A legislative committee heard a presentation about suicide prevention last week that included some local statistics for Fremont County.
The numbers showed that Fremont County recorded the highest percentage of sixth- to eighth-grade students who reported attempting suicide one or more times in the past 12 months.
The presentation also included a slide that showed Fremont County recorded the third-highest suicide rate in the state for 10- to 24-year-olds between 2010 and 2020.
Finally, the presentation indicated that, in 2020, Fremont County’s suicide rate was the fourth highest in the state, at 51.2 per 100,000 residents – up from 38.4 in 2019.
‘Statewide plan’
The numbers were compiled by PROSPER (Proactive Reduction of Suicides in Populations via Evidence-based Research) Founder Kent Corso, who presented the information to the Wyoming Legislature’s Mental Health and Vulnerable Adults Task Force during a meeting last week.
Wyoming Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, who co-chairs the task force, said Corso is helping Wyoming develop “a statewide plan to address suicide.”
Corso referred to the project as “an opportunity to help bend the suicide curve in Wyoming” – in part by looking at suicide as “a social problem” as opposed to a “mental health problem.”
Suicidal ideation is “a much more common human experience than we are used to believing,” Corso explained, and it often impacts adults who are not involved in the mental health system.
That’s why, “if we rely solely on the mental health system as the vehicle to improve this, we will continue to fail,” he said, suggesting that Wyoming instead “broaden the aperture” and look at suicide “as more of a social problem.”
“It’s about connectedness,” he said. “We all wake up in the morning and think something to ourselves about why I should bother getting out of bed. … When people question that, and they have a very flimsy sense of why they should bother going through a day, that’s the precursor to the suicidal thoughts. (So the) more we increase connectedness in communities, in families – whether you’re an adult or a child – the more we’re buffering against that suicide risk.”