Suicide in Inuit Nunaat: an Analysis of Suicide Rates and the Effect of Community-Level Factors
Penney C~~Senecal S~~et al
Suicide is one of the areas of greatest concern to Inuit living in CanadaÕs north, yet there is little in the way of national statistical evidence to highlight this issue. Besides trying to come to grips with the scope of the issue, Inuit, along with Federal, Provincial and Territorial governments, are trying to understand the factors that lead people to take their own lives, in an attempt to formulate more effective suicide prevention strategies. In this study, we look at suicide in Inuit Nunaat (land where Inuit live) through a geographical approach, in the absence of Inuit identifiers in national vital statistics datasets. Furthermore, we analyse these data using information from the Statistics CanadaÕs Census of Population and Aboriginal Peoples Survey to compare suicide rates between groups of communities based on a variety of community-level factors.