According to a report by the Arizona Department of Health Services last year, the suicide rate in the state of Arizona has increased in the past decade.
Suicide, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists as the 10th biggest cause of death in America for 2016, rose in the Grand Canyon State from a rate of 15.4 per 100,000 deaths in 2006 to 18 per 100,000 in 2017.
Suicide now outpaces deaths from motor vehicle crashes in the state, with an average of four suicides occurring per day.
For mental health workers in the Verde Valley, suicide prevention has become a top concern. On Friday, Sept. 20, the Mental Health Coalition Verde Valley held a mental health summit at the Camp Verde Unified School District campus, bringing together health care providers, educators and others in the area who focus on mental health, for a series of discussions on how to combat suicide in the area.
One of the major focuses of the event was on how to not only help those most at- risk for suicide, but also to prevent the kinds of mental health issues that can lead to suicidal tendencies in the first place.
“Almost all the interventions that I’ve been exposed to have been downstream interventions,” said psychotherapist C.C. Landauer, head of the Mental Health Coalition’s Youth Outreach Task Force. “My interest is far more in upstream interventions. Downstream people are already in great despair. What are we doing that’s leading to that? How do we change their consciousness. I want to look at how we got there.”
Landauer highlighted the value of groups like the national Boys to Men and the recently started local group Girls Becoming Women, which are aimed at helping adolescents feel more comfortable as they mature.
In September, Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill providing an additional $3 million to public schools with the intention of aiding student mental health.
“We have increased suicide-prevention awareness as part of our School Safety grant, added our advisory period to promote positive student-adult relationships, partnered with Spectrum counseling and crisis intervention,” Mingus Union High School Principal Genie Gee wrote in an email. “We have also offered youth mental health training to our staff and currently have three trainers on campus. We have received a wellness grant which supports adequate nutrition and social/ emotional health. Our school ecumenical committee has also offered help with crisis response when needed. For the future, we will enthusiastically comply with new laws requiring suicide awareness and prevention training for all staff at least once every three years, and we are looking at putting contact information on the back of student IDs for Teen Lifeline, whose mission is to enhance resiliency in youth and create supportive communities to prevent teen suicide.”
“What I’m hearing is that a lot of the schools — I think what they’re asking for is more help,” Landauer said. “They may be over- whelmed by the sheer numbers of kids that need more attention, and there aren’t enough people, there isn’t enough time, there isn’t enough space to give the kids the kind of personal attention they need. So how do they change that?”
“We have a crisis, a cultural crisis in our communities,” Barbara Litrell, president of the MHCVV, said. “Are we a conscious, caring community? And that’s what we keep trying to do with the mental health coalition, is to build a conscious, caring community.”
“The question we ask ourselves all the time is ‘Why are we seeing such increases in mental illness diagnoses when we supposedly have all the best tools in the world?’” Litrell said.
The event’s keynote speaker was supposed to be Kevin Hines, a man who attempted suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, survived and has since dedicated his life to suicide prevention. But a medical emergency stopped Hines from making it, so another suicide survivor, musician and educator David Simmons, stepped in for an impromptu talk.
Simmons encouraged the audience, which included not just mental health experts, but also schoolchildren from the schools in the area, to be more willing to talk about their mental health in the hopes of allowing people to work through their problems.
“I live on a daily basis with managed mental health,” Simmons said. “We need to normalize this conversation.”
“You are worth it,” Simmons told the audience to end his speech. “You deserve it. You are worthy.”
