[h=2]Youth Suicide Epidemic: Doctor Blames ?Possession?[/h]
Sonia Condori S?nchez
2/20/16
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?Nauta used to be a quiet place,? he says. ?Most of the people who lived there were from there. Now there are many people who have come from other parts of the Amazon, and they bring their customs, as well as drugs and trash. There is a collision between the urban and the indigenous worlds.?
Pollution, especially from oil fields upstream from Nauta, also causes stress, according to Omar Peixoto, a psychologist at the government-run health center in Nauta. Contaminants poison the fish, as well as rivers and lake on which people depend for water for cooking, bathing and drinking.
Those problems create insecurity and uncertainty among indigenous youth, experts say.
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Various suicides have been reported in Nauta since 2001, when three adolescents took their own lives. The cases peaked 2008, with more than 30 suicides.
N?stor Aguilar, a psychiatrist at the Loreto Regional Hospital in Iquitos, who has studied the suicides in Nauta since 2008, attributes the problem to a ?dissociative disorder? characterized by possession, especially among teenage girls.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, possession involves taking on another identity, through the influence of a spirit or another person. Aguilar believes it has both mental health and cultural roots and can be triggered by stresses such as marginalization, poverty, violence, abandonment or sexual abuse.
?What?s notable about this disorder is that it looks almost like an epidemic,? Aguilar says. ?One teenager shows the symptoms, and within a matter of minutes, others have the same symptoms.
In early September, there were three other teen suicides?a 13-year-old girl and two 15-year-old boys?in the Punchana neighborhood in Iquitos.
?It?s a frequent problem,? says the Rev. Miguel Angel Cadenas, pastor of the Catholic parish of La Inmaculada in Punchana.
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Understanding the culture may be more important than knowing psychiatry or psychology, Espinosa says.
?For example, when a Awaj?n teen commits suicide, the cause may not necessarily be depression,? he says. ?In the Awaj?n world, equating suicide with depression doesn?t work. But health workers say that suicide is due to depression.?
Besides changing the way the issue is studied, treatment methods must also change, experts say.
?If a person with a Kukama surname gets sick, everyone with that name suffers, so everyone with that name must become involved in curing the sick person,? Cadenas says. ?The treatment is integral, not individual.?..
