Suicide prevention strategy a travesty
Province’s weak plan only confirms systemic racism,
There are two main reasons why governments develop and release strategies. The first reason is when there is a pressing issue — be it health, social or economic — that the government wants to tackle. The second reason is when there is a pressing political issue that the government would like to go away.
This explains why some strategies clearly identify the problem, outline how the problem is going to be addressed, state who is responsible for doing what and what the timelines are, and, in most cases, commit the funding required to get the job done. Other strategies are vague, avoid specific commitments and timelines, and are unfunded.
Tragically, the suicide prevention strategy released by the provincial government is clearly the latter type of document. Given that Saskatchewan has the highest rate of death by suicide of any province in the country, and that the suicide rate is increasing, the document is a travesty. Having read and assessed more than 100 suicide prevention strategies from around the world, I take no pleasure in saying that I have never read anything as weak as Saskatchewan’s. Not even close.
When people have a job to do, we find it natural to ask ourselves if we can think of anyone who has done something similar, what exactly they did and whether it turned out well. We can therefore ask which jurisdictions have lowered their suicide rates, and how they did it. It turns out that one of the world’s most celebrated suicide prevention success stories is right here in Canada: A province that took a range of concerted actions that reduced its overall suicide rate by a third, and its youth suicide rate in half, in a decade. Don’t look for the details in Saskatchewan’s strategy, because Quebec’s experience isn’t mentioned in it. Nor are the examples of
Indigenous nations that have lowered their rates of youth suicide. Nor are the recommendations made by the World Health Organization, which calls suicide “a largely preventable public health problem.”
Most egregiously, the provincial government’s strategy ignores the recommendations made in the suicide prevention strategy developed by the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations. FSIN acknowledged that sexual abuse and other forms of early childhood adversity underlie the sharply elevated rate of youth suicide in the north of the province, and proposed clear actions to address that. FSIN also urged the province to strengthen the grossly inadequate mental health services available to the residents of northern communities. The government has responded with platitudes.
National media attention has alerted Canadians to the gravity of the suicide situation in northern Saskatchewan. Teenage First Nations girls in this province die by suicide at a rate almost 30 times that of their non-indigenous peers. How is that sharply elevated burden of suffering from a “largely preventable” public health problem not a matter of urgency for our society?
Asked about the province’s failure to act on the FSIN strategy, Minister for Rural and Remote Health Warren Kaeding told a Starphoenix reporter last week that “Suicide is a provincial concern,” and that “There is no one specific entity that we’re going to be able to fund along that line.”
Let us be clear. If white girls in this province had a suicide rate 30 times that of First Nations girls, concerted action would be taken. A very different suicide prevention strategy would have been released, with the funding required to ensure effective implementation. The province’s strategy confirms the ongoing systemic racism in health care in Saskatchewan. Jack Hicks is an adjunct professor in the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, and served as an adviser to the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations on the development of its suicide prevention strategy.