This study examines a long escalating problem of youth suicide in Siberia. One objective is to understand why and how the suicides spread and takes on epidemic character.

It is recognized, that there has to be some sort of social contamination that can explain the epidemic character of suicides among various indigenous groups of people. I wish to explore the ways of communication by which one suicide may affect others in the community and might cause them to perform the same action from a local perspective. In the Chukchi universe communication not only takes place between human beings, it encompasses the communication that takes place between all beings, which is seen as both human and non-human, including those beings living in worlds other than the physical world we see around us. This study explores whether environmental factors, such as social relations to and communication with non-humans, in this and other worlds, can affect a person to such a degree that he chooses suicide.