Indigenous Suicide

a literature review

Abstract

The phenomenon of indigenous suicide is still unknown to science, to professionals who deal with this public and to public health. Some multi-level explanations have been given, involving not only the personal or family dimension, but also the community dimension, cultural values and the cosmology of indigenous cultures themselves. Despite this, many answers are still needed to explain the high indigenous suicide rate compared to the rest of the population and, on the other hand, to develop strategies to reverse this situation. We aim to present a systematic review of the existing literature on indigenous suicide, highlighting differences and commonalities, in order to produce a coherent analysis on the subject. We used articles collected through the platforms Lilacs, Periódicos Capes, Scielo and Science (n=1017). We started by selecting the most used terminologies to search for articles and, once the searches were carried out, we used filters (peer-reviewed, last 10 years, in Portuguese) as exclusion criteria and reading the title and abstract. And as an inclusion criterion the affinity of the text with our theme, resulting in 20 articles. Based on the reading of these articles, it was possible to conclude that 6 factors are recurrent explanations for indigenous suicide: proximity to Western culture, territorial conflicts and the ti, use of alcohol and other substances, indigenous quality of life, expectations of a better future, issues of gender. We conclude that it is possible to think that what moves the problem is the lack of adequate living conditions, which respect the subjectivity of these people without making them invisible.