Rural counties have always had unique struggles with suicide and other mental illness, and for Park County, 2009 was particularly difficult. In the Denver Post’s recent article, “Park County’s 2009 suicides a stark reminder of state’s high rate”, they detail the mental health challenges facing rural Colorado:
“In a county of breathtaking mountain vistas, with barely 18,000 residents spread sparsely over 2,200 square miles, 15 people eventually took their lives in 2009, nearly doubling the previous record high. While hardly a statistical trend, the sudden spike offered a jolting reminder that Colorado’s suicide rate continues to hover well above the national norm — and that experts still haven’t fully come to grips with a problem that pervades the Rocky Mountain West.
The state suicide rate has remained mostly flat since 1990, except for a brief dip around 1999, as Colorado developed its first strategy to combat the problem. According to statistics from 2006, the latest year national data are available, Colorado’s rate of 15.1 per 100,000 population still well exceeded the overall U.S. rate of just less than 11. Other Mountain West states such as Wyoming, Montana, Nevada and New Mexico dwarfed even that with rates at 19 or higher. The most recent compilation of state numbers put Colorado’s rate at 15.8 in 2008 — and marked the second year in a row that total suicides eclipsed 800.
About a decade into renewed emphasis on prevention, those numbers tell Jeanne Rohner that Colorado still has a long way to go.
“But they also say to me that we don’t know where we’d be if we hadn’t put together all the programs,” said Rohner, president and CEO of nonprofit Mental Health America of Colorado. “That’s the difficult thing about suicide. You don’t know the numbers that you’ve prevented.”
One number Colorado does know: the calls to the national suicide prevention hotline (800-273-8255) that originate within the state and get routed to operators in Pueblo. From only 318 in 2000, the volume rose steadily to 7,457 in 2008.
To read the complete article, visit the Denver Post website. To find out more about Colorado’s mental health efforts, consider attending the National Association for Rural Mental Health annual conference–click here for more information.
