Thanks.
We say that suicide is “normalized” in our communities. We say it that way because, as I said in my opening statement, everyone is affected. Everyone, from a very young age, understands very graphic details about it, how it happens and how a person is affected. The life courses of people are altered. The life courses of whole families and whole communities are altered by suicide in a way that envelops all of us.
That's just something that does not happen in most of Canada. It may happen in specific families, or perhaps there's a high-profile death by suicide, but it is not an environment that children grow up in and understand as just a part of how their community functions or does not function.
The root of this, stemming from the 1970s, when the rate of suicide increased, and the dysfunction in many cases in our communities, passed down from generation to generation, all play into that factor of why we are the way we are today. Families were being broken up because people didn't have mental health services. People couldn't heal from the things that tore them apart, whether it was physical or sexual abuse as children or whether it was that they were in residential school from the time they were five to the time they were 18. Many different things that happened in our society over a short period of time led to people not being able to deal with the things that we all take for granted.
Love of your partner, love of your children, love of your family, the ability to overcome difficult situations in life—these are all things that need to be created when there is a vacuum in an individual. That is the reason there is hope for us. You can build resilience. You can build coping mechanisms. You can heal from things that you've gone through.
What we have been saying is that we have not been given those opportunities. We don't have the mechanisms to do that. We've been asking for them for generations now, and we still don't have them.