Inuit Youth Suicide

Final Term Paper

In Michael Krahl’s “The Weight on Our Shoulders Is Too Much, and We Are Falling”: Suicide among Inuit Male Youth in Nunavut, Canada he discusses the major impact of mental illness on the youth of the Inuit society. In “Incorporating the prosthetic: Traumatic, limb-loss, rehabilitation and refigured military bodies” Seth Messinger discusses the importance of mental stability when dealing with the limb loss of veterans. In both of these articles, the common claim I will be making is, despite its vitality, clinicians must stop ignoring the mental stability of patients enduring major life crises in order to allow them to better assimilate within society. In both of these articles, the strong sense of untreated mental instability
He conducts his research through ethnographic fieldwork from 2004-2005, which includes 27 interviews with Inuit between the ages of 17 and 61. Overall he states that the rapid culture change in Inuit society has left the colony destabilized within their kinship social organization which leads to high suicides rates in male youth. The Inuit people had to assimilate to a totally different social structure when the government began to control their region in the 1950’s. The forced colonialism inevitably ruined the kinship and social structure of the community. This newly unstable society has greatly affected the modern day Inuit
He states “Most suicides take place during the night when the family is asleep, where young Inuit typically hang themselves quietly on the clothes rod in their bedroom closets, facing the wall on the left side. The body is discovered by family members in the morning. Not many suicide notes are found, but the few I have seen in the coroner’s files have thematically been about broken love relationships. Romantic, family, and intergenerational relations are described below together with suicidality in the context of colonial change” (67). The mutual technique and theme behind these suicides are causing a contagious uproar amongst youth. When one individual commits suicide, their friends are quick to follow as if it was a trend. Ultimately, Krahl concludes that suicide has become a post colonial social disorder that is supported by a strong lack of communication between families and their children. The rising number of suicides within the Inuit can be easily attributed to the untreated mental instability within this