Study looks at Native suicides

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Why do Native American students commit suicide at rates three time the national average?
That’s the question that a wide rage of health professionals who make up the Project Trust Partnership have been looking at for the past two years.

Representatives of the group presented their findings this week to members of the Gallup-McKinley County School District.

The group is composed of many members from the McKinley County area who got involved because in 2005, the county school district saw the district suicide rate soar with 13 suicides reported among district students.

That resulted in the district starting programs to tackle the problem and although the suicide rate has since dropped to the normal levels, area health officials have been looking at ways to deal with mental health problems of Native American students.

Kimberly Ross-Toledo, who is Navajo-Sioux and director of the Coalition for Healthy and Resilient Youth, said that one of the things that the group did was hold meetings in four area communities — Crownpoint, Gallup, Shiprock and To’Hajilee — to talk to people in those areas about the trauma that young Native Americans feel.

They also talked to a number of Navajo medicine men and got their thoughts.

What they found is that the healing system in this area is backward. Instead of having Western medicine be the primary way of healing, they said the area should give that responsibility back to the medicine men.

“Native American traditional practices and ceremonies have been effective since time immemorial, but federal policies at different times have prohibited them, disregarded them, perpetuated questions about their credibility and validity and resulted in their loss across generations in some communities,” the report said.

Ross-Toldedo said that as a result, community leaders are saying that the current reliance on Western medicine is not actually meeting the health needs of Native American youth and may in fact be harmful.

To understand Native American youth and their mental health needs requires someone with a knowledge of tradition and culture, according to the report, which also said their interviews revealed a feeling that sending the Native American kids with mental health problems to institutions that promote Western values and Western ideas of treatment may only re-traumatize them.

The group has come up with a lot of recommendations to reduce the trauma that many native American students feel. They include:

• Acknowledgment of past mistreatment is a very important component of healing “so the United States should issue a formal apology” as the Canadians and the government of Australia have done to their natives.
  
  
• The United States needs to make funding level adequate to address the level of need for health care. This will help restore the trust that is now lacking among young Natives.
  
  
• A system must be set up so that federal, state and local behavioral health systems will have a mechanism for paying traditional practitioners for their services.
  
  
• If policymakers and providers truly want to be culturally appropriate, it is essential that they become culturally humble and more conscious of what people are doing in communities that works.

The group has come up with some 42 recommendations that they say area health providers need to look at if they want to improve the mental health of Native American students.

Johnny R. Thompson, who has been the strongest support of providing traditional culture course in the school system, said that while the report brings up a number of issues, he didn’t think that it would change the approach that the district is now using to address these mental health issues.

“I don’t think the report will have any effect,” he said.

A copy of the 120-page report can be found on http//hsc.unm.edu/chpdp/Assets/Projects
/Assets/TRUST_Report_May08.pdf