Surviving Time: Suicide

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Surviving Time Suicide and the persistence
of identity in the face of radical cultural
and developmental change Michael J.
Chandler University of British Columbia,
Canada Christopher E. Lalonde University of
Victoria
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With thanks to...

• Marlene Atleo, Jessica Flores, Pam Frank, Erica
  Gehrke, Darcy Hallett, Catherine Horvath, Cathy
  Hull, Marla Jack, Leigh Koopman, Chris Lalonde,
  Aislin Martin, Lisa Moberly, David Paul, Jesse
  Philips, Holly Pommier, Bryan Sokol, Ulrich
  Teucher, Florence Williams

• Canadian Institute of Health Research, Human
  Early Learning Partnership, Michael Smith
  Foundation for Health Research, Social Sciences
  and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the
  Hampton Fund, University of British Columbia,
  University of Victoria

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Introduction

• The work that I will describe forms a part of a
  larger research
• Enterprise that is, in some descending order of
  generality, about
• Possible meanings of self- and personhood
• The process of identity development
• The challenge of achieving a sense of personal
  cultural
• persistence in a changing world and
• The serious prospect that youth suicide is among
  the serious
• penalties of personal and cultural failure to
  achieve a
• sense of continuity in time.

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Three Orienting Questions
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Three Orienting Questions

• How is it that, given the inevitability of
  change, individuals and whole cultures succeed in
  preserving their identity in time?
• How could it be that young persons in general,
  and Aboriginal youth in particular, attempt and
  succeed in killing themselves at rates
  dramatically higher than other age or cultural
  groups?
• How did it come to pass that Canadas Aboriginal
  population, and in particular its youth, has the
  highest known suicide rate of any culturally
  identifiable group in the world?

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Six Easy Pieces - An Overview

• Part I The one self to a customer rule
• Part II Age related change in self-continuity
  warranting practices
• Part III Self-continuity in suicidal
  non-suicidal youth
• Part IV The epidemiology of suicide in First
  Nations communities
• Part V Cross-cultural comparisons
• Part VI Potential Action Policy Implications

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Part I The One Self to a
Customer Rule

• The Antinomy of Sameness and Change

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I The One Self To A Customer Rule

• If they are to remain recognizable as instances
  of what selves are ordinarily taken to be
  (Cassire, 1923), individual selves must satisfy
  at least two constitutive conditions
• We are all works in progress, forced by the
  temporally vectored nature of our public and
  private existence to constantly change.
• Inevitable change not withstanding, selves must
  be satisfactorily understood to somehow remain
  recognizably the same.
• As such, sameness within change, or personal
  continuity is not an elective feature of
  selves, but a constitutive condition of their
  coming into being (Habermas, 1991).

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Bows Sterns

• Life is like a skiff moving
  through time with a bow as
  well as a stern
  (William James)
• The conviction that earlier and later
  manifestations of a life must somehow count as
  belonging timelessly to one and the same
  continuant is necessary for at least two reasons,
  
• one of which is quintessentially historical and
  backwards referring (responsibility the moral
  order),
• the other forward anticipating, and so all about
  our own as yet unrealized futuresabout being
  around to enjoy our own just deserts.

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Part II Age related change in self-continuity
warranting practices

• A Methodology

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Assessing Self-Continuity
Continuity in ones own life, and the lives of
familiar story characters Jean
Valjean Ebineezer Scrooge Self-descriptions
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Two solution strategies Solving the paradox of
personal persistence

• Essentialist arguments (Self as enduring
  Entity)
• find some aspect or feature of the self that
  endures despite change in other quarters
• Narrative arguments (Self as a followable
  story)
• Identify relations that weave together the
  multiple time-slices of our lives

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A typology of alternative self-continuity warrants
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Essentialist Accounts

• Simple Inclusion continuity is assured by the
  survival of at least one atomic part
• Topological change is merely presentational
• Epigenetic the present was prefigured in the
  past lies in wait for its proper moment of
  ascendancy
• Frankly Essentialist the present is a phenotypic
  variation upon an unchanging genotype
• Theory-based identity is a bracketed or
  provisionally held theory of the self

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Narrative Accounts

• Episodic self as simple chronology (i.e., life
  is one damned thing after another)
• Picaresque knights rogues
• Causal the present is the effect of which the
  past is the cause
• Narrative continuity is supplied by a
  discoverable plot
• Interpretive the re-storying of ones life

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Level of Reasoning by Age
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Part III Self-Continuityin suicidal and
non-suicidal youth.
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Type of continuity warrant by suicidal status
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Part IV The epidemiology of suicide in First
Nations communities

• Cultural continuity as a protective factor
  against suicide in first nations youth

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Native Suicide

• Canadian First Nations suffer from the highest
  rate of suicide of any culturally identifiable
  group in the world
• Native suicide rate is 3 times higher than the
  rate for the general Canadian population
• Native youth are 5-200 times more likely to die
  of suicide than are their non-native peers

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Population Statistics Youth
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Aboriginal suicide rates as actuarial fiction

• Variability as a function of
• Health Region
• Census District
• Band/Tribal Council

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Suicide by Census District
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Suicide by Band Youth Rate
1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Band (names removed)
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Suicide by Tribal Council Youth Rate
140
120
100
80
60
40
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0
1
2
3
4
5
6
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THE OPEN QUESTION

• What distinguishes Aboriginal communities with no
  youth suicides from those in which the rate is
  alarmingly high?

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What Doesnt Work

• Urban/Rural/Remote location
• Children and youth in care
• Family structure
• Population density
• Income adequacy
• Unemployment
• Labour force skill levels
• Education completion rates

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Cultural Reconstruction

• Self-government
• Land Claims
• Education
• Health Services
• Police/Fire services
• Cultural Facilities
• Women in government
• Child Protection Services

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Community Factors
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Youth suicide rate by number of factors present
in community (1987-1992)
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Overall rate by number of factors (1993-2000)
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Part V Cross-Cultural
Comparisons

• The choice between Narrativist and Essentialist
  self-continuity warrant practices

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Urban / Rural Communities
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First Nations story materials
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Participants
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Form of Self Understanding by Cultural Group

• Reliance upon Essentialist vs. Narrative
  forms is strongly associated with culture

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Part VI Potential Action Policy Implications

• The Myth of the Monolithic Indigene
• Indigenous Knowledge, Knowledge Transfer, the
  Exchange of Best Practices

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The Myth of the Monolithic IndigeneThe
actuarial fiction that it is possible to
capture the diversity of a whole provinces or
countrys Aboriginal life in a single, totalizing
(often statistical) gaze.

• What the research summarized plainly shows is
  that the youth suicide rates observed across the
  different Aboriginal communities in BC presents a
  wildly saw-toothed picture. As such, while it
  continues to be statistically true that the
  overall provincial rate of youth suicide is
  alarmingly high, such summary statistics tells us
  nothing about any particular group or community
  that deserves being acted upon. As such, all
  totalizing blanket statements created by
  arithmetically averaging across all of the real
  cultural diversity that does existall attempts
  to tar everyone with the same broad
  brushautomatically amount to actuarial
  fictionsmyths that, in addition to being
  seriously misleading and defamatory, tend to
  sponsor the misappropriation of scarce human and
  financial resources

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II. Indigenous Knowledge, Knowledge Transfer,
The Exchange of Best Practices

• Second, clearly contained in the finding that
  more than half of BCs Aboriginal communities
  have youth suicide rates lower than the general
  population is the evident fact that real
  knowledge about how to address this problem must
  evidently already be well sedimented within these
  communities. Such groups must, we are forced to
  assume, know and do things that are unknown or
  left undone by other communities (both Aboriginal
  and non-Aboriginal) where youth suicide is
  epidemic. If proper attention and weight were
  given to this fact, then it would become
  necessary to radically re-think two of
  governments most cherished catch-phrases of the
  day knowledge transfer and the exchange of
  best practices.

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Knowledge Transfer

• Knowledge transfer, as commonly understood, is a
  top down process by means of which scientific
  knowledge generated within the Academy is made to
  trickle-down until it eventually reaches
  community level workers. In addition to being
  suspect on other grounds, such made in Ottawa
  solutions are broadly seen as disrespectful by
  served communities, and openly confirmatory the
  positional inferiority commonly accorded to
  Aboriginal culture.
• What the research that I have presented suggests
  as an alternative is that if indigenous knowledge
  is recognized as real knowledge, then, in the
  place of more traditional top-down approaches,
  what needs to be seriously explored is the
  possibility of a community-to-community,
  lateral transfer of knowledges and best
  practices between groups that have enjoyed
  greater and lesser levels of success in meeting
  the needs of their own developing youth.

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Conclusions Six Easy Pieces

• Recourse to some conceptual means of preserving a
  sense of personal persistence is a recurrent
  parameter of self-understanding, perhaps common
  to all human cultures.
• Young people come to different understandings of
  the grounds for their own personal persistence at
  several different junctures in the course of
  their own identity development.
• Those adolescents who fail to successfully
  sustain some self-continuity warranting
  strategies suffer a loss of connectedness to
  their own future, and are thereby placed at
  special risk for suicide.

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Six easy pieces

• Individual and cultural continuity are strongly
  linked, such that First Nations communities that
  succeed in taking steps to preserve their
  heritage culture and work to control their own
  destinies are dramatically more successful in
  insulating their youth against the risks of
  suicide.
• Different cultures serve to promote different
  approaches to the problem of personal
  persistence, with essentialist strategies more
  favored among those young persons who are a
  product of Euro-American culture, while
  aboriginal adolescents more often chose narrative
  means of warranting their own and others
  self-continuity.

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Six easy pieces

• There are at least two obvious action or policy
  implications that flow from the research that I
  have summarized. One of these turns upon
  exposing as false what I have called the myth of
  the monolithic indigene the actuarial
  fiction that is possible to capture the
  diversity of a whole provinces or countrys
  Aboriginal life in a single, totalizing (often
  statistical) gaze. The second is that, in light
  of the rich fund of indigenous knowledges and
  practices shown to be scattered throughout the
  Aboriginal population, traditional top-down
  strategies of knowledge transfer should be
  retired in favor of a more lateral
  community-to-community exchange of best practices.

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Thank you

• E-mail chandler_at_interchange.ubc.ca