural resistance to the marginalization of yuuyaraq, the Yup’ik way of being
• Universal and Selective prevention — PC CARES: promoting community conversations about research to end suicide
• Indicated preventio —: New Hope: Mandated and developed by White Mountain Apache Tribe to identify and intervene with young people showing suicide risk

These approaches were all developed either directly by Indigenous leaders or in partnership with AI/AN communities, highlighted by what Wexler characterizes as a focus on what’s going right and what strengths a community can offer in support of its members.

“We’re really trying to shift the narratives and think about strengths and building on what’s already working in communities,” Wexler said. “This approach gives us a chance to share power so that communities who have been marginalized intentionally for years and years and years can be acknowledged as important knowledge holders who hold the power and the capacity to solve their own problems.” 

Centering Community Strengths and Resisting Structural Racism to Prevent Youth Suicide: Learning from American Indian and Alaska Native Communities is available through the Archives of Suicide Research via Taylor & Francis Online.