CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,049Suicide and Self-Harm StudiesIndigenous Health, Education, and RightsRacial and Ethnic Identity Research

Cultural Continuity as a Hedge against Suicide in Canada's First Nations

Chandler, Michael J., Lalonde, Christopher·1998·Transcultural Psychiatry
DOI 10.1177/136346159803500202
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults - who are living through moments of especially dramatic change - constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia's nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly…

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/136346159803500202

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Cultural continuity (e.g., cultural facilities, language, governance) is strongly associated with significantly lower suicide rates in Indigenous communities in British Columbia.

    “Using data from 200 Indigenous communities in British Columbia in Canada, Chandler and Lalonde 172 showed that cultural continuity (eg, cultural facilities, language, and governance) was strongly associated with significantly lower suicide rates.”

    From The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on youth mental health (2024) · cites this paper as [172]

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C.
Affiliations
University of British Columbia (CA)
ORCID
Venue
Transcultural Psychiatry
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
1998-06
Volume
35
Issue
2
Pages
191-219
ISSN
  • 1363-4615 (ISSN-L)
  • 1461-7471
DOI
10.1177/136346159803500202
OpenAlex
W1996095866
Cited by
1,049
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 33 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 37 · 2022: 59 · 2021: 86 · 2020: 69 · 2019: 60 · 2018: 55 · 2017: 48 · 2016: 52 · 2015: 46 · 2014: 54 · 2013: 61 · 2012: 57
FWCI
3.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
Locations
Transcultural Psychiatry (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Suicide and Self-Harm Studies
  • Social Sciences › Health › Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
Keywords
cultural continuity, self-continuity, youth suicide, First Nations, Indigenous youth, suicide prevention, protective factors, cultural identity, cultural revitalization, British Columbia First Nations, suicide rates

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review