Many of the people who called were young men who felt like they had no one to talk to. For 18 years, she woke up in the middle of the night and talked to suicidal people. Every night, Atsa kept the hotline cellphone next to her bed. A mural commissioned by the city is a large-scale reproduction of a photograph from the early 1900s.īy sheer force of will, the hotline took off. Just by listening, and acknowledging the pain, she hoped she could help.Īpartment blocks dominate central Nuuk. Atsa says her thinking back then was that a lot of people felt very alone. "We didn't know what to expect."Īnd yet, she felt sure that doing something had to be better than doing nothing. "I didn't know what would happen," she says. She had no idea if she would be able to handle it. She knew she would end up with most of the calls - people don't usually call suicide hotlines during the day. Atsa has no education at all, let alone a degree in social work or counseling, but she signed up to take the night shift. Instead, they built on the resources they had - middle-aged women who were good at listening.
TEEN SUICIDE BAND SHITT PROFESSIONAL
They didn't have the resources to hire professional counselors. They opened Greenland's first national suicide hotline. Less than a year after their conversation at the grocery store, Atsa Schmidt and Anda Poulsen decided to expand even further. They hosted events together about suicide prevention, open to everyone. People who were thinking about suicide, too." Atsa started helping Anda. "It was very clear that people needed help," says Anda. "You know, the one that burned down." Atsa was pushing her cart down an aisle when this young guy she knew through her cousins from Kangeq came up to her.Ītsa Schmidt describes the old family pictures that line the walls and shelves of her house. "I was shopping for food at the Brugseni market in Nuuk," she says, as if the geography of Nuuk in the '90s is common knowledge. So his death wasn't really something she expected to come up at the grocery store. Even today, she doesn't have any photos of her son in her home. It was a deeply private and painful part of her life. Right after it happened, his suicide had been something Atsa discussed only with her closest family. The next day they found his body in the back of the theater. Then, one day, he didn't come home for dinner. He started telling his mother he was tired all the time, that everything he did felt too hard. He ran a small theater group and was in school to become a mechanic. Ujuanseeraq had loved acting and dancing. In the spring of 1989, Atsa Schmidt's son had been dead for nearly a decade. Many people I spoke with struggled to explain what that felt like, to live in a place where suicide is so pervasive, and most of them settled uncomfortably on the same word: normal. The suicide rate was, and still is, so high that it's not an exaggeration to say that everyone in Greenland knows someone who has killed himself. rate (it's still about six times higher). Between 19, the suicide rate there quadrupled to about seven times the U.S. In Greenland, the problem was only getting worse. American Indians and Alaska Natives (many of whom share Inuit roots with Greenlanders) had already seen many of their communities buckle under the same pressures. Like native people all around the Arctic - and all over the world - Greenlanders were seeing the deadly effects of rapid modernization and unprecedented cultural interference.
TEEN SUICIDE BAND SHITT HOW TO
There was one problem: There were no clear answers to any of Anda's questions about why people were killing themselves or how to prevent it. It was in a working-class neighborhood near Nuuk's growing harbor.Īnda Poulsen, in white jacket, poses for a portrait with his fellow 1989 graduates of Greenland's school of social work in Nuuk. "My mother, my sisters and I all lived in a tenement building," Anda says. Their new home in Nuuk would be in a concrete apartment block, with hundreds of other families from dozens of other small villages that had also been erased.
It would be much easier if the Inuit people moved to larger towns where the infrastructure was already in place.Īnda's family - his mother, his sisters, his cousins - had to pack their things and say goodbye to their yellowy-orange clapboard house overlooking the sea. From the government's point of view, it was a purely practical decision - it was difficult to provide basic services like health clinics and schools to every tiny village. They were closing the store, shutting off the power, and reassigning the priest. The Danish government was removing the village from the list of towns in Greenland. Kangeq's old wharf and houses appear ghostlike through a late winter snowstorm.
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