The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share that Annals of Internal Medicine has published a new editorial by Professor of Anthropology Joseph P. Gone entitled "Suicide in U.S. Indigenous Persons: Reframing the Etiology and Solutions."
Indigenous persons in the United States are distinguished by who we count as kin. Indeed, our lives are organized by expansive kinship connections and relations. These ties convey strength but also vulnerability, as suicide haunts most of our extended families. Thus, we urgently need more and better research on who tries and who dies by suicide. We recognize that these community losses recreate long legacies of social suffering, often referred to today as “historical trauma” (1). We seek conceptual frameworks that will recast our understanding of suicide as deeply entangled with conditions of coloniality. We desire creative inquiry that will motivate and mobilize the innovative development of new and expansive forms of effective suicide prevention (2).
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