Pathologizing Indigenous Suicide: Examining the Inquest into the Deaths of C.J. and C.B. at the Manitoba Youth Centre

Abstract

This paper examines the inquest into the deaths by suicide of two Manitoba Indigenous female youth while imprisoned in the Manitoba Youth Centre in Winnipeg, Canada. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inquest as a discursive space that relies primarily on expert knowledge from law and psychiatry. It studies the inquest’s recommendations for preventing future deaths under similar circumstances. Utilizing Heidi Rimke’s conceptualization of psychocentrism, this analysis examines how suicide discourse in this inquest reduces various manifestations of violence to racial defects and places responsibility on the deceased girls for their inability to have coped with the tortuous conditions of imprisonment. I argue that contemporary understandings of Indigenous suicide in custody systematically erase histories of colonial violence and erroneously reduce suicide to an issue of individual pathology that can be identified and treated through medicalization, psychiatrization and criminalization.

Keywords

• psychocentrism
• racism
• incarceration
• youth justice
• suicide
• anti-colonialism
• inequality