"The researchers canvassed Native communities through much of western Canada. What struck them almost immediately was the astounding suicide rate among teenagers—500 to 800 times the national average—infecting many of these communities. But not all of them. Some Native communities reported suicide rates of zero. ‘When these communities were collapsed into larger groupings according to their membership in one of the 29 tribal councils within the province, rates varied … from a low of zero (true for 6 tribal councils) to a high of 633 suicides per 100,000.’



What could possibly make the difference between places where teens had nothing to live for and those where teens had nothing to die for? The researchers began talking to the kids. They collected stories. They asked teens to talk about their lives, about their goals, and about their futures. What they found was that young people from the high-suicide communities didn’t have stories to tell. They were incapable of talking about their lives in any coherent, organized way. They had no clear sense of their past, their childhood, and the generations preceding them. And their attempts to outline possible futures were empty of form and meaning. Unlike the other children, they could not see their lives as narratives, as stories. Their attempts to answer questions about their life stories were punctuated by long pauses and unfinished sentences. They had nothing but the present, nothing to look forward to, so many of them took their own lives.



Chandler’s team soon discovered profound social reasons for the differences among these communities. Where the youths had stories to tell, continuity was already built into their sense of self by the structure of their society. Tribal councils remained active and effective organs of government. Elders were respected, and they took on the responsibility of teaching children who they were and where they had come from. The language and customs of the tribe had been preserved conscientiously over the decades. And so the youths saw themselves as part of a larger narrative, in which the stories of their lives fit and made sense. In contrast, the high-suicide communities had lost their traditions and rituals. The kids ate at McDonald’s and watched a lot of TV. Their lives were islands clustered in the middle of nowhere. Their lives just didn’t make sense. There was only the present, only the featureless terrain of today."

— Marc David Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease