http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411278Lyons: Fire and firewater in Native America
Posted: July 21, 2005
by: Scott Richard Lyons
Excerpts:
There is a mental health crisis in Indian country, and its casualties are the young. From suicide clusters on the northern Plains to the school shooting at Red Lake, Native youth have spent this year issuing a collective cry for help more plaintive and more chilling than any since Wounded Knee.
There is no sadder evidence of this than the 17 teenagers who killed themselves in recent months at Cheyenne River. As Julie Garreau, executive director of the Cheyenne River Youth Project, recently testified: ''Some of these suicides were young men who had made a suicide pact with one another. They drew numbers, and decided to hang themselves in that order. One by one their families found these boys, often hanging in their homes, as their number came up.''
When I first heard that story - still reeling at the news from Red Lake - my immediate reaction was to wonder if the same might not be said for the human species as a whole. Was our number up, too? Are the kids simply taking themselves out first?
An overreaction, I'll admit. But this is a situation that compels a dramatic response.
Consider the numbers: While the suicide rate has fallen for most social groups in America, it is on the rise among teenagers and American Indians. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the rate of suicide among American adolescents has tripled since 1960. The trends are even worse when the adolescents are Natives.
If you are an Indian, you are already 72 percent more likely to commit suicide than the average American, according to the IHS. If you are an Indian teen, however, you are over 300 percent more likely. And if you are a Native teenager living on the northern Plains, you are fully 10 times as likely to initiate your own death.
Of course, none of this is meant to detract from the successes of Native youths who are doing well. In fact, the ironic flipside of this crisis is the very good news that many young Indian lives are improving, as seen for example in certain indicators of academic performance and reduced poverty rates.
But we should not fall into the dangerous trap of thinking that only some of us - the ''abnormal'' - are afflicted with individual emotional problems right now. This is a community crisis.
First, we must understand what we're dealing with here: mass unhappiness. There is no lurking scientific mystery. What doctors call depression is simply a persistent unhappy emotional response to life: intense sadness, often accompanied by feelings of hopelessness, despair, self-loathing or guilt.
In the 19th century this emotional state was called ''melancholy,'' and it was believed to result from an excess of black bile in the body. During the 20th century it was termed ''depression,'' then designated as a ''disease,'' and finally described as a ''chemical imbalance'' in the brain. Soon it became common to speak of ''clinical depression.''
Whatever we call it, it's still unhappiness: an emotional response to life.
Everyone wants the pain to stop, but there is little agreement about how to do it. Increasingly in our society - the same society that invented the concept of clinical depression - the trend is to focus on chemical imbalances and medicines designed to correct them.
It is certainly true that unhappy emotions are the result of chemical reactions in the brain. So are all emotions. But there are significant problems with the idea of relying on drugs to regulate feelings.
I think sovereign indigenous nations should consider SSRI bans of their own, at least for people under the age of 18. There are no legal precedents against such a ban in Indian country, so why not? As a potentially dangerous panacea for troubled times, SSRIs just might be the new firewater.
At very least, no one can say with absolute certainty what SSRIs actually do. But we can all see what they cannot do.
Drugs cannot address the real social forces operative in peoples' lives. They do not counter the violence of poverty, abuse or addiction. They are unable to address the needs of an adequate diet, decent health care or a sustainable environment. They do not speak back to racism, historical trauma or low self-esteem. They are mute on the subjects of meaning, values or identity. They are unable to provide love.
Aren't these the burning issues facing American Indian teenagers today? Isn't this what started the fires at Cheyenne River, Red Lake and elsewhere? If the problem is mass unhappiness with life, what is the solution if not fixing life itself?
Scott Richard Lyons, Leech Lake Ojibwe, teaches writing, literature and Native American Studies at Syracuse University.
