Youth suicide was an intense topic to discuss early Wednesday morning in Lafayette, but the community breakfast hosted by Mental Health Partners did not shy away.
Mental Health Partners, a nonprofit providing mental health care and addiction recovery services in Longmont, Broomfield, Boulder and Lafayette, hosts these annual breakfasts to address pressing mental health concerns impacting the community. Suicide, the second leading cause of death for youth in Colorado behind only motor vehicle accidents, is a major concern for the region.
To set the stage for the discussion, Mental Health Partners co-CEO Dixie Casford outlined some statistics. According to Boulder County Public Health, emergency department visits for suicide attempts of children ages 10-17 almost doubled in 2021 compared to 2020 and was nearly three times as high as 2019.
She added that Broomfield tied with two other counties for the highest rates of suicide in Colorado. Black and Latino suicide rates in Colorado per 1,000 people is more than double the national average, while Colorado veterans have suicide rates at 34% above average.
Featured speaker Anna Mueller, a socioligist specializing in youth suicide research, emphasized the social roots of adolcensent suicide when looking at these numbers. She explained that suicide is a complex phenonmenon with a variety of intermingling factors at play, with no one cause.
Mueller has spent the last 10 years of her career focused on “suicide clusters,” a number of suicides or suicide attempts that occur close together in time and space that youth are more vulnerable to. She outlined her research in a town given the pseudonym Poplar Grove, which demonstrated the way that ignoring the social roots of suicide impacted the ability to prevent youth suicide.
Mueller described Poplar Grove as an affluent, predominantly white community where she spent three years interviewing children, parents and providers. The small community has a high level of social connectivity, but this often led to worries about social perception and gossip.
Additionally, Poplar Grove has a heavy emphasis on success that places high pressure on students along with intense stigma about mental health and suicide. Only 32% of students in Poplar Grove were willing to talk to an adult about the mental health issues they were facing, compared to 67% in a comparison group of children.
“They were scared that people would find out that they needed help,” Mueller said.
The schools in Poplar Grove up until 2017 had a policy of not talking about suicide out of fear of triggering suicide contagion. Mueller said research shows that discussing suicide after one occurs — called post-vention — actually does the opposite.
“Kids were not getting really thoughtful post-vention at school,” Mueller said. “They were not getting really thoughtful suicide prevention. They were experiencing more a case where it was swept under the rug and tried to move on very quickly and act like basically nothing had happened. So, kids felt very gaslighted.”
This also led the youth to a passive view of suicide, when having agency is a much more helpful approach to this issue.
Mueller argued that all these social factors combined to worsen other risk factors for suicide. In response, she said that communities need to look at building stronger mental health safety nets.
“Along with that, we need to think about how we can build a world that’s worth living in for kids,” Mueller said.
She explained that while Poplar Grove has specific stressors, it provides a way to look at other factors that might not satisfy children’s psycho-social developmental needs, like structural inequality, housing insecurity, mental health safety systems and social values.
Mueller recommended cultivating cultures of belonging, including for students who might not be the most successful in school or identify as LGBTQIA. Other recommendations she included were challenging mental health stigma, reconsidering academic pressure and ending silence and shame around suicide.
“Shifting culture is possible, though a challenge,” Mueller said. “... It’s critical to empower youth to be a part of the conversation. I don’t mean give them a seat at the table, I mean really give them driving power. Respect them when they tell you what they need.”
Mueller’s academic publications are available for free on her website at annasmueller.com. Learn more about Mental Health Partners and their services at www.mphcolorado.org.
Colorado provides a 24/7 crisis support line at 844-493-8255 or text TALK to 38255.
