‘What happened isn’t surprising at all’
‘ TRAPPED, ANGERED, FRUSTRATED’ PEOPLE IN NORTH: PSYCHIATRIST
Elena Shurshilova has the lonely distinction of being the only psychiatrist working in the remote communities of northern Saskatchewan. It is a flyin practice, and the Ottawa- based Shurshilova makes the trip west, then north, every three or four months. The 20- hour trek leaves her bone- weary and with bags beneath her eyes, and that is before the hard work of actually seeing patients even begins.
What she sees in them, most often, is despair, and what she felt after learning about the mass shooting in La Loche Friday — that left four dead and seven more wounded— wasn’t shock, so much, but a sense that the inevitable had finally, tragically, come to pass.
“What happened isn’t surprising at all, but what is surprising is that something like this didn’t happen before in this location, where the suicide rates are so high,” said Shurshilova, who was heading home from a stint in Saskatchewan when she first heard word of La Loche.
“Homicide and suicide are two sides of the same coin — two sides of violence — violence out of desperation and despair. The violence is either inward toward oneself, or outwards to- wards other people.
“It is a distraught person feeling trapped, angered, frustrated.”
Police arrested the suspect, a 17-year-old male, outside the La Loche Community School at 1: 47 pm CST Friday. A teacher, Adam Wood, who had moved to town from Ontario, lay dead inside, along with Marie Janvier, a teacher’s aide. Two of the shooter’s relatives — brothers Drayden Fontaine, 13, and Dayne Fontaine, 17 — were killed at a residence not far from the school.
Multiple friends, classmates and relatives of the accused killer describe the young man as having been bullied relentlessly, a situation only made worse, perhaps, by recent cuts to the school and mental health supports available to residents in this remote community on the eastern shore of Lac La Loche.
“He was a normal boy. He was not a monster. He was hurting,” said Perry Herman, who knows the accused’s family. “If we had the supports we needed, this would not have happened.”
La Loche is predominantly Dene. The town of 3,000 is isolated, geographically, but also adrift, a place without an actual core holding all the disparate parts and people together. There are no hotels, no family restaurants and no recreation facilities. There isn’t even a bank. The nearest Tim Hortons is 100 kilometres away.
Historically, the Dene were fur trappers and traders. Men hunted. Women tended to the home and children. Society worked. Now, there is almost no work and even l ess opportunity — amid wholesale family dysfunction. Many of the older generation were victims of the residential school system. Many younger people don’t speak the traditional Dene tongue. As traditional culture erodes, contemporary problems fill the vacuum, and get passed from generation to generation. Mental and physical abuse, addiction and despair become the norm, and the cycle continues — unbroken — unfixed.
There are two bars and a liquor store on La Loche Av- enue, a strip the locals refer to as “Main Street.” People collect there beginning in the morning, drinking in plain view.
Connie Cheecham works for the La Loche Strengthening Families Program.
“Mental health and addictions come hand- in- hand,” she told the Star- Phoenix last fall. “If you’re depressed or whatever, you cope with drinking or whatever or drugs or whatever. And a lot of our people don’t know how to cope. They have lost all ways, all mechanisms to cope, so you just drown your pain.”
The annual suicide rate in the Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority, which includes the northwestern communities of La Loche, Buffalo Narrows and Ile a la Crosse, is the highest of any health authority in Saskatchewan. From 2008 to 2012, the area averaged 43.4 suicide deaths per 100,000 people — more than triple the provincial rate of 12.7.
Because La Loche is so small, everyone knows each other, and people are reluctant to seek help for mental health problems because word will get around. Those who need specialized services are flown south, mostly to North Battleford, for treatment. Sometimes depressed and suicidal La Loche residents wait for hours in overcrowded emergency rooms and return home more hopeless than when they left.
“The community is struggling,” Shurshilova says.
On Sunday morning the community gathered together for a standing- room only service at Our Lady of the Visitation Roman Catholic Church. Some people cried, many hugged, while Archbishop Murray Chatlain spoke both of what had been lost, but also of a “generous” spirit that was alive in the people of La Loche.
Back in Ottawa, Shurshilova was preparing for another week of seeing patients at her busy practice in the nation’s capital. She finds the trips to northern Saskatchewan exhausting, but says she will continue to go, both out of a sense of duty — there is no other psychiatrist working there — and hope.
The Dene are “beautiful people,” she adds, despite all the difficulties afflicting them, and challenges they face.
“We cannot believe there are no solutions here,” Shurshilova says. “We need to focus on solutions — and number one is for all of us, all of us, to share in La Loche’s grief — but to also look deeply at the roots of the problem and to ask ourselves what could bring that kind of despair to a young person?”
“How could this happen?”