Evidence of meeting #20 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was aboriginal.
A video is available from Parliament.
Consultant Psychiatrist, As an Individual
—that there are always more people seeking health care than the number of providers available to provide it. I know that at Anishnawbe Health Toronto, for example, the practitioners or psychiatrists who provide consultation services to Anishnawbe Health, again, are not of aboriginal ancestry, but people probably have fairly long waiting lists for assessments.
It gets complicated as well in urban settings, where, for example, if you have young people in crisis, there are often a multitude of other community and social service agencies involved: for example, the schools, the CAS—Children's Aid Society—or child protective services. Police are sometimes involved. The cases are very complicated, so that limits the number of people you can see per day.
As psychiatrists, we can't just.... As I said, the revolving door of seeing people every five minutes just does not work with aboriginal people.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Andy Fillmore
Thank you for that.
We have time for one final question, Dr. Wieman.
It is from Arnold Viersen, please.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Thank you, Dr. Wieman, for being here today.
I have two questions. My first one I don't think will take too long to answer.
There are always several issues that come into play when we are dealing with people who are attempting or have committed suicide. If you had to rank the issues, where would you place child abuse or sexual assault in the early years of someone's life? How would that play into suicide in general, or suicide attempts throughout the lifetime of an individual who has experienced one of those two situations?
Consultant Psychiatrist, As an Individual
I think it is definitely a significant factor for some people who are at risk of suicide, but more importantly for aboriginal people, I think it is not just one trauma. It is a series of traumas that occur over a young person's lifetime.
They may have been sexually assaulted by a family member, an extended family member, a neighbour, or another community member, but they are also contending with so many more traumas. They may be dealing with parents or grandparents who attended residential school; they may be witness to domestic violence; they may be struggling with substance abuse, which we haven't really touched on but which is another critical factor; they may be totally disconnected from the educational system and school.
It is not just that they have an experience of being sexually abused as a child. It is the fact that they have experienced trauma after trauma, death of relatives, death of friends. It is not unusual to take a history from someone and find out that over the last five years they have lost 10 friends or family members. It is just that severe.
All those things combine to place people at increased risk of suicide.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
We talk a lot here about culture, cultural appropriateness, and things like that. One of the things I would like you to expand on a little is that, through things like the sixties scoop and the residential schools, big swaths of culture have been lost. It is fairly easy to reinstate, for example, clothing or food. Even language, though difficult, is something fairly tangible we can deal with. Some of the other things are much more difficult to deal with—say, how society is organized, what the meaning of life is, and these kinds of issues. A culture generally has those answers, and to some degree, we need to reinstate that.
You will probably run out the rest of the time, two minutes, responding to this. How does the federal government go about renewing, say, those answers to “Why are we here?” or reinstate those parts of the culture that are not so tangible?
Consultant Psychiatrist, As an Individual
I think you've touched on another important factor for suicide, which is that we know that kids, young people, are at lower risk of suicide if they have what we call forward thinking, so they can see themselves at some point in the future doing something. Whether that's being a mother, a father, a student, an employee, they have to be able to see themselves at least at some point in the future, and then we know they have something to hold on to.
The challenge that we face—and I'll be the first to admit that there is no easy set of solutions to this—is how to help and support indigenous young people across this country to develop a sense of identity for themselves that is consistent with their tradition, their culture, and their values, but also functional in contemporary times. Do you know what I mean?
For example, I am about to turn 52 years old. I'm a child of the sixties scoop, and I can honestly tell you that I did not feel strong in my identity until I was probably in my mid-twenties to mid-thirties. It took that long for me to feel comfortable in both, such that I could be a strong first nations woman and yet be a psychiatrist and function in a very difficult job and be who I am in my life, a wife, a mother, whatever.
That's the challenge, and I don't necessarily think there is an easy answer, but I think one way to go about it that I touched on briefly is to invest much more heavily in sharing stories of resilience with our young people. All of the resilience literature, whether it has to do with indigenous people or not, says that if somebody has at least one strong person in their life that they can relate to and they have a good relationship with, or they share a story with, that, in and of itself, can foster resiliency.
We need to hear stories like my own, and I don't mean that in an arrogant way at all. If you talk to indigenous people across the country who are recognized as achievers, no one will tell you a story that it was just smooth sailing, that they were just born and they went on to greatness without a hitch. That is not the case at all. I think everyone has a very complicated and rich story of struggle, and yet ultimate achievement. If we shared these types of stories with our young people, I think they could relate to pieces of themselves, see themselves in that, see possibilities for themselves in the future, and ultimately it would result in them flourishing as contributing, valuable members of Canadian society.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Andy Fillmore
It's a great note to wind up on, Dr. Wieman.
On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank you for your well-considered remarks today. They're going to be of tremendous help to us as we carry on this very difficult study of indigenous suicide.
Thank you for being with us.
Consultant Psychiatrist, As an Individual
Thank you very much for having me.
Chi-miigwech.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Andy Fillmore
We'll suspend for a short period while we change up and come back in about a minute and a half.
Thank you.
[Proceedings continue in camera]