Suicide champion

Why do so many Greenlanders kill themselves? - Slate Magazine

Interesting article on Greenland and the mystery of how it came to be (by far) the country with the highest suicide rate in the world. From an Australian perspective, it's interesting to see the role of welfare in indigenous community getting a mention:

It's true that the island's Inuit, who make up 88 percent of Greenland's population, suffer from the same rampant alcoholism that plagues many North American indigenous groups. On one evening in August, I stood in the checkout line at Nuuk's only supermarket and watched an obviously intoxicated man sing "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" to a display of Haribo gummi bears. A few minutes later, a woman tried to pocket a bottle of wine. Security nabbed her. Later, at the police station, where the woman sat on a wooden bench, laughing hysterically and giving spirited high-fives, a police officer blamed alcohol for Nuuk's three biggest public-safety problems: unsupervised children wandering the streets, theft, and people shooting themselves or one another. "Ninety five percent of our cases involve drinking in some way," he said.

Peter Bjerregaard from Denmark's National Institute of Public Health has noted that while Greenland's suicide problem began in 1970, almost all the deaths involved people born after 1950—the same year that Greenland began its transformation from remote colony to welfare state, as the Danes resettled residents to give them modern services and tuberculosis inoculations. Hicks, the Canadian researcher, said the correlation is present in other Inuit societies as well.

"It happened first in Alaska, then Greenland, and finally in Canada's Eastern Arctic," he told me. "It's not the people who were coerced into the communities as adults who began to exhibit elevated rates of suicidal behavior—it was their children, the first generation to grow up in the towns."

The lesson may be that you have to hunt to get your food, your days are too busy to get depressed. If you then move (with the encouragement of government to allow better delivery of services) to a town or mission, you become more welfare dependent and (especially for the young) bored and hopeless for the future.

As it is difficult to encourage aborigines to go back to being hunter/gatherers in the harsh Australian outback, the important thing in the communities would be to make sure there is the hope of social mobility for the young. Or, at the very least, meaningful, daily employment.