Suicide rate in Nunavut capital lower among teen boys

New research indicates the suicide rate among teenage boys in Iqaluit is much lower compared to teenage boys in other Nunavut communities.(PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

The suicide rate among teenage boys in Iqaluit is much lower compared to teenage boys in other Nunavut communities, new research has found.

Researcher Jack Hicks, a former suicide prevention advisor to the Government of Nunavut and to Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, analysed the territory’s suicide statistics dating back to its creation in 1999.

Hicks found that boys aged 15 to 19 living in Iqaluit died by suicide at a rate of about one in 400, roughly a third of the rate of Inuit teenage boys living in other Nunavut communities, where about one in 110 have died by suicide.

The rate of suicide among Iqaluit teenage boys, however, remains 20 times the national average: 2011 statistics show that only one in every 8,000 Canadian teenage boys die by suicide.

In Nunavut’s smaller communities, the suicide rate among teenage boys is 40 times the national average.

Some sort of social force may at work, not only in Iqaluit but in other large Arctic centres, said Hicks, who presented his findings to the Gender Equity in the Arctic conference held last month in Akureyri, Iceland.

Researchers in Alaska and Greenland have made similar findings, Hicks said: that teenage boys living in larger centres in those jurisdictions also experience a much lower rate of suicide than their counterparts in smaller communities.

The question Hicks puts forward now is: why?

“I think people need to think about what’s happening in places like Nuuk, Fairbanks, Anchorage and Iqaluit that is leading to fewer suicides,” Hicks said. “There’s something happening in those centres.”

The difference could be due to social and cultural changes and even the availability of social programs, he said, some of which don’t exist, or take longer to implement, in smaller communities.

“The answer isn’t necessarily to move young people to larger centres,” he added. “But I would love if people working on this topic factored that into their thinking.”

Hicks is working on a PhD thesis which is examining social determinants behind the high rates of suicide among Inuit youth.

Nunavut saw its highest number of suicides in 2013, when 45 Nunavummiut took their own lives.

And that has prompted a renewed a focus on the territory’s suicide crisis, heightened this past fall with news that an 11-year-old boy died by suicide in a Baffin community.

His research notes the dramatic increase of suicide in Inuit communities starting in the 1970s, and he links the trend to historical trauma experienced by Nunavummiut, particularly in the territory’s Qikiqtani region, whose communities have the territory’s highest suicide rates.

In the context of Nunavut Inuit, historical trauma can refer to a series of events Inuit experienced since their first contact with southern authorities, who, among other things, imposed a residential school system and forced relocations into communities, Hicks said.

And, because historical trauma is collective and intergenerational, Hicks said future research ought to look at the “protective” factors — how men and women experience and process that historical trauma.

Since the territory’s creation 15 years ago, there were too few suicides by young women to include them in this particular research, he noted.

Boys and men in Nunavut are clearly at higher risk of dying by suicide: since 1999, 453 people have died that way in Nunavut, and 76 per cent of them have been male.