What Are The Causes
of These Psychological Problems? by Ian Brown

In the first section we talked about the difference between stress and distress. In looking at what factor caused which problem, it may help to use diagrams.

[ 1 ] What Are The Origins of Individual and Collective Distress?

The first important thing to realize is that the signs of distress, i.e. such things as family violence, grief, mental illness, substance abuse and suicide, are all interconnected. One problem (e.g. depression) can, and often does result in another (e.g. thoughts of suicide). This is what the horizontal list of words in the leaf-like shapes is supposed to indicate. The vertical arrows are double-headed because, just as one can say that suicide, for example, is a result of distress, it is also a potential cause of yet more distress (for other members of the family).
Much has been written about the ‘risk’ and ‘protective’ factors for mental illness, specifically suicide, and that is what we will turn our attention to now.

[ 2 ] What Are Risk Factors For
Suicide and Other Forms of Mental Illness?

There is now agreement between First Nations and the Canadian government that the historical stressors referred to in the above diagram are a prime cause of much, if not all, of the distress. The 1995 report entitled Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (RCAP) says:

“The profile of mental disorders among Aboriginal people is primarily a by-product of our colonial past with its layered assaults on Aboriginal cultures and personal
identities.”

In other words, the self-destructive behaviour of Aboriginal people cannot be analyzed primarily in terms of ‘mental disorders’, but must be looked at in the context of historical colonial relations. Canada’s Indian Policy’s original goals were that of ‘Protection, Civilization and Assimilation’, which in turn suggests that Native people were an inferior, uncivilized group, lacking the moral qualities of the colonizing societies. The internalizing of feelings of inferiority has been referred to as ‘psycho-colonization’. Historically, it produced a state of mind that played an important role in the development of such ailments as clinical depression and anxiety disorders.
The following five areas have been identified as risk factors for suicide: psycho-biological (i.e. mind and body), life history, situational, socio-economic, and culture stress. The following is a summary of the main findings with respect to each area.

[ a ] Psycho-biological

Health providers suggested that unresolved grief may be a widespread psychobiological
problem. Grief comes from the heartache of losing someone or something dear to you. As has been pointed out many times, the history of aboriginal peoples in Canada is one of losing one thing after another: loss of language, loss of culture, loss of land, loss of tradition, loss of lifestyle. Loss of family members, friends or neighbours due to suicide adds yet another aspect to this pattern of multiple loss.
With respect to unresolved grief, Katie Moores, a social worker who gave an address entitled ‘Grief In The Inuit’ (Widening the Circle, 1997, pp. 40-42), referred to statistics showing that in the Inuit community, everybody knows somebody who has committed suicide. Statistics also indicate that a person who knows someone who has committed suicide is eight times more likely to commit suicide himself or herself.

[ b ] Life History

The individual may have experienced trauma due to a life history of:
disrupted relationships with caregivers
unexpected death in the family
abuse (sexual, physical, emotional, psychological)
chronic family instability and multiple home placements
family dysfunction and breakdown
conflict and rejection in significant relationships
criminal justice encounters
substance abuse
lack of religious and/or spiritual connections

[ c ] Situational

The stability and security of the individual’s home environment may have been disrupted due to:

residential schools
adoption
forced relocation
fly-out hospitalizations

The first three items, the removal of children from their families to attend residential schools, adoption, and forced relocation (in some cases of whole communities) were all part of the Canadian government’s policies of assimilation.
From 1879 to 1973, the Canadian government mandated church-run boarding schools to provide education for Aboriginal children. Over 100,000 children were taken from their homes and subjected to an institutional approach that tried to re-mould them with a new, more ‘acceptable’ identity. Studies have shown that children who went through this system report overwhelming feelings of loss, depression and loneliness. In addition, separation from family and community also resulted in the inability to develop effective parenting skills.
Aboriginal parents were not necessarily seen as ‘unacceptable’ parents, but as incapable of ‘educating’ and passing on ‘proper’ European values to their children. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal government handed over responsibility for Aboriginal health, welfare and educational services to the provinces. Child and Welfare services focused on the prevention of ‘child neglect’. Such ‘neglect’ was mainly linked to poverty and other social problems. However, improving care within the family was not given priority and provincial child welfare policies did not include preventive family counselling services, as they did in the case of non-Aboriginal families. In fact, Child and Welfare services did not even try to keep the family together physically. As a result, social workers usually chose adoption and long-term foster care for Aboriginal children that they took into care.
By the end of the 1960s, fully 30 to 40 per cent of the children who were legal wards of the state were Aboriginal children – in stark contrast to the rate of 1 per cent in 1959 (Fournier and Crey, 1997).
Forced relocations were a particularly devastating form of stress as they involved a complete change of circumstances. The ‘experiment’ of relocating Inuit to the Far North to protect Canadian sovereignty was just a late chapter in the process of forced culture change (Dickason, 1992). The effect was not only to take away control from individuals and communities but also to undermine their trust in outside authority and justice.

[ d ] Socio-economic

forced transition from living off the land to
wage earning and welfare economy
limited employment opportunities
high rates of poverty
inadequate housing
inadequate health services
deficiencies in sanitation and water quality

The shift from an economy based on living off the land to one based on wage earning has left many people, young and old, feeling like strangers in their own culture. In many aboriginal communities there are few jobs, and those that exist are often demanding and out of reach for those with low levels of education.
In 1991, the average income for Aboriginal people was about 60 per cent of that of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Despite efforts at income assistance and community development, this gap has widened over the decades since 1980. While traditional subsistence activities (hunting, trapping, fishing, etc.) have become less profitable, culture contact with the mainstream society has created a demand for new goods. The presence of mass media even in remote communities bombards everybody with the values of consumer capitalism and creates feelings of deprivation and lack where none existed before.

In Inuit communities, ill health has been strongly associated with a lack of ‘country foods’. In Nunavik, elderly Inuit reported a need for beluga whale skin because it is reported to alleviate feelings of depression by energizing the system through its effect on the blood and hence the body and mind.
The unemployment rate for Natives both on and off reserves is generally high. Studies show that mental illness and rates of suicide are strongly connected to both poverty and unemployment. The poor economic conditions affecting most Native communities damage self-esteem and can result in depression, drug and alcohol use, and family
violence, all of which contribute to the high suicide rate.
In terms of housing conditions, dwellings with more than one occupant per room are 16 times more likely on reserves, and often water supply and sewage disposal are inadequate. Community mental health facilities are nonexistent in the majority of communities: these communities lack the financial and human resources to undertake mental health programming independently. Many tragic outcomes of distress could be prevented if supportive and crisis intervention services were available. Hospitalization, violent acts and mismanaged child sex abuse disclosures are frequently the outcome of long waiting lists and an inability to access appropriate services.
As for low levels of education, one example of this is literacy rates. Studies show that 45 per cent of all status Indians living on reserves are illiterate, contributing to the difficulty of competing in the job market and impairing the communication of
traditional culture.

[ e ] Culture Stress

“Culture stress is a term used to refer to the loss of confidence in the ways of understanding life and living that have been taught within a particular culture. It comes about when the complexity of relationships, knowledge, languages, social
institutions, beliefs, values, and ethical rules that bind a people and give them a collective sense of who they are and where they belong is subjected to change. For aboriginal people, such things as loss of land and control over living conditions,
suppression of belief systems and spirituality,
weakening of social and political institutions, and racial discrimination have seriously damaged their confidence and thus predisposed them to suicide, self-injury and other self-destructive behaviours.” (RCAP, 1995)
This definition of ‘culture stress’, however, omits to mention the fact that 90 per cent of the indigenous population of North America died as a result of the direct and indirect effects of culture contact with European settlers. Estimates of this population range upwards from about seven million prior to the 18th century. For example, Northern Iroquoian peoples may have shrunk from about 110,000 in the 16th and early 17th centuries to about 8,000 by 1850.

[ 3 ] What Are Protective Factors For Suicide and Other Forms of Mental Illness?

In 1997, an Australian study of youth suicide listed the following protective factors that can
decrease the risk of suicide:

a strong sense of the value and meaning of life
individual and collective self-esteem
belief in survival and coping
fear of suicide and moral objections to suicide
skills in stress management, communication and problem-solving
support from peers and family
family responsibilities
community support networks
a sense of belonging

But what about the situation in Canada - specifically, Aboriginal youth suicides? Earlier in this article it was reported that for Aboriginal youth between the ages of 10 and 19, the rate of suicide is five to six times higher than for their non-Aboriginal counterparts. As Kirmayer and associates point out (1999), “there are specific developmental issues in adolescence and young adulthood that contribute to making this age group most vulnerable to suicide in Aboriginal communities. Youth are involved in gradual differentiation from their families of origin and the development of a network of peer relationships. When families have been troubled, this process of separation can be complicated and upsetting. Given the limited job opportunities, young people may have few positive expectations for the future.
Meanwhile, through mass media, they are
confronted with images of a global youth culture that seems to enjoy great freedom and material wealth. Most importantly, as has already been discussed, the transmission of cultural tradition and identity has been disrupted due to generations of cultural oppression. As a result, the processes of initiation and integration into adult society that once gave youth a sense of their past and a valued role in their community have been replaced by the improvised attempts of peer groups to create a sense of belonging and identity.”
It is this factor of cultural discontinuity that is focused upon in a recent study of youth suicide in British Columbia. Chandler and Lalonde (1998) did research in which they traced back to their band of origin every known Native youth suicide that occurred in British Columbia between the years 1987 and 1992. They succeeded in calculating not only how many suicides occurred within the province as a whole, but also the actual number of such deaths that occurred in each of the province’s different Native bands and tribal councils.
They discovered that more than half the bands experienced NO youth suicides while others suffered rates more than 800 times the national average. Some 90 per cent of known suicides occurred in less than 10 per cent of these extended communities.

Having discovered this startling fact, they set out to find the reasons why. They discovered that some bands are successful in insulating their young from suicide in ways that others are not. Specifically, they found that of the 196 Native bands of British Columbia, those that took an active role in establishing local control and the preservation and continuation of culture had substantially lower youth suicide rates. The authors identify six indicators of the kind of local control that can facilitate what they call ‘cultural continuity’, i.e. a sense of psychological connection between past, present and future. These are:
community control of fire and police services
community control of health
community control of education
existence of local facilities for cultural activities
self-government
involvement in land claims

Other protective factors against suicide have been identified as good school performance, regular attendance at church and a good relationship with the community. Given that youth suicide rates are highest for males, it is also important to note that many people have pointed out how beneficial it has been for young men to spend time in the bush. The Cree, for example, continue to practice traditional hunting activities, which provide not only an important source of food but also a way of life with significant social and spiritual meaning, which contribute to a sense of well-being.
In Quebec, where the Inuit, Attikamekw and several other nations have very high rates of suicide, the Cree population has rates no higher than the rest of the province. (Petawabano et al., 1994)