“Sometimes I just feel like I’m alone on myself. I learned to be independent at a young age. And I’m not typically the kind of person who will reach out for help. For that, persistently, I try to do it myself first. “I’ve always been an introverted girl, so often it’s hard for me to open up and find the motivation, ‘she told CNN from her home in Norway’s House Cree Nation, Manitoba.
“I was really confused, I did not know at first how to deal with it. It was my last year of high school, so I was overwhelmed. I could not spend it with my friends and have the senior year we all wanted , “says Farrah.
“What really affected me was losing my grandmother a few months ago and I could not attend her funeral. I was 8 hours away, the roads were all burnt down, I was heavy of heart and guilty because I could not see her in months, ”she adds.
Canada is already facing an epidemic among its domestic youth. First Nations children and teens have a depression and suicide rate more than 3 times the average for non-Indigenous people according to government statistics
“Living in a reservation becomes depressing over time. You start to feel isolated, you find yourself parting ways with your friends. It takes a big toll on your health,” says Farrah.
Native American peoples make up nearly 5% of the population in Canada and for years their unemployment rate was almost double that of the rest of the population. For the nearly 1 in 4 indigenous youth living on reserve, differences in educational and recreational opportunities are acute. Housing on many reservations is not enough, with some remote communities being cut off from the rest of Canada for weeks or months a year.
For Jennifer Simpson, the effect of the lockdown on her teenage son Coda was almost immediate.
Simpson told CNN that as a child with special needs, explaining the pandemic to Coda was not possible. All her son knew was that the daily routines that brought him structure and security were gone. No visit from support workers, no long drive through Norway House, no stop to pick up a slushy at the local shop.
“He’s had a lot of anxiety issues here and is trying to get around where we needed to get our doctor to change the meds. He’s isolated at home and has problems,” Simpson said.
Surch in talks to hotlines for mental health
Within weeks of community shutdowns, Canadian government officials said mental health hotlines for indigenous youth were flooded with calls for councilors’ support or emergency interventions. The talks came at a rate of about four times the pre-pandemic average they say.
Samantha Folster did not have to hear the figures to know that a crisis was brewing. Folster is also from Norway House Cree Nation and as a mother and grandmother she knows all too well how the vulnerability of the youth of the First Nations can destroy a community.
But her job is now more than 400 miles away in Winnipeg, and as a policy analyst for the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, she can be heard from overwhelming businessmen and councilors.
“I was pretty upset by the talks, they really needed the support … it was very emotional for everyone,” Folster said, describing a recent conference call where business workers and supervisors described how families were overwhelmed.
“The youth had suffered outbursts because they could not understand or handle the pressure of being quarantined,” Folster said, adding that parents were also overwhelmed. “They had to be the behavioral specialist, the speech therapist, the occupational therapist, they had to do it all.”
“The extra pressure of Covid-19 caused more depression and more anxiety among our young people because the education system was not available to them either. It is their port for young people and it was immediately removed,” Folster said.
For months this year, children, parents and entire communities were left without the support they fought so hard to establish.
Implement Jordan’s principle
Jordan was born in 1999 with special needs and died five years later in hospital without ever going home after government officials argued over who would pay for his home care.
Now applied to Covid-19, the principle of Jordan would ensure that First Nations children receive the services they need and that there is equality in those services for them. A major component of this should be resources for mental health support.
And yet, experts have warned for years that support for mental health is not enough, with youth at risk still dealing with intergenerational trauma, addiction, food insecurity and shelter and domestic violence.
“There are not enough mental health professionals at the base to deal with the real problems that indigenous youth have experienced,” said Dr. Anna Banerji, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto.
“There are teen Inuit friends on my Facebook feed and they all say, ‘I do not want to live anymore,’ ‘I am so stressed,’ ‘warned Banerji, whose personal story is a striking reminder of the fragility of domestic youth.
Banerji said it was shocking to see the difference in support for mental health between indigenous and non-domestic youth in Canada, even during a pandemic.
“It’s extremely difficult for them, and then they go online and see people in other parts of Canada who ‘have’ things. It’s really hard and stressful to be a native youth in a remote or isolated community,” he said. Dr. Banners.
Native American communities in Canada have done what one official described as a “wonderful job that flattened the curve of the pandemic, with less than 500 positive cases nationwide. But the mental health of indigenous youth still hangs in the balance.
“We see the impact it is having on the mental health of the youth in our community,” said Grand Chief Arlen Dumas of the Manitoba Chiefs meeting. “Unfortunately, we are starting to see the effects of that isolation. I’m glad we did, but it has had some pretty significant and severe impact on our communities,” he said.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by the Canadian and provincial governments on programs tailored to abide by the Principality of Jordan, to ensure that indigenous youth do not suffer unreasonably during the pandemic.
But the Canadian government acknowledges that it will take years to understand the implications of Covid-19’s mental health on indigenous youth.
“We continue to work to assess mental health needs and to ensure that mental health resources, financially, are directly deployed on the growing mental health care system, which we are not yet able to fully quantify, or truly recognize. “Recognize and measure the impact. And I think we will not know for years what that impact really was,” said Marc Miller, Canada’s Minister of Indian Services.
Miller stresses that the government understands how a possible second wave of these pandemics could further damage communities and seeks to design effective programs to reduce the fallout.
“I feel the second wave would affect people more,” said Farrah, who is now trying to move forward with a university education that has also been lifted by the pandemic, “We may not be mentally fully prepared on the spot.” the place. “
How to get help: Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US at 1-800-273-8255. The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide can also provide contact information for crisis centers around the world.
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