In a remote Alaskan city with the nation's highest suicide rates, community-based prevention heals
In a story supported by the Bill Lane Center's Western Media Fellowship, journalist Brandon Kapelow recently reported on NPR's Morning Edition about a community-based suicide prevention program in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, remote Alaskan wetlands where suicide rates are among the highest in the nation. The audio story was followed by a longer article -- "Native-led suicide prevention program focuses on building community strengths" -- with evocative photography capturing both the despair and hope of a ravaged but resilient people.
In both reports, Kapelow highlights how Indigenous researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have been addressing the public health crisis by drawing on community strengths to engage and uplift young people. Rather than the traditional approach of providing mental health counseling, this program, known as 'Qungasvik' (meaning 'toolkit'), aims to foster individuals' sense of purpose and identity by giving them access to cultural activities. For people who often suffer from isolation, connecting them to the wider community in this way is crucial.
Kapelow's reporting captures the sounds of joyful music and drumming from a Yup'ik dance class, for example. Such practices, as well as beadwork, seal hunting and others, have been found to lift the burden of depression caused by social isolation, access to guns and generational trauma. Researchers have identified these factors as contributors to region's problems, and program participants seem to find relief in a solution that draws on the collective. "Doing our Eskimo dances and drumming takes your stress away. It takes my depression away," remarked Gideon Green in the story, a 28-year-old who has lived in Hooper Bay his whole life.
For the Yup'ik culture, Native people traditionally from Southwest Alaska, "suicide is not a mental health disorder, and it's not an individual affliction. It's a disruption of the collective," Stacy Rasmus tells Kapelow. Rasmus is the director of the university's Center for Alaska Native Health Research and helps oversee the Qungaskvic program.
"Every community and culture has a real strong foundation and set of protective factors that have, you know, allowed us to survive and thrive. We all have that," Rasmus continues. "And so, the solution to suicide needs to be at the community level."
Kapelow emerged as the most promising candidate for the Lane Center's 2023 Western Media Fellowship early in the selection process with a strong application highlighting a pressing health crisis facing the rural American West: Why do western states have the country's highest suicide rates? With a $5,000 stipend to pursue his project, Kapelow has produced an important piece of journalism which was broadcast to NPR audiences from member station KYUK on Tuesday, August 6, 2024.
The work is a continuation of a multi-part report called "Somewhere I Belong" in which Kapelow has used photography and text to tell painful but important stories of suicide. TIME published part one of this project in October of 2022 with coverage of the public health crisis in Catron County, New Mexico. From 2010-2020, Catron had the highest suicide rate of any county in the contiguous United States. The Lane Center was eager to support a second installment of Kapelow's work focusing on rural Alaska, as the rural West has always been a central focus of the Center's research agenda. According to Kapelow, western Alaska is the only region in the country to surpass Catron County's rate of suicides.
"Social connection and its absence lie at the heart of this issue," Kapelow wrote in his fellowship proposal. "By creating space for survivors to tell their stories, this project seeks to foster opportunities for hope and connection through shared experience; to start difficult, but necessary conversations in areas of the West where stigmas around mental health remain powerful; and to provide insights to researchers and policy makers working to find solutions to this pervasive public health dilemma."
Through the Western Media Fellowship program, the Bill Lane Center has supported journalism about Western land and life for more than a decade. Fellows work in all kinds of media — newspapers, magazines, radio, television, online, video, film, data visualization and mapping, and multimedia. Connecting talented reporters to university life allows these storytellers to interact with Stanford researchers, scholars and students while investigating projects of their own design. And this program fosters continued journalistic exploration of crucial aspects of the West -- its land, its people, its history, and the impact of the forces that power its economies.
