Supportive adults provide emotional safety, security, and comfort to young people and play a big role in reducing youth suicide risk. For Alaska Native (AN) communities, who face disproportionately high rates of youth suicide, a community care approach is critical to preventing suicide while honoring local knowledge, strengths, and values.
This recent publication in Social Work Research builds upon previous research about the kinds of social support AN youth ages 15–24 described receiving from people in their community (see Markowski et al., 2022). By exploring the types of supportive actions AN community members of all ages report doing to prevent suicide and promote mental wellness, this paper reinforces the importance of relational social networks in advancing community-level suicide prevention efforts.
Baseline survey data (N=419) collected from a 2019 evaluation of PC CARES (Promoting Community Conversations About Research to End Suicide) describe supportive actions community members in five remote Alaska Native villages report taking to prevent or reduce suicide risk with different people in their lives within the past few months.
Across eleven survey questions about participants’ behavior, the categories of supportive actions assessed were suicide prevention and health promotion, interpersonal support, and suicide postvention. Examples of actions participants could report doing include “I discussed how to make a home safer (no alcohol, gun safes)” and “I talked about what healthy environments look like for youth growing up”.
Researchers analyzed these data to determine 1) the frequency and types of supportive actions community members engaged in, 2) who these actions involved, and 3) differences in social support across demographic groups. The paper overall describes what kinds of supportive actions were being done and between whom, alongside their prevalence and the characteristics of community helpers.
Findings revealed widespread engagement in supportive actions, with more than 95% of participants engaging in at least one wellness or prevention action in recent months. Participants also reported completing an average of 6.28 out of 11 supportive actions, indicating a generally high level of participation in wellness and suicide prevention behaviors across the sample.
With regard to gender differences, female participants were more likely to engage in interpersonal support behaviors than their male counterparts, which could be tied to systemic disparities in gender norms around mental health and help-seeking.
AN participants aged 60 and older engaged in more prevention actions than younger age groups. Additionally, when examining support provided by family members, younger age groups engaged in fewer support actions than older groups for four items. In contrast, younger participants reported more supportive actions with friends than older groups for five items.
Very few AN participants in this sample reported engagement in supportive activities with service providers, paralleling broader research findings that demonstrate the inaccessibility and cultural incongruence of health service systems for many AN communities.
Overall, the paper offers a culturally-grounded, strengths-based analysis of how social support works to prevent suicide and promote health in remote and rural AN communities. Research on social networks of support in AN communities highlights an opportunity to deepen our understanding of strengths already present in Indigenous communities, enabling practitioners and policymakers to better understand and apply the power of social resources, like culture and relationships, in suicide prevention efforts.
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Citation:
White, L. A., Markowski, K., Schmidt, T., Rataj, S., Schultz, K., Habecker, P., & Wexler, L. (2026). Who are the helpers? Patterns of social support in rural Alaska Native communities. Social Work Research, 50(1), 26–37. https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svaf029