Authors ’ Correspondence:

• Main Authors: Michael J. Chandler, Christopher E. Lalonde
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.517.1160; http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~chandlerlab/Chandler %26 Lalonde (2004).pdf

Over the better part of a decade we have been hard at work re-fashioning a still earlier decade’s worth of work on identity development and youth suicide in order to better fit these efforts to the special circumstances of Canadian Aboriginal youth—an ongoing effort aimed at explaining two deeply puzzling matters. One of these concerns the heart-breakingly high rate of suicide widely known to mark and often stigmatize Aboriginal youth; an overall suicide rate that is reported to be higher than that of any culturally identifiable group in the world (Kirmayer, 1994). The second of these known facts of the matter (owed largely to our own research) is that the rate of Aboriginal youth suicide varies dramatically from one community to another. As our research in British Columbia clearly demonstrates, more than 90 % of Aboriginal youth suicides occur in only 10 % of the bands, with some communities suffering rates as much as 800 times the national average, while more than half of the province’s 200 First Nations bands have not experienced a single youth suicide in the almost 15 years for which such figures are available. What obviously needs explaining in the face of such disparities—what inquiring minds most want to know—is what is different about those communities without such suicides, and those in which youth suicide occurs in epidemic proportion?