Nunavik health officials launch first suicide prevention, healing event

The Puttautiit suicide prevention and healing conference runs from Oct. 5 to 10 in Puvirnnituq. (PHOTO COURTESY OF MAKIVIK CORP)

Nunavik’s first regional suicide prevention and healing conference gets underway in Puvirnituq Oct. 5, with the hope of empowering Nunavimmiut to respond to its own needs.

Nunavik’s regional board of health and social services and its regional suicide prevention committee, which is organizing the conference, is keeping the inaugural gathering small and tight-knit.

The event is expected to host about 66 participants, which will include two representatives from each community and 20 staff from different organizations including some front-line workers.

The conference, called Puttautiit, Inuktitut for life jackets, is modeled after the annual “Dialogue for Life” conference that takes place in Montreal, a suicide prevention event focused on the indigenous peoples of Quebec and Labrador.

The success of that event encouraged health officials to hold a gathering created by, and directly focused on, Nunavimmiut.

“[Suicide prevention] needs to be owned by the community,” health board director Minnie Grey told Nunatsiaq News in an interview last spring.

“It’s happening to our people, our families. History has always dictated that people from the outside come in to help. But we have to start changing that mentality — it’s us that have to do the work.”

In Puvirnituq, this year’s inaugural conference will include recreational and cultural activities as well as an exhibition to promote all the programs and services available to Nunavimmiut.

Participants from across the region will also take part in Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST, along with workshops that touch on the impact of the region’s colonial history, grieving and healing, the health board said this past summer.

The conference comes on the heels of a special inquest held in Nunavut last month to look at the territory’s high rate of suicide, and specifically, the record-high 45 suicides recorded in the territory in 2013 alone.

The inquest produced 30 recommendations on how Nunavut should respond to its suicide crisis including a call to the Government of Nunavut to declare suicide a public health emergency.

Because Nunavik is a region and not its own province or territory, statistics on suicide in Nunavik are more difficult to track than in Nunavut.

According to the Quebec coroner’s office and numbers cobbled together from Statistics Canada, between 2000 and 2011, 163 Nunavimmiut died by suicide, making it the second-highest cause of death in the region, just after cancer.

The region’s overall suicide rate is slightly higher than Nunavut’s over the same 11-year period.

Statistics on suicides in Nunavik from 2012 are still considered “provisional” while the Quebec coroner’s office completes investigations to confirm causes of death.

The health board says the Puttautiit conference will become an annual event in Nunavik, with the intention of hosting it in a different community every year.