Michael Chandler, a Canadian research psychologist, has received a lot of attention for his work demonstrating how culture moderates the suicidal behaviour of First Nation Canadians. It’s been cited approvingly by many Australian academics examining the rate of suicide amongst Indigenous youth. In particular, Chandler and Lalonde’s 1998 article published in Transcultural Psychology highlights the findings of decades worth of research. I reproduce the abstract here for your benefit:
This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults – who are living through moments of especially dramatic change – constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia’s nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbia’s 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower [emphasis my own].
It’s a persuasive thesis and it has reaffirmed to me just how much sociologists could learn from psychologists of Chandler’s ilk. What I found especially insightful was the theoretical and empirical breadth and depth with which Chandler proposes his theory of the relationship between identity and suicide. Chandler has used his psychological theory of identity to demonstrate how suicidal behaviour is more of a risk when self-continuity is unstable. Given the disruptiveness of adolescence, Chandler and Lalonde use this theory of self-continuity to show why adolescent suicide is relatively high compared to other age groups. But when Chandler confronts the relatively high rates of suicide in Indigenous populations compared to non-Indigenous people he turns to an extension of his theory – his concept of cultural continuity - to explain this difference. As compelling as this argument is, I want to point to some problematic sociological assumptions that, I believe, recommend a very different conclusion. What I want to suggest from Chandler and Lalonde’s work is that communities that have taken active steps to adapt and modify their own cultures (to some extent) are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.