It describes seminal work on cultural connectedness and youth suicide. Highly recommended. (You can skip the first ten minutes of introductions.)
“It is this variability - this radical divergence in suicide rates from one indigenous community to the next - that obliges us all to look beyond individual woes, and to direct attention to socio-cultural factors that drive up suicides in some communities and not others.
Doing so is important, we will work to show, because the identification of community factors protective against suicide allows for the framing of intervention efforts that fall within the indigenous communities themselves.
“… I will begin by working to document that the high rates of youth suicide that mark certain First Nations communities are not uniformly distributed across BC’s more than 200 distinct bands, but occur in some, but not other, of these cultural groups.
Then Chris will follow with an account of our efforts to trace out those particular socio-cultural determinants that effectively distinguish bands with many suicides from others in which youth suicides are virtually unknown.” Dr Michael Chandler