The document discusses the impacts of colonization on Aboriginal communities, including high rates of suicide, and proposes a model for Community Response Teams to address crisis and promote resilience. It argues that suicide is related to pain and hopelessness, and that connection to community, culture, and tradition can increase resilience. The model involves training frontline workers and leaders to form Response Teams, which would respond to crises, facilitate programming, and support caregivers, integrating traditional values. The goal is for communities to develop connection, empowerment, identity, and vision to heal from trauma and be self-determining in addressing issues like suicide.

1. The Community
is the Medicine
A Rationale and Model of Community-
Based Aboriginal Crisis Intervention
and Suicide Response Team
Darien Thira, PhD
darien@thira.ca * www.thira.ca

2. Colonization and Suicide
Suicide is... the expression of a kind of collective
anguish–part grief, part anger... the cumulative
effect of 300 years of colonial history: lands
occupied, resources seized, beliefs and cultures
ridiculed, children taken away, power
concentrated in distant capitals, hopes for
honourable co-existence dashed over and over.
... The damage must be acknowledged before it
can be healed (RCAP, 1995, p.2).

3. Colonization and Trauma

4. Suicide Is About Stopping the
Pain and Hopelessness
Suicide is about stopping pain and
hopelessness, it is not about dying.
If you can reduce a person’s pain, you can
reduce their suicide risk.

5. Aboriginal Mental Health
Throughout the history of the First Nations
people, the definition of health evolved around
the whole being of the person–the physical,
emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of a
person being in balance and harmony with each
other as well as with the environment and other
beings. This has clashed with the Western
medical model, which, until very recently has
perpetuated the concept of health being the
absence of disease (Favel-King, 1993: 125).

6. Suicide Statistics
Point to Suicide Resilience
Aboriginal
Non-Native Children Youth Adult Elder/Senior

7. Suicide Resilience and
Traditional Values
In communities where Elders receive:
(1) care for their well being;
(2) respect for their wisdom/experience;
(3) a meaningful community role; and
(4) have the opportunity to serve as cultural
and/or spiritual guides;
the Elder suicide rate is very low.

8. Suicide Resilience and
Traditional Values
In relation to their families and communities,
resilient individuals find a positive sense of:
(1) connection (cared for by those important to
them);
(2) empowerment (capable to respond well to
life’s demands—respect);
(3) identity through a positive social role; and
(4) vision (hope for the future and a sense of how
they are to live in the world culturally and
spiritually).

9. The Two Branches of
Suicide Resilience

10. Community Resource Map

11. Community Response Teams
RATIONALE
Front-line staff/natural caregivers often required
to respond to community crises without the:
● the training, skills or confidence,
● resources and collaboration, and
● support necessary to meet their community’s
needs and their own.

12. Community Response Teams
• respond to individuals/families in crisis
(i.e., struggling with emotional distress)
• respond to community-wide critical incidents
(e.g., house fire, serious accident, suicide);
• lobby for and/or facilitate community initiatives
(e.g., a ―girls group‖ or ―healing circle‖);
• identify and facilitate educational initiatives
(e.g., workshops on grief, trauma, suicide);
• support a neighboring CRTeam (if requested);
• invite neighboring CRTeam to assist (if required).

13. Community Response Teams
MEMBERSHIP
• human services workers
• first responders
• community leaders
• natural caregivers

14. A Community Response Team
Training Model
THE COMMUNITY IS THE MEDICINE
• Week 1: Through the Pain:
Community-Based Suicide Prevention
• Week 2: Opening the Circle:
Developing and Maintaining
a Community Response Team

15. The Community is the Medicine
Provides the knowledge, strategies and techniques to:
Understand and Respond to:
• individual and community crisis
• colonization and trauma: fear, suicide and rage
Develop, Mobilize and Maintain:
• a community response team
• community programs/initiatives
• caregiver balance/boundaries and self-care
• an integration of traditional values and resilience

16. Community Response Teams
Community Response Teams develop the
community’s:
(1) connection to one another;
(2) empowerment to respond to their own issues;
(3) identity as healing itself (i.e., not a victim); and
(4) vision as culturally/spiritually engaged.
This model is true resilience-based community
development.