By Sarah Wallace

Ignite the Life Rally to focus on the youth suicide crisis

Jan 20, 2017 | 1:00 PM

The sad rise of youth suicides in Canada has many people worried for the country’s young people.

In the month of October, northern Saskatchewan saw six girls between the ages of 10 and 15 take their own lives with reports of over 20 more attempts in the weeks following.

Sara Wheelwright is helping organize a free rally in Saskatoon aimed at the province’s youth. The Ignite the Life Rally will take place Feb. 2 and 3. 

“We really had empathy for the situation and felt we had to do something … we met with some other connections in November to see what can be done and that’s when we came up with the core idea for the Ignite the Life Rally,” she said.

“What we’re trying to do is really start something here, really creating ambassadors that are going to go back to the communities and share the information.”

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The event will include a Facebook live stream, plus numerous photos and videos will be posted to their page. Currently, 500 to 600 students have shown interest in the event, and Wheelwright said First Nations communities have collected funds to send their youth to the event.  

Part of the two day even will focus on northern communities.

“We have speakers, breakout sessions, we have a very Indigenous element to it simply because that again is the communities that have been affected,” Wheelwright said.

A panel of suicide survivors will speak at the rally about life after their attempts and how there really is hope. Another panel trains entrepreneurs and will speak specifically on their successes within the First Nations community.

Wheelwright thought negativity had a terrible habit of spreading, and the vast geography of Saskatchewan, plus long cold winters played a part.

“I think there’s a cycle that a lot of communities have gotten into where there isn’t a positivity, they can’t see a career path and they can’t see a way out or if they do get out they don’t come back,” she said.

She said for communities in northern Saskatchewan there are social workers in place, but these workers are so overburdened young people may slip through the cracks.

“What’s become very clear, with the amount of people that are trying to register here, is there is a massive, massive need for focus from provincial and federal government and the individual communities to really look at this subject and get through it because we’re losing talent, we’re losing our future,” she said.

Her goal is to show youth who feel suicidal that they are not alone. There is a stigma on suicide, whether it’s for religious reasons or because of social pressures.

“The problem is there tends to be a domino effect which we certainly saw last year in the northern communities of one and another, and another, and a pact that’s kind of for death rather than for life. What we’re really trying to do is show that however bad it is, tomorrow is a new day,” Wheelwright said.

Being open about suicide and embracing the community as a whole, she believed, would help deal with deep rooted issues like abuse, addiction, depression and question of sexuality.

Sarah Wallace is paNOW’s community reporter and afternoon anchor on 900 CKBI. She can be reached at swallace@panow.com or tweet her @sarahthesquid.