A new report on Nunavut's most tragic social problem suggests the reasons young people are killing themselves aren't that much different than anywhere else.
It's just that many of the causes are so much more prevalent in Nunavut.
"Virtually no one in this territory has not been touched by suicide," said Natan Obed, one of three authors of the report on what is a debilitating problem in the territory. "That's just what life has become here."
Inuit men between 15 and 24 kill themselves at a rate roughly 28 times that of their peers in southern Canada -- about 600 per 100,000, the report says.
It also points out that almost half of patients in their 20s at Iqaluit's Qikiqtani General Hospital are admitted with injuries from trying to kill themselves.
A 2008 study cited in Obed's report found that nearly half of 111 residents surveyed in one community had considered suicide during the previous week. More than a quarter of them had tried it at least once during the previous year.
Obed used coroner's reports to try to identify common themes behind Nunavut's suicides. What he found would sound familiar to social workers anywhere: relationship breakdowns, physical or sexual abuse, poor education, run-ins with the law, parenting issues, drugs and booze.
But most of those problems are magnified in Nunavut. Figures show the territory's rate of sexual assault in 2007 was 10 times the Canadian rate. Only one-quarter of students who go to school graduate.
In addition, Inuit are dealing with something the report calls "historical trauma" -- the cumulative effect of massive social change forced on a people over a short period.
The report notes there was only one suicide in what is now Nunavut during the entire 1960s. But as the first generation of Inuit began to grow up in communities, divorced from traditional life and cultural roles, suicides began to rise until they reached their current average of 27 a year.
A psychiatrist who worked for a year at the Qikiqtani hospital was asked how his Inuit patients compared with those he saw in Toronto.
"Psychiatric issues in the Arctic appear deeply interwoven with interpersonal, socio-economic and societal changes," the report quotes him as saying.
"Effective community mental health services must address a broad spectrum of psycho-social issues beyond the medical model."
That's what Obed hopes his report will lead to. It was written for the territorial government as well as the land claim organization Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., as an attempt to create a unified suicide prevention program across the Eastern Arctic.
"We wanted to focus a lot on communities and on supports for families," Obed said.
Many current suicide prevention programs focus on building self-esteem in young people by sending them to land camps, which teach traditional skills, or to hip-hop workshops relaying positive messages through contemporary culture.
But simply improving the skills of Nunavummiut to spot a son or friend or student in distress would go a long way, Obed said. Trained counsellors should also be available in all communities, he suggested.
"Some communities provide great community mental health supports. In other communities, there's virtually nothing."
More than 40 per cent of health-worker positions in Nunavut's 28 communities were unfilled as of last June, according to government documents.
Politicians and aboriginals also need to get together, said Obed, who is also director of social development for Nunavut Tunngavik.
"A lot of what needs to happen is just better co-ordination between all the groups that really care and really want to do something."
The report was released just a day before Julien Tologanak, 20, of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, leapt to his death from a small plane flying 7,000 metres above sea level. No one knows for sure if the young man intended to take his life.
