Gazette: Experts Face Facts on Suicide
Posted 05/21/2009
By Brian Newsome
The Gazette
In El Paso County, children as young as 8 have confessed to drawing up plans to kill themselves. Veterans have returned from war to use weapons that once protected them to end their lives. And families and friends have learned too late that people who seemed to have everything felt there was nothing in this life left for them.
For years, the region's suicide rate has far exceeded the nation's, and these deaths represent just a fraction of the people who make attempts or seriously contemplate the idea. Yet suicide has been a mostly silent issue.
That may be changing. In what is believed to be the first ever meeting of its kind in Colorado Springs, counselors, experts on suicide and others gathered for an all-day forum Wednesday to face the issue head-on.
Sponsored by Pikes Peak Behavioral Health Group, the forum was designed to launch a more concerted and focused suicide-prevention effort than what's previously been done, said Morris L. Roth, the group's president and chief executive officer. It's also a commitment to keeping the issue in the public eye.
El Paso County has an average of 19 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people, and in 2004, Colorado Springs' suicide rate ranked No. 2 in the nation among major cities.
No one knows why the area's rate is so high. Recently released research by Pikes Peak Behavioral Group suggests that one factor might be the region's high population of veterans, which is considered a high-risk group.
Thomas Joiner, a scholar specializing in suicide research who wrote "Why People Die By Suicide," told the crowd Wednesday that although numerous factors and circumstances play into suicides, they all come down to a convergence of three conditions: a developed fearlessness of pain or death; alienation; and the idea that a person would be of more value, or at least less of a burden, dead than alive.
He said intervention in any of those three factors can go a long way toward keeping a depressive episode from turning into a suicide.
Alison Lighthall, a deployment mental health consultant at Fort Carson, said the Army has taken that logic to heart as it grapples with suicides among soldiers.
"We have been flummoxed by what is going on with our soldiers," she told the crowd during a panel discussion.
She said Fort Carson is focusing on helping platoon leaders understand the warning signs of suicide.
Experts also discussed ways they could collaborate to address the issue in light of an economic climate in which funding for suicide prevention will be hard to come by.
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