10 Cultural Continuity as a Moderator of Suicide Risk among Canada’s First Nations
Eight years ago the journal Transcultural Psychiatry published the results of an epidemiological study (Chandler and Lalonde 1998) in which the highly variable rates of youth suicide among British Columbia’s First Nations were related to six markers of “cultural continuity ” – community-level variab...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.330.2493 http://web.uvic.ca/~lalonde/manuscripts/2008HealingTraditions.pdf |
| Summary: | Eight years ago the journal Transcultural Psychiatry published the results of an epidemiological study (Chandler and Lalonde 1998) in which the highly variable rates of youth suicide among British Columbia’s First Nations were related to six markers of “cultural continuity ” – community-level variables meant to document the extent to which each of the province’s almost 200 Aboriginal “bands ” had taken steps to preserve their cultural past and to secure future control of their civic lives. Two key findings emerged from these earlier efforts. The first was that, although the province-wide rate of Aboriginal youth suicide was sharply elevated (more than 5 times the national average), this commonly reported summary statistic was labelled an “actuarial fiction ” that failed to capture the local reality of even one of the province’s First Nations communities. Counting up all of the deaths by suicide and then simply dividing through by the total number of available Aboriginal youth obscures what is really interesting – the dramatic differences in the incidence of youth suicide that actually distinguish one band or tribal council from the next. In fact, more than half of the province’s bands reported no youth suicides during the 6-year period |
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