Thank you.
My name is Natan Obed. I'm the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national representational organization for Canada's 60,000 Inuit.
The first objective in our 2016-2019 strategic plan is to take action to prevent suicide among Inuit. It is a priority of the highest degree for our national organization and for all Inuit in Canada to do something meaningful to prevent suicide.
I want to open by talking about how it affects each and every one of us.
This is a huge difference between the Inuit population, or anyone who lives within an Inuit community, and those who live in southern Canada. Each one of us is personally affected by suicide, and this comes from a very early age. It affects our entire life course, and it is something that is always with us. Imagine a scenario in which you grow up understanding how to die by suicide; you have friends, family members, and loved ones who have died by suicide; and suicide is normalized in your community to the extent that it is used sometimes even as a bargaining tactic, or something that is a threat, rather than a situation that is not normal and one that demands immediate attention and mobilization from communities and from governments.
We all live in this reality, and not one of us wants to see another day that we live in this reality. What you are doing here, and what the House did in its special debate, is being watched by all Inuit. We do hope that it translates into action to prevent suicide for Inuit moving forward.
I also want to recognize all of those people in our communities, from the 1970s to today, who have done amazing work to prevent suicide with absolutely no help or little help. It goes from the faith-based community to those who are champions in our community for people who are at risk. That doesn't necessarily mean there is no mental health system, but for too many years individuals in our communities have had to pick up an enormous burden of caring for the mental wellness and mental health of many of those who are at most at risk in our communities. That is something that will continue to exist, but it should not be the only way that suicide prevention happens, in many cases, in many of our communities.
Over the past two months, there has been a national discussion about suicide prevention and suicide by indigenous peoples. I was at the special debate and I listened to many well-meaning members of Parliament talk about how important this issue is. I would say that I came away frustrated, and have continued to be frustrated, by the way in which the discussion has happened to date. It is as if indigenous suicide and Inuit suicide is something completely outside of a public health context, and somehow the answers only lie with us and us alone.
Many times when we as the national Inuit organization or when individuals who are Inuit are asked by well-meaning Canadians what needs to be done, the response those people are looking for is one that has nothing to do with creating social equity, nothing to do with providing mental health services, and nothing that goes beyond historical or intergenerational trauma. What they're looking for, in many cases, is a particular component of suicide prevention that is indigenous only, that usually has something to do with on-land camps or cultural continuity, that is relatively cheap, and that has nothing to do with the relationship between government services and overarching populations and their overarching health. We need to change that discussion.
For our part, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami will release a national Inuit suicide prevention strategy on July 27.
In this strategy we talk about why suicide happens the way it does in our communities and also what is necessary to prevent suicide in Inuit communities.
You might find this strange, but our people do not have one common, united narrative about why suicide happens in our communities. Many times the discussions happen about the final step by somebody who was at risk of suicide, who was thinking of suicide, and who then attempts or completes suicide. All the discussion about why it happened is just in that particular moment when we live in an environment of suicide. From the time many of our children are in the womb, they're at risk of suicide in a different way because of the environment in which our children grow up and the environment in which our people live.
The discussion about why suicide is the way it is is as follows.
We have to do a great deal to achieve social equity. Our society has gone through massive historical changes in the last 50 to 60 years. As Jack Hicks mentioned, you can see the suicide rates elevating in the 1970s, corresponding to the first generation of children who grew up in communities. We need to do more to ensure that we have proper education systems, proper mental health systems, and justice systems that reflect our needs; that we address violence and sexual abuse in our communities; and that we end poverty. Social equity is that first societal step that we need to take. It is necessary to improve our mental health and ultimately to prevent suicide.
Then it gets to the community level, where a number of different things happen in normal communities that do not happen in our communities: programs and services, connections between generations, things that allow for coping skills to be created, and things that build resilience.
From the evidence base, we think of risk factors and protective factors. We have societal risk factors and individual risk factors. We do not have the appropriate measures in the protective factors that build resilience in our communities for our society as a whole to come through hard times. Every individual will go through difficult times in their lives. It is a lifetime of experiences and a lifetime of relationships with your family, with you, with your mental health system and health systems in general, and in your communities, that craft the responses to those difficult times. We need to do more to ensure that there are supports at the community level for all our community members to overcome hardship.
On the individual level, we have a number of different things we can do to provide mental health services and support for those at risk of suicide. That means improving some of our mental health acts, improving mental health services at the community level, and incorporating Inuit-specific healing practices within the mental health continuum. We need a mental health continuum to overcome the challenges that people face on a day-to-day basis. When people are experiencing acute stress—and this gets to the individual level, where a lot of the discussion about suicide takes place in suicide prevention—we need people who can help, and we need interventions for those who are at risk.
There are usually three ways to break down suicide prevention: prevention, interventions, and post-interventions.
At the intervention stage, when people are at the most risk, programs like ASIST, which arm community members with the ability to identify those at risk and link them to care, are great examples of how we can prevent suicide in a way that we have not done previously. Our strategy will present actions that will create meaningful change in our community and will prevent suicide.
I'd like to leave with an association between what has happened in relation to lung cancer over the past 50 to 60 years with what must happen with Inuit suicide prevention in the coming 50 to 60 years.
In the beginning, there was not even a recognition of the causes of lung cancer, especially in relation to smoking, but over the course of generations and upstream investments in public health measures to ensure that people knew the risks and took mitigative actions so that they would not develop lung cancer, we have arrived at a very different place. Those who do have lung cancer, we treat. We treat through radiation and medication, and we also have palliative care for those who are beyond that stage of treatment.
It is as if today, with Inuit suicide prevention, we allow only for very small, palliative care-type interventions for our people. We do not have the requisite upstream investments in social equity. We do not have the requisite interventions, mental health facilities, and mental health continuum of care for Inuit that would allow people to get through difficult times and to have positive mental health. We certainly don't have enough to ensure that our communities can be healthy, happy, and productive in the way we believe we were before we moved the communities and before all this colonization happened.
I look forward to working with each and every one of you to make the meaningful changes necessary to prevent suicide of Inuit.
Nakurmiik.