Suicide and Inuit youth

Canadian suicide rates (per 100,000 people): Inuit, First Nations, all Canadians. Source

From Alaska to Greenland, young Inuit have unusually high rates of suicide, attempted suicide, and suicidal ideation. According to a 1972 survey of Inuit 15 to 24 years old from northern Quebec, 28% of the males and 25% of the females had attempted suicide (Kirmayer et al., 1998). Before the 1970s, suicide was rare among Inuit youth. Today, it has reached epidemic proportions.

Public authorities have responded largely by targeting those factors, like alcohol and drug abuse, that make it easier to go from thinking about suicide to actually doing it. While these efforts are having some success, there still remains the problem of suicidal ideation.

Why do so many Inuit youth contemplate suicide? Kirmayer et al. (1998) point to a prevailing sense of uselessness:

Inuit youth are confronted with the values of an individualistic, consumption-oriented society through mass media but have few opportunities to achieve the life-style portrayed. The result may be a sense of frustration, limited options, and difficulty imagining an optimistic future. This may extend to an impaired sense of self-continuity that contributes to attempted suicide.

Dufour (1994) argues that Inuit society has a long tradition of people ending their lives when they feel they have become useless. In the past, however, this kind of suicide involved only the elderly:

Suicide in early Inuit society was viewed positively when the individual had become a burden for the group. “Senilicide” in particular was deemed to be acceptable and appropriate. Its pattern: a usually elderly person motivated by illness, helplessness, bereavement, dependence on the group, famine, or resource shortage who would decide after consulting family members who sometimes could be called upon to assist. In contemporary Inuit society, the elderly no longer commit suicide. The young people do.

TV and video present young Inuit with an affluent lifestyle that is unattainable for all but a few. Meanwhile, school presents learning goals and standards of behavior that are likewise difficult to attain, especially for boys. By postponing adulthood in order to extend the learning process, school also has the unintended effect of humiliating Inuit youth. In another age, they were treated as young adults, often being parents in their own right. Today, they are just “children.”

Many young Inuit thus perceive themselves as being socially useless. And this self-perception is triggering suicidal ideation.

Such ideation may seem irrational from an individualistic Western standpoint. You cannot make your life better by ending it. Yet it is less irrational from the standpoint of one’s kin group, especially in a context of limited resources. Such was the case with elderly Inuit who would choose death so as not to burden the younger members of their band, such people being close relatives for the most part.

In such a context, natural selection—specifically kin selection—might have favored suicide as a response to perceived uselessness. Such selection is possible. Suicidal ideation is significantly heritable and seems to be inherited as a specific behavioral response:

Suicidal behavior is highly familial, and on the basis of twin and adoption studies, heritable as well. Both completed and attempted suicide form part of the clinical phenotype that is familially transmitted, as rates of suicide attempt are elevated in the family members of suicide completers, and completion rates are elevated in the family members of attempters. A family history of suicidal behavior is associated with suicidal behavior in the proband, even after adjusting for presence of psychiatric disorders in the proband and family, indicating transmission of attempt that is distinct from family transmission of psychiatric disorder. (Brent & Mann, 2005)

According to a twin study using American subjects, suicidal ideation has 36% heritability and suicide attempt 17% heritability (Fu et al., 2002).

De Catanzaro (1991, 1995) has argued that suicidal ideation has evolved as a response to a situation where an individual has become a burden to immediate kin. In studies of the general public and high-risk groups (elderly and psychiatric patients), he found that the strongest correlate of suicidal ideation was burdensomeness to family and, for males, lack of heterosexual activity. As Buss (1999, p. 94) concludes: “If a person is a burden to his or her family, for example, then the kin’s reproduction, and hence the person’s own fitness might suffer as a result of his or her survival.”

The threshold for suicidal ideation may be lower in some human populations than in others, depending on one’s risk of becoming a serious burden on kinfolk. This risk is high in Arctic hunting bands because their members are almost entirely close kin and because their nomadic lifestyle limits food storage for lean times. When food is scarce, who eats and who doesn’t? The question is especially difficult because close kin are involved. The easiest solution, in terms of keeping the peace and maintaining group cohesion, is one where the burdensome individual voluntarily bows out.

What does all of this mean for young Inuit who are thinking of suicide? Clearly, it is not enough to focus on things that facilitate the transition from suicidal ideation to actual suicide. That approach might work in southern Canada, where suicide tends to result from transient episodes that push people up and over the threshold of suicidal ideation. Among the Inuit, the threshold seems to be lower and the focus should be more on preventing ideation, specifically by giving young Inuit a greater feeling of self-worth and social usefulness.

References

Brent, D.A. & J.J. Mann. (2005). Family genetic studies, suicide, and suicidal behavior, American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics, 133C, 13-24.

Buss, D.M. (1999). Evolutionary Psychology. The New Science of the Mind, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

de Catanzaro, D. (1991). Evolutionary limits to self-preservation, Ethology and Sociobiology, 12, 13-28.

de Catanzaro, D. (1995). Reproductive status, family interactions, and suicidal ideation: Surveys of the general public and high-risk group, Ethology and Sociobiology, 16, 385-394.

Dufour, R. (1994). Pistes de recherche sur les sens du suicide des adolescents inuit, Santé mentale au Québec, 19, 145-162.

Fu, Q., A.C. Heath, K.K. Bucholz, E.C. Nelson, A.L. Glowinski, J. Goldberg, M.J. Lyons, M.T. Tsuang, T. Jacob, M.R. True & S.A. Eisen. (2002). A twin study of genetic and environmental influences on suicidality in men, Psychological Medicine, 32, 11-24.

Kirmayer, L.J., L.J. Boothroyd, S. Hodgins (1998). Attempted Suicide among Inuit youth: Psychosocial correlates and implications for prevention, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 43, 816–822.