Madam Speaker, we live in a time where we have outpaced our demand for mental health professionals. I get calls from constituents unable to put their names on waitlists for youth psychologists and concerned by the demand on inschool ones. But if our youth aren't speaking with professionals, then who are they speaking with?
Suicide is a common conversation among our youth. In the NWT, roughly 160 to 180 people use hospital services every year following suicide attempts. Some of these people are youth and some were brought in to emergency by their peers. In North America, 19 out of 20 suicide attempts will fail, but people who try and fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time. Each failed attempt is the gift of a second chance. We need to be ready and resourced for second chances. And if our youth are providing peer support, then we need to prepare them for supporting roles and, devastatingly at times, survivor roles.
A few weeks ago, I travelled to Iceland and had the privilege of listening to inspired young adults speak passionately about mental health and youth agency. But I wasn't listening to youth from Iceland. I was listening to Dene, Inuit, Gwich'in, and Metis youth from the Northwest Territories. Our youth are powerful, insightful, and inspired. So we don't need to look to other parts of the world for answers; we need to look down the street and pass the microphone to the voices we are losing.
Hope grows when we have conversations about our paths to a new day. For things to get better, we need to see the role we play in our own tomorrow and that comes with agency. To have agency means to have power in our own future.
I commend the community of Tuktoyaktuk who started the conversation about what next by passing the microphone to their youth and asking them what they needed; what they wanted. But what is this government's next step to pass the power to NWT youth, to empower them to share ideas and access funding themselves? To our youth, living another day takes courage and hanging on to an ounce of hope takes strength. It will get better and you are worth life. I will have questions about how this government is empowering youth to have agency over their mental health. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Thank you, Member. Members' statements. Member for Nunakput.
