A People Awakening: An Indigenous approach to suicide prevention

For more than 70 years, suicide prevention models have largely been designed to identify and mitigate risk through an individualized approach. But as suicide rates have steadily risen for the past few decades, momentum is growing for a new paradigm – one that focuses instead on teaching communities how to build off their cultural strengths. Indigenous researchers in Alaska have been testing this type of model in two of the nation’s most impacted populations for suicide – Native villages and military installations – with hopes that their approach could scale both nationally and abroad.

Health

Suicide prevention program finds strength in Yup’ik cultural roots

Brandon Kapelow

For decades, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta has been home to the nation’s highest rates of suicide. In the 1980s, the backlash to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series helped prompt decades of work from Indigenous leaders to build innovative prevention programs from within the region focused on community strengths.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Support for this reporting was provided by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.