Indigenous Suicide in Canada: A Synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous suicide (particularly amongst youths) in Canada is an exceedingly complex and harrowing phenomenon. The First Nations suicide rate is three times higher than the non-Indigenous national average and the Inuit suicide rate is nine times the national rate. However, excessive suicidality is by no means a commonality amongst every Indigenous community, as the majority of bands have well below the national average, with significant amount having zero suicides. Thus, it is select bands that have epidemic level rates of suicide to the point that it spikes the Indigenous national averages. This has bred both a very unique and urgent set of circumstances. Circumstances that are undoubtedly impelled by the legacy of colonial policies compounded with neo-colonic socio-economic conditions Canada’s Indigenous populations find themselves within. This has led to many researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches to try and contend with. It is therefore the goal of this thesis to present, evaluate, and synthesize the leading research on Indigenous suicide in Canada. Namely, cultural continuity (Chandler & Lalonde), suicide clusters & communication (Niezen), historicity of suicide & institutional control (Kral), mixed-methods prevention oriented approaches (Kirmayer), and Indigenous perspectives on neo-colonialism and its impacts on Indigenous identity and suicide (Talaga). All with the intent to inform further researchers, advocates, and policy makers with the best ways to understand and hopefully prevent this phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.024 | 0.048 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".