Greenland has the ignominious title of being the suicide capital of the world. On the largest island that isn't a continent, and the least densely populated dependent country in the world, the government says 1 in 5 people have tried to kill themselves, while other research claims 1 in 4.Note: 89% of Greenland's population is Inuit Indian.
The simple white wooden crosses that dot the landscape are a stark reminder that many of those people have succeeded.
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Most of the victims are teenagers, more than half of them boys aged 15 to 19.
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"It's difficult to verbalise how [the Inuit people] feel, they find it hard to explain why they are sad, or angry. They keep it inside them and carry it around for a long time. That's one of the explanations for the suicide.
"But also, that they aren't being offered therapy or psychological help...
Some also blame the rapid modernisation of this traditional Inuit community for what's happening. Greenland became a part of the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953.
The Danes brought with them the infamous G60 policy – when many Inuit communities were resettled in soviet style apartment blocks. Fishing and hunting people who had lived off the land for thousands of years were plunged into a town life they could not adapt to. More than half a century on, the deep social problems created by that doomed policy still exist today.
Some connect the alcoholism that came in this period to the high suicide rate. The dark winters have been dismissed as a reason for suicide, as the rates actually seem to be higher during the summer, when you have the midnight sun and people can't sleep.
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There is no doubt that there is more awareness of the issue, and more government campaigns as well as a special suicide prevention helpline. That is why experts are baffled and extremely concerned about a recent rise in suicides, 42 so far in 2010, which is around one death a week.
About a year ago, Slate published an article about Greenland's suicides:
Greenland is the country with the world's highest suicide rate. The rate here is 24 times that seen in the United States. Even Japan—a nation with a well-documented suicide epidemic—has an annual rate of only about 51 people per 100,000 inhabitants. Greenland's is 100 per 100,000.
... the majority of Greenlanders who kill themselves are teenagers and young adults. (In most other countries, the elderly dominate suicide statistics.) Young men here are especially prone to an early exit and account for more than half of all suicides, although the girls hold their own. In a 2008 survey, one in four young women in Greenland admitted to trying to kill herself.
Slate notes that suicide is a relatively recent phenomenon:
... for the first half of the 20th century, Greenlanders lived much as they had for the previous 4,000 years: They hunted and fished, clustering in small, remote villages that hug the rocky coastline. They also boasted a suicide rate among the world's lowest. One Danish analysis found that from 1900 to 1930, Greenland had an annual suicide rate of just 0.3 people per 100,000. And "as late as 1960 there was still the occasional year when there were no recorded suicides by Greenlanders," reports Jack Hicks, a Canadian expert on suicide in the arctic region.
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One reason for Greenland's high suicide rate is that people are particularly proficient at the act, employing methods that leave little chance for survival. Shootings and hangings account for 91 percent of male suicides and 70 percent of female suicides. (Almost every Greenland home has at least one rifle for the annual caribou and musk-ox hunts. Of course, any rope, fishing net, or electric cord can be fashioned into a noose, which in the Greenlandic language is called "our Lord's lasso.")
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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."
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... most people kill themselves in summer, according to a trio of Scandinavian and U.S. scientists who analyzed Greenland's mortality data from 1968 to 2002.
The researchers theorize that the brief and bright summer sun disrupts winter sleep cycles, alters serotonin levels, and causes some Greenlanders to snap, especially those in the far north, where the sun stays above the horizon for weeks on end.
"It's sort of impulsive self-violence that is different from the melancholic winter suicides, which are more associated with [seasonal affective disorder] and depression," said Daniel F. Kripke of California's Scripps Clinic Sleep Center, one of the researchers.
Neither article speculated that this might have an impact on how these young people might view the future of their world, an a life that was stolen from them circa 1950, as incredibly bleak:
Scientists in Greenland have told Al Jazeera that an ice sheet that covers 80 per cent of the territory is shrinking much faster than expected.
In recent months, unusually large chunks of ice have broken off its glaciers - one of them four times the size of the US city of Manhattan. Some experts are worried this increasing rate of melting could raise sea levels across the globe.
So what does all this have to do with Barrington Illinois, the village where I live?
In the past three years, six Barrington Consolidated High School students have committed suicide. With an enrollment of about 3,000 students, that is the equivalent of about 67 suicides per 100,000 population. And that might very well be something the school board would want to take seriously.
Julianna, my dentist, chalked it up to a bunch of spoiled rich kids with too much time on their hands. I beg to differ.
One needs to be very depressed to contemplate suicide. Very depressed. Their life must appear hopeless, their future bleak, and this hopelessness and bleakness looms emminently on the horizon.
This I know, for I once tried suicide, in those woods that I now so love to walk, with a knife to cut my jugular. The knife was dull, and more likely, there was enough of a spark, enough of a hope, that I couldn't go through with it. That was 1986. Later, and not all that long ago, really, I contemplated suicide by train - standing in the tracks to be run down. But I decided that was an unfair thing to do to the engineer.
Damn, but I've come a long way in the past three years, since I dropped off my manic-high chair like an anchor tossed from a ship.
Until you've been swallowed up in that suffocating black fog that works to convince you that the only solution is to end it all, you do not have the right to sit in judgment. Your are not part of the peer group. And you ought to get down on your knees and offer sincere prayers of thankfulness to the One who made you, and allowed you to find circumstances in your life that permitted you to ward off that evil that can permeate you mind, body, and soul.
Grant me compassion oh Lord, above all else
And humility, that I not dare to judge
That I not forget my own foibles
That I strive to give comfort at all times to those in discomfort
And thank You, for the many gifts you have given me
For drawing me back from the edge
When I looked into the abyss
And saw no other way out.
