Suicide Epidemic Among Youth in Indian Reservations

In case you haven't been thinking of equality in the treatment of depression and mental health when it comes to the whole healthcare issue, think again. This story from the NYT illustrates the impact on a small community in extreme poverty when there are few or no mental health services available, especially the threat to the lives of adolescents:

ROSEBUD, S.D. — The two suicides struck the Rosebud Sioux Reservation like a random virus. No one saw them coming.
At the reservation, Luke and Gaylord Black Spotted Horse. Suicide has become the second-leading cause of death for Indian youths.
The young man, 19 years old, played varsity football and basketball at Todd County High School. He was admired across the reservation, in that way small towns follow and celebrate their teenage athletes. The girl, weeks shy of her 14th birthday, made straight A’s at Todd County Middle School, played volleyball and basketball and led a traditional Lakota drum corps.

They hanged themselves. This happened at the end of a particularly brutal two and a half months, from Jan. 1 to March 13, when tribal authorities were called to three suicides and scores of attempts. The next day, with the reservation (population 13,000) reeling, tribal officials declared a state of emergency.

Since then, a woman in her early 20s killed herself with pills, and scores more young people have tried to kill themselves — a total of 144 so far this year, at doctors’ best count; the computer used for recordkeeping was down for six weeks. In May, seven youths who tried hanging, poisoning or slashing themselves to death were admitted to the reservation hospital in one 24-hour period.

What is happening at Rosebud is all too common throughout Indian Country. American Indian and Alaska Native youth 15 to 24 years old are committing suicide at a rate more than three times the national average for their age group of 13 per 100,000 people, according to the surgeon general. Often, one suicide leads to another. For these youths, suicide has become the second-leading cause of death (after accidents). In the Great Plains, the suicide rate among Indian youth is the worst: 10 times the national average.

Here at Rosebud, when six high school girls were approached at the Boys and Girls Club one recent afternoon for their reactions to the suicides, four said they had tried suicide. The four compared notes on their methods — two slashed their wrists, two overdosed on pills — and their motives. “There are a lot of reasons,” said Areina Young, a 16-year-old cheerleader at Todd County High who overdosed on sleeping pills and codeine in February. “We have a lot of issues.”

Plains reservations are among the poorest places in the country, with all of poverty’s consequences. But the why of the suicide phenomenon — why American Indian youth, why the Great Plains — is complicated, experts say. The traumas Plains tribes have experienced over the last 175 years — massacres like the one at Wounded Knee, the decimation of their land and culture — are part of it.

“Very generally, adolescence is a time of trouble for all youths,” said Philip May, a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico who has been studying suicide among American Indians for more than 35 years. “But in many American Indian communities, it’s compounded by limited opportunities, historical trauma and contemporary discrimination. The way the Lakota people and other Plains tribes have experienced history in the last 100 years has reduced the mental health factors that are available to them to cope.”

Tribal leaders at Rosebud took a survey of Todd County students in March. The students’ biggest complaint was that they did not feel safe for fear of gangs. They said that they had no refuge, that their parents were not present, and that they saw too much tragedy, alcoholism and hopelessness.

In response, tribal and community leaders have redoubled their efforts to stem the reservation’s gang problem. They have organized after-school programs, sponsored talks by motivational speakers and made school counselors widely available.

At the same time, schools and the community at large are not commemorating those that kill themselves, said Victoria Sherman, the principal at Todd County High School. She refused, she said, to allow an elaborate memorial during this year’s graduation for a student who killed himself last year on graduation day. “We don’t want to encourage desperate acts,” Ms. Sherman said.

Federal lawmakers are also beginning to address the problem. Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, recently introduced a bill to combat child abuse and Indian youth suicide. The legislation would provide increased resources for suicide prevention training and treatment.

With few places for students on this sprawling reservation to congregate — some commute as far as 40 miles each way to school — the Boys and Girls Club, a former bowling alley, opened before it was ready so students could have a place to gather after school.

Rosebud and the neighboring Pine Ridge reservation, using a $400,000 federal grant, have started training community members and school employees in suicide prevention and intervention.

But tribal leaders say they need more concrete help to turn the situation around. The reservation has only four full-time mental health professionals, and two are leaving soon, said the Rosebud tribal president, Rodney Bordeaux.

“We did the emergency declaration because we needed to get attention,” Mr. Bordeaux said. “We’re saying, we need more funding, more help, now.”

Health services are seriously underfinanced on reservations nationwide. For over a decade, Congress has failed to reauthorize a law that would increase aid.

Officially, three youths at Rosebud committed suicide last year and 193 tried. But not all suicides or attempts involve calls to the police, officials here said.

The group of girls who had attempted suicide said they all knew others who had tried several times.

“A lot of people are just trying to get attention,” Areina Young said.

One girl in the group, a 15-year-old, had swallowed a bottle of Tylenol on April 14 and spent two weeks in the hospital.

“Me, I had a really good explanation,” she said. She started into a horrific story of being raped by her half-brother for years before he was arrested two years ago; of her and her siblings being routinely abandoned for months at a time by their mother, an alcoholic; of her grandmother beating her.

“But now I know that suicide is the permanent solution to temporary problems,” she said. “Counseling really helped me a lot. Put down that we need more counseling. For me, right now, I need it every day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09suicide.html

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company Read more!

ARE WE SICK? OVER 40,000 VIOLENT DEATHS IN U.S. PER YEAR

OK, here’s just one reason I’m tired of the focus on the huge, media-vulture events and our knee-jerk compulsive-obsessive responses to them. I’m as exasperated as most Americans with our lack of progress to end this stupid Occupation of Iraq, and the ongoing disaster in Afghanistan. The fact is, though, I would be immensely exasperated even if we didn’t have these occupations going on, even if we weren’t the biggest arms dealers usually to both sides of any conflict anywhere in the world.

On average every year since 9/11, about 20,000 young people from ages 10-34 die violently – they either commit suicide or are murdered.

We’re supposed to have a “terrorism” crisis, and it’s supposed to be coming from outside the US, with some “homegrown terror cells” too. We’re spending billions (let’s just forget “millions” as a large measure anymore, when we’re dealing with budget deficits in the trillions) to “prevent terrorism”. We’re spying on regular people’s web surfing habits, emails and phone calls because over 3,000 people were killed in a one-day attack.

Meanwhile, our young people, as young as age 10, are being murdered or committing suicide at the rate of 20,000 a year. These young people, people who could be (hopefully already haven’t been) our nieces, nephews, sons, daughters, young parents, grandchildren, cousins, brothers and sisters – all were not killed in a war. What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, we’re rightfully protesting the deaths of almost 4,000 soldiers now, along with the lifelong injuries of tens of thousands more. That’s been in four years. That’s about 1,000 soldiers a year – while 20,000 young people of about the same age as those soldiers (some much younger) are dieing right here in that same year.

Why don’t we care about these “domestic” deaths? Why don’t we demand, with equal vehemence, that our government deal with these deaths as a crisis? Twenty times as many people as soldiers in Iraq, some as young as 10, most between 15-34, die of violent causes every year. Another 9,000 or so people between 35-44 die violently, either by murder or suicide. That's almost 30,000 people between 10 and 44 years of age dieing violently in the US per year! Between the ages of 44-64, another 10,000 who haven’t been felled by cancer or heart disease or accidents are also murdered or commit suicide! In one year!

Inside our country, in one year over 27,000 people commit suicide; another 13,000 are killed. I'll bet you didn't know suicide kills more people than homicide, eh? You don't see a huge movement to arrest all those suicidal people and throw away the key [yet!] - your news only tells you that you must distrust your neighbor and expect to be murdered anytime, anywhere.

These 40,000+ violent deaths are from CDC statistics from 2004 – and as poverty spreads, despair and violence spread, and poverty has increased for millions of people in America. Expect higher numbers for 2005 and 2006.

So what do I want you to take from this? Well, keep it in perspective, please. While we’re being jerked around by our media and politicians to focus on things they control completely, we are letting these daily atrocities go, for the most part, unchallenged. These 40,000 murder/suicides per year are ripping at the very fabric of our existence. It’s as if we were being attacked by an outside enemy and mustering no defense whatsoever.

If it were an outsider killing this many in our country, even most of us who oppose empire-wars would join to defend ourselves against such a virulent attack. Why don’t we demand some national defense against this institutionalized (as in "routine", "ignored", "treated as normal") attack on our humanity?

Mental health PACs and interest groups aren’t in the news much (unless there’s a massacre!). They’ve never been busted for bribing legislators or singled out by those wonderful millionaires and actors who push the “liberal” agenda. Yet really, what’s more likely to impact our lives, our families, our homes? Are you or your loved ones more likely to die from global warming this year, or terrorism – or murder, or despair?

Take a look at the figures, and if life at home here in the US isn’t what it should be, let’s start demanding changes here, too, not just in our policies overseas. We won’t really value life any more elsewhere until we start valuing life (and not just fetuses) here. There are more demonstrations to protect fetuses than there are to stop the despair and violence within our own communities. It’s no coincidence that so many feel so helpless to change national and foreign policies when we live so tenuously right here.

We need mental health care for everyone that is fully paid for and available at many times the levels we have now. We need real mental health care, not pharmaceutical-industry-sponsored pill-pushing and “Ta-ta! See you when you need more!” We need to stop ignoring the despair that’s so close to home and so frightening to us all. We need to reach out to those who are close to the edge, not run from them – there’s nowhere to run; they’re in our communities, they are “us”.

Even in the presidential election endless season, only John Edwards stresses mental health for everyone, and Barack Obama wants improved mental health care for troops and veterans. None stress anything other than the methods and treatments that are obviously woefully inadequate. The 40,000 needless deaths will continue, year after year, while we wait for government and the media to even acknowledge it's a real problem they can help change.

As long as we have such easy access to weapons that easily kill others (and we always will so long as the US is the biggest arms dealer – by multiples! – in the world), we have to treat the epidemic of violence against others and ourselves as what it is – A CRISIS! Leaving millions of people in a state of poverty, anxiety and despair that could drive them to kill others and/or themselves is a stupid and cruel domestic policy.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/osp/charts.htm Read more!