Mental Health Matters

Note: This article includes details about individuals who have taken their own lives. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text 988.

In 2012, Washtenaw County saw thirty-four deaths by suicide. In 2022, there were forty-four. For Celeste Kanpurwala, a facilitator for the anti-suicide group Washtenaw Alive, the issue hits tragically close to home.

“My father, Scott Smith, was an avid fisherman with an eclectic music taste,” she writes on MomentsThatSurvive.org. “Unfortunately he suffered from depression and took his own life with his shotgun on April 9, 2014, which was the day after my 31st birthday. He never got a chance to meet his grandchildren, so all I have to share with them are stories. Sometimes if I close my eyes and squeeze them tightly, I can smell my dad’s cologne and feel his face pressed against mine as he gave me one of his famous bear hugs. I miss him every day.”

This is not the only time suicide has touched Kanpurwala’s life. Just two years later, her friend Gwendolyn La Croix lost her seventeen-year-old son. “My son Jonah took his life with his father’s unsecured pistol on October 19, 2016,” La Croix shares in an email.

“Her ex had thought it was safely stored, but it wasn’t at all,” Kanpurwala says. “He had the firearm out and the bullet separate, but that’s not safe storage. That’s complete and utter negligence.”

In response to the rise in suicide rates, the Washtenaw County Health Department (WCHD) released its first suicide report this spring. The goal, county epidemiologist Shannon Phillips emails, is “to describe and present local data to start conversations with the public and our partners.”

The report details suicide rates and demographic trends between 2000 and 2021. Although Washtenaw County has historically seen fewer suicides than both the state and the nation, the gap is narrowing.

“Unfortunately, the data we have available at WCHD cannot explain or point to a ‘why’ for increasing suicide rates,” writes Phillips.

Health department communications administrator Susan Ringler-Cerniglia believes one reason may be because “the way we live has changed for the worse. I don’t want to blame it all on social media [but] what does that do to our ability to connect to each other, particularly for young people?”

“Social media is so consuming and results in experiences like bullying,” adds U-M School of Social Work assistant professor Lindsay Bornheimer. “It also leads to less personal connections and supports in someone’s own physical environment.”

And it’s often “incredibly difficult to seek emergency mental health care,” says Ringler-Cerniglia. “I’ve personally dealt with family members that needed resources, and it was very difficult to get access. I’m not suffering from a lack of information or insurance. But in the moment, in that crisis, it can be very, very challenging.”

And then there’s the issue of firearms. According to the suicide report, guns were used in 43 percent of county suicides between 2019 and 2021, and in more than 50 percent of suicides by people over the age of forty-five.

Kanpurwala thinks that rising suicide rates and increased gun ownership are connected. Phillips is careful to contextualize this information. “We do not have data on gun access or ownership in Washtenaw County, so we can’t back up that link—although it certainly could be a factor, we just don’t have the specific data to support it,” she writes. “Also, we don’t currently have historical data on suicide deaths by age group and methods (this may be something we can investigate in the future—but we don’t have access to older data yet).”

But Kanpurwala, citing EveryStat.org, points out that 60 percent of Michigan gun deaths are suicides. “Other countries have mental health issues,” she says. “But we are the only industrialized country with this plethora of guns, and the suicides and homicides reflect that.”

State Democrats have wanted tighter gun control for years but couldn’t get a hearing in Lansing until they won control of all three branches of government last November.

“We moved first on gun violence prevention because it was something that both caucuses in the House and the Senate were broadly agreeing on,” says Ann Arbor’s state senator, Jeff Irwin.

In April, governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law bills requiring stricter background checks for the purchase of firearms, as well as more stringent safe storage requirements. In May, she signed a “red flag law,” allowing temporary removal of firearms from at-risk individuals.

Irwin says he’s “very hopeful that these bills are going to reduce suicide deaths and reduce accidental gun deaths in Michigan … Violent acts in general and suicides in particular are often spontaneous acts that, if a little bit of additional time is added to the mix, folks won’t attempt.”

Meanwhile, on the local level, Washtenaw County’s 2017 Public Safety and Mental Health Preservation Millage has brought in almost $18 million, with $6.7 million going to mental health initiatives.

“The millage has given us the opportunity to be able to do a lot more community campaigns around mental health and education and access to services,” explains Community Mental Health executive director Trish Cortes, “for example the #wishyouknew campaign that we’re doing in partnership with [the public health department] around bringing more awareness and reducing stigma around mental health for particularly youths.”

WCHD also launched the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline last year in part with federal funds, as well as billboards and bus wraps to get the word out. So far, it seems to be working.

“We definitely have people accessing services at a much higher level than ever before,” Cortes says. “Our individuals that we serve are up 109 percent, and our call volume has gone from 5,000 a month to just around 10,000 calls a month.”

That increased willingness to ask for help may be cause for cautious optimism.

“We have a long way to go in terms of getting people that are suffering from that to treatment,” Ringler-Cerniglia says. “It is also clear that if you are able to access treatment, suicide can be prevented, people can recover.”

“I have to be hopeful,” Kanpurwala says, “because without hope what do we have?”

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988 is national initiative

Susan Ringler-Cerniglia, the county health department’s head of communications, emailed to say that the statement “WCHD also launched the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline last year” in our piece “Mental Health Matters” from the September issue “isn’t accurate. 988 is a national initiative/number. In Washtenaw, because we have a local access line (734–544–3050), individuals can call it directly or use 988. 988 has chat and text features that the local phone number doesn’t.”