Suicide rates among Native Americans in New Mexico have dropped by more than 40%. This, among a population that has suicide rates 91% higher than the general population.
The data comes from the New Mexico Department of Health, which reports that, among American Indians, suicides dropped 43% from 77 deaths in 2022, to 44 in 2023.
What’s behind it? A shift in perspective, according to Dr. Deidre Yellowhair, an assistant research professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of New Mexico. Her work focuses on creating culturally safe mental health care for tribal members, and she joined The Show to discuss the improvements.
Full conversation
DEIDRE YELLOWHAIR: It was really great news to watch how the data was telling a story about the efforts that have been made throughout New Mexico. You know, one of the things that I think the data shows us is that this is a multi-agency, multi-community effort. This really reflects the grassroots movement.
It is the community members who are out there, who are providing that community education, who are getting in touch with members of the community, members of their family, youth in the community, and making those person to person connections, and then working with therapeutic agencies, behavioral health agencies, schools like UNM tribal community resources, you know, all of those things. It took a great effort from multiple sources, I think, to be able to achieve the kind of data that we're seeing.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, such an effort behind this. It sounds like, and before this, it sounds like, in the years prior to at least, there had been a big rise in suicides among Native Americans in New Mexico. And suicide rates, we should say, are already higher nationwide among this population. Talk a little bit about why, like, what are some of the factors that have led to that being a truism in this country for so long?
YELLOWHAIR: There's no one answer why suicide rates have been higher in American Indian communities, more so than any other racial ethnic group. I think it really has a lot to do with the systemic policies, different systems, academic systems, judicial systems, larger systems that have policies that aren't always as culturally adaptable or accessible to American Indians and their perspective of life and their understanding of wellness, what it means to be holistically well.
That somewhere in there, there's a lot of mistranslation that happens if you don't know how a group of people defines wellness, and you know the overall structure of health that you're imposing on this group of people without really understanding their perspective. You're not treating what needs to be treated. And I think that's something that has happened for generations across tribal communities.
GILGER: Right. OK, so you're getting at this idea here that I want to talk about, which is that what you've done in the state, you and many other people have is, is to create a culturally appropriate prevention response to this problem, right? Like, what does that mean? What does it look like? It sounds like it's like creating a baseline, almost.
YELLOWHAIR: You know, when we talk about culturally appropriate treatments, it really starts with the community. Because it's the community that gets to define what is their culture, what are important values and core pieces of their language, their traditions and their culture that are valuable, that anchor them to community, to family, to life. So culturally appropriate interventions, preventions and even post-vention activities really start by listening to the community.
How do they define wellness? How do they define illness? And how do we begin to utilize culture as therapy, because we know that it works. You know, we talk a lot about evidence-based practices in Western academics, and when we're in the ivory tower universities, we talk about evidence-based practices.
Well, look around the United States, there are over 570-something federally recognized tribes, and there's still countless others that are not recognized, that are still here. That is your evidence. That is your evidence that culture is therapy. That when you have culture to ground you to make those people to people connections, to make those connections with your environment, to make those connections with your. Community that then creates those protective factors that then help with strengthening a person, a family, and ultimately, a community.
GILGER: The culture is the medicine, that's so interesting.
YELLOWHAIR: Absolutely.
GILGER: You've worked in clinical settings to try to implement some of this, talk a little bit about the practical implication of that for us, and tell us what that looks like in treatment, in therapy, approaches in, I guess even just the words you use, right? I read that some cultures don't even have a direct translation for the word depression, right? Like this is, this is about even the most basic things in creating an understanding.
YELLOWHAIR: You know, I've worked both in tribal communities that are, I've worked on Navajo, where I'm from. But I've also worked in tribal communities that I am not a native language speaker of, and I am not native to. And I think one of the most important things is often letting people tell their stories, because storytelling is a huge part of many of our cultures. Many of our cultures and our languages were not written, and they've always been transmitted orally. You know, stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. So storytelling is a big part of it, and letting people, even kids, have stories, and giving them a safe space in a therapeutic setting to just tell their stories can make such a huge impact. To let them know that their stories matter, to let parents who have been you know, stigmatized, maybe isolated by labels of being a bad parent, being involved with CPS, being involved with like all these other systems, those labels have impact.
But when you take a moment to just listen to stories. It empowers people to utilize their voice to tell their own story, without judgment, without fear, without repercussion. But there's also different ways we utilize culture in intergenerational connections, connecting the youth with their elders and connecting elders with their youth, and it's community building. For so long, practitioners have come into tribal communities and have said, this is the way it works everywhere else. So we're going to make it work here, or we want you to make it work here.
GILGER: Right.
YELLOWHAIR: But a lot of times those treatment methodologies aren't normed. Aren't created for indigenous or tribal communities, but starting from the ground, that grassroots level, and listening to the community and how they define culture and wellness. It is a treatment that's created for them for their benefit.
GILGER: Is this a model that can be replicated, Deidre, around the country? Like can it - can you take these lessons that you've learned there, this improvement that you've seen in the numbers themselves, and repeat it and make this something that is helping people all over?
YELLOWHAIR: I absolutely believe it can be replicated if we listen to people and what their needs are. If we listen to communities and what their needs are. Because a community here in rural New Mexico, where there is an infrastructure to support telehealth, there's no running water, there's no electricity, and there are communities like that. They're in Arizona, where the largest part of the Navajo Nation exists. There are still communities that are so remote, so the treatment there for those community members is going to look different for a family or community in urban Phoenix or Albuquerque. So we have to get away from this idea that treatment is one size fits all.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Dr. Deidre Yellowhair's name.
