Cultural Continuity as a Protective Factor Against Suicide in First Nations Youth

Six years ago the Journal of Transcultural Psychiatry published the results of an epidemiological study (Chandler & Lalonde, 1998) in which the highly variable rates of youth suicide shown to characterize British ColumbiaÕs (BCÕs) First Nations were set in relation to a half dozen markers of Òcultural continuityÓÐÐcommunity level variables meant to document the extent to which each of BCÕs almost 200 Aboriginal ÒbandsÓ had taken steps to preserve their cultural past and secure future control of their own civic lives. Two key findings emerged from these earlier efforts.The first was that, while the province-wide rate of Aboriginal youth suicide was once again found to be sharply elevated (more than 5 times the national average), this commonly reported summary statistic was demonstrated to be an Òactuarial fictionÓ that failed to capture the local reality of even one of the provinceÕs First Nations communities. Second, all six of the Òcultural continuityÓ factors originally identifiedÐÐmeasures intended to mark the degree to which individual Aboriginal communities had successfully taken steps to secure their cultural past in light of an imagined futureÐÐproved to be strongly related to the presence or absence of youth suicide. Every community characterized by all six of these protective factors experienced no youth suicides during the 6-year reporting period, while those bands in which none of these factors were present suffered suicide rates more than 10 times the national average.