More mental health workers for grieving Innu community
After losing a young mother to suicide last month, a remote Innu community is faced with a crisis on two fronts.
For the people of Uashat mak Mani-utenam — a reserve east of Sept-Îles — the death of 18-yearold Nadeige Guanish plunged their territory even further into the abyss. She is the fifth person in Uashat to take her own life since February.
Her suicide has hit Uashat’s mental health professionals hard, but there’s also a fear that another tragedy is looming. As they grieve the loss of Guanish, the staff at Uashat’s health centre must also set aside its own suffering and try to contain its worst suicide crisis in over 20 years.
The reserve’s band council will get emergency aid from Health Canada, which approved grants to hire an additional four mental health professionals earlier this month. After three meetings between Health Canada and Uashat, the federal government agreed to pay the salary of one additional clinical counsellor and three extra psychologists between now and the end of March.
“They’ve certainly identified to us that their regular workers are strained,” said Richard Budgell, a regional director for Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit branch. “We feel a great deal of empathy for what people in Uashat are facing and we want to work with them as closely as we can to get through this crisis and continue to do long-term planning toward prevention and mental wellness.”
News of the federal grants comes just weeks after Marie-Luce Jourdain — the head of health and social services in Uashat — said members of her team are teetering on the edge of a burnout.
“The intensity of the crisis is such that we’re constantly putting out fires,” said Jean-Claude Therrien Pinette, a spokesperson for Uashat’s band council. “We’re constantly in the thick of it, we can’t begin to think about prevention because we’re always stuck in a crisis. We want to be getting in front of the problem but we’re so busy reacting that we can’t.
“The way we’ve set our services up — and we’re doing the best we can here — we’ve hit a wall with our resources,” he continued. “We constantly think of ways to optimize what we can do with what we have but we always run into the same problem. We need more resources.”
Suicide is a problem that disproportionately affects First Nations — indigenous people are nearly six times more likely to kill themselves than non-indigenous Canadians.
Like many other First Nations, Uashat struggles with the legacy of Canada’s colonialist policies. Between 1952 and 1970, children in the community were forced from their homes and into the residential school system — where they were stripped of their language, their culture and, in the worst cases, suffered unspeakable acts of abuse.
Therrien Pinette says the system tore families apart, that it robbed a generation of their innocence and severely hindered their ability to raise children. As a result, he says, much of the town’s youth has spent time in child protective services and Uashat still struggles with the fallout from its residential school nightmare.
Unemployment and substance abuse are other factors that contribute to the community’s troubles.
Shortly after Guanish’s death on Oct. 31, Quebec’s chief coroner announced that it would hold a public inquest into the rash of suicides that have left the community reeling. Though the focus will largely be on the mental health aspects of the crisis, the coroner said it will also look into sociological and historical factors in hopes of better understanding why so many people took their own lives in Uashat this year.
No matter what conclusions the inquest reaches, Therrien Pinette says the community needs to have enough resources to stop reacting to the problem and begin the work of preventing it.
“The sheer size of our situation will necessitate a lot more funding. Not just to prevent death but to promote life,” he said. “You can try to prevent suicide, that’s one thing, but people need something to live for. What does the government plan on doing to bring hope to this community?”