Last year, Volusia County had its highest sucide rate in decades.
When suicide claims the life of a celebrity — as it did last week, when fashion designer Kate Spade and author/chef Anthony Bourdain ended their lives — it spurs a flurry of interest in prevention and public education, and often, a spike in the number of calls to suicide-prevention hotlines and mental-health crisis centers. High-profile deaths draw attention to a killer that flourishes in silence.
But once the spotlight fades, those who are fighting with the pain, isolation and despair that often lead to suicide are back in the dark, left to wonder: If people like Bourdain and Spade — whose public images rested on luxury, adventure, courage and joy — couldn’t fight off their demons, what chance do I have?
That’s why communities can’t relent in their fight against this silent killer. And that is particularly true in Volusia County, where suicide rates have been higher than national and state averages for decades. Official figures released last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that grim trend continuing. Volusia County’s suicide rate was 18.3 per 100,000 people in 2016, well above the overall Florida rate of 15.4.
(READ: Volusia County suicide rates continue to exceed state levels)
And things are getting worse. In 2017, 123 people took their own lives in Volusia County, pushing its rate back up to 23.4, the highest rate in decades. Even more alarming, Flagler County — which typically has a lower than average suicide rate — had 31 deaths in 2017, giving it the highest suicide rate in Florida. Are those numbers an anomaly, or do they represent the start of a trend?
Local officials aren’t taking these grim statistics as a given. Volusia County is a participant in a program that has provided suicide-prevention training to hundreds of local school personnel, community agencies and individuals, and aims to train at least 500 more by 2019. The training focuses attention on effective strategies for dealing with people in mental-health crisis, but acknowledges that there are other barriers to overcome. These include a reluctance on the part of friends, family and other people to simply ask someone if they might be contemplating suicide, and a lack of resources, including access to affordable mental-health services, where people can be referred.
Expanding services is a huge task in an era of budget cuts, but too critical to surrender. Volusia County should keep chasing every opportunity, including grants and other options.
There are other, more targeted areas that local officials should pursue. Volusia County has seen a disturbingly high number of suicides at its correctional facilities, and while county officials have put additional suicide-prevention measures in place, some have drawn controversy — including a program that drafts inmates to keep an eye on people being held under suicide watch. If the county continues with this approach, it should assure that all inmates assigned to observation duty are properly trained and take their duties seriously.
Local leaders should also use data to target known high-risk areas. This is one area the County Council should ask new interim Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin to focus on immediately. (It’s worth noting that one of Thogmartin’s predecessors, Dr. Tom Beaver, was the one who first called attention to Volusia County’s abnormally high suicide rates.) Working with the Volusia County Health Department, the ME’s office can sift through the circumstances of each death, looking for trends that might help focus prevention efforts.
But government and nonprofits can’t do it all. People in the community — husbands, wives, parents, doctors, nurses, teachers, ministers, friends, neighbors — often see warning signs before tragedy strikes, but are afraid to ask someone if they’re contemplating suicide.
It’s a barrier this community must learn to overcome, if it’s serious about saving lives.