Citation

Wexler L, White LA, O'Keefe VM, Rasmus S, Haroz EE, Cwik MF, Barlow A, Goklish N, Elliott E, Pearson CR, Allen J. Arch. Suicide Res. 2024; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, International Academy of Suicide Research, Publisher Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13811118.2023.2300321

PMID

38240632

Abstract

The persistence of extreme suicide disparities in American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth signals a severe health inequity with distinct associations to a colonial experience of historical and on-going cultural, social, economic, and political oppression. To address this complex issue, we describe three AI/AN suicide prevention efforts that illustrate how strengths-based community interventions across the prevention spectrum can buffer suicide risk factors associated with structural racism. Developed and implemented in collaboration with tribal partners using participatory methods, the strategies include universal, selective, and indicated prevention elements. Their aim is to enhance systems within communities, institutions, and families by emphasizing supportive relationships, cultural values and practices, and community priorities and preferences. These efforts deploy collaborative, local approaches, that center on the importance of tribal sovereignty and self-determination, disrupting the unequal power distribution inherent in mainstream approaches to suicide prevention. The examples emphasize the centrality of Indigenous intellectual traditions in the co-creation of healthy developmental pathways for AI/AN young people. A central component across all three programs is a deep commitment to an interdependent or collective orientation, in contrast to an individual-based mental health suicide prevention model. This commitment offers novel directions for the entire field of suicide prevention and responds to calls for multilevel, community-driven public health strategies to address the complexity of suicide. Although our focus is on the social determinants of health in AI/AN communities, strategies to address the structural violence of racism as a risk factor in suicide have broad implications for all suicide prevention programming.

Language: en

Keywords

suicide prevention; American Indian and Alaska Native; community-based; multilevel; strengths-based; structural racism