Rep. Sara Gelser fully supports the theory of “upstream prevention,” the idea that the best way to fix a problem is to never let it start.

But when it comes to youth suicide, the Corvallis Democrat doesn’t want to leave all state resources upstream.

Not with 2012 statistics showing suicide as the second-highest cause of death among Oregonians ages 15 to 34. Not when 13.6 percent of eighth-graders who responded to the 2011 Oregon Healthy Teens survey said they had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 3.5 percent actually tried.

And especially not considering the mid-valley lost five people between the ages of 10 and 24 to suicide in 2012, and at least three between October and December of last year.

Gelser is introducing a bill in this legislative session she hopes will strengthen the state’s ability to intervene with kids in crisis.

House Bill 4124 would add “intervention” to the title and job description of the state’s youth suicide prevention coordinator, move the position from public health to mental health, and require regular updates to lawmakers on both prevention and intervention plans.

The Chair of Human Services and Housing has scheduled it for a hearing and possible work session on the Monday, the first day of the new session.

As a discussion topic, suicide is emotionally devastating, Gelser acknowledged. Deaths in Corvallis, Philomath and Albany this past fall nearly caused her to back off from the proposed legislation to avoid further anguish for local families.

But not talking about it hasn’t made it go away.

“Unless we can talk about it, it’s very hard to find solutions to it,” she said.

By the numbers

The rate of suicides among Oregonians of all ages has jumped 21 percent since 2000, according to a 2012 report by the Oregon Health Authority.

As of 2010, the suicide rate here was 41 percent higher than the national average.

Youth suicide trends are a little more hopeful. Although Oregon’s rate still surpasses the national average, it began dropping between 1991 and 2009 and has held more or less steady since.

In Linn and Benton counties, most of the people who die by suicide are older than 24, according to statistics collected by the Oregon Violent Death Reporting System. On average, however, records for the past decade show between three and six younger people between the two counties take their own lives each year.

The Oregon Health Authority’s report for 2003-2010 indicates roughly a third of Oregon’s adolescent suicides told someone they were planning to kill themselves. Twelve percent of the males and 41 percent of the females had made previous attempts.

To Gelser, that means the decision to die didn’t come without warning.

“We know who they are,” she said. “That means we can do better. We can save some of these kids. And if we can save some of these kids, it’s worth the effort we put into it.”

The bill’s particulars

Gelser’s bill doesn’t claim to change the statistics. She’s looking instead to shine a light on them and to improve access to services for people in immediate crisis.

If passed, the bill would accomplish three things. First, it would change the job description of the state’s current youth prevention coordinator position to add an emphasis on intervention.

It would also move the position from public health, which focuses on long-term preventive measures, to mental health, where the emphasis is on people currently in crisis.

Third, the bill would require an update of the state’s youth suicide intervention and prevention plan every five years, with an update on the first plan due next January.

Although various reports on suicide have been released in recent years, Oregon’s youth suicide prevention plan hasn’t been updated since the late 1990s.

That plan recommends identifying barriers to receiving crisis services and finding ways to improve those services. It also advocates for low- or no-cost services and more insurance coverage for behavioral health treatment.

However, its overall focus is upstream prevention: public education campaigns, professional training opportunities, skill-building support groups, efforts to reduce bullying and harassment.

Gelser’s bill also would identify the service barriers and recommend improvements.

It would report the suicide demographics by age, gender, race and other factors, and document the manner and method of completed and attempted suicides, as well as self-inflicted injuries.

It would list the number of completed suicides where the youth had previously been hospitalized for an attempt, or had been the subject of a request for intervention services.

It would include suggestions for depression screenings and intervention opportunities through social media, among other recommendations. And it would detail the intervention and prevention strategies used by states with low rates of youth suicide.

‘Out of the shadow’

No cost estimates come with the bill, although Gelser acknowledged there will be some expense.

It will take extra time and skills to collect and analyze whatever information the bill requires that isn’t already documented, for instance. And ideally, Gelser said, the state would add an intervention position in mental health rather than simply moving the prevention position from public health, which would add to the cost.

However, she added, Oregon can train any number of people to identify youth in crisis. It doesn’t help if there’s nowhere to send them.

“If you’re looking at limited resources and you have an existing position, I think the greatest need right now really is building up that intervention system and better understanding how we can be there and meet the emergency, immediate needs of kids who are depressed and suicidal,” Gelser said.

Gelser said anguished constituents call her, desperately looking for help for the troubled young people in their lives. But she knows others stay silent for fear of being stigmatized.

That, she said, is perhaps the most important reason for the bill.

“It’s important to talk about the issue so we can bring the issue out of the shadow,” she said, “so people can realize they’re not alone and there’s nothing wrong with them for asking for help.

“There is nothing wrong with asking for help.”

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Part Two, Corvallis Gazette-Times, Feb. 02, 2014

A mid-valley teenager had struggled with depression and mental health issues since she was a small child, but last November, she hit crisis level. In the weeks it took for a bed to open in an inpatient treatment facility, she became increasingly suicidal and violent.

Her younger sibling stayed with their grandparents, her father quit his job to be with her every minute of the day and her mother kept the phone close at all times.

On one of their worst days, the mother got a call from a county worker.

“The worker called us right before 5 and told us she’s sorry she didn’t get back to us, but there had been a suicide in the community, and it was a crisis,” the mother recalled in a letter she sent to Oregon Rep. Sara Gelser. “All I could feel was fear for my own child and anger that someone successfully killing themselves is what was finally a crisis.”

Linn and Benton counties lost at least three young people — two high school students and a recent graduate — to suicide between October and December last year. In the past month since Gelser, D-Corvallis, introduced a bill aimed at helping prevent these deaths, youth suicides at Oregon State University, Bend High School and Eugene made the news.

Records for the past decade show that, on average, three to six mid-valley residents between the ages of 10 and 24 take their own lives every year.

The experience of the mid-valley parent who wrote Gelser isn’t unique. Parents face the challenge of navigating a mental health system made up of a patchwork of limited services and treatment options. While public mental health clinicians and community partners work to pool resources and creatively fill the gaps, they admit that the crisis-driven system in place to deal with troubled youths has little capacity for prevention or intervention, even while it struggles to treat the most at-risk youth while they’re in crisis.

‘He gave us a number’

“Trying to get help for her has been so heartbreaking,” the mother wrote in her letter to Gelser.

The mid-valley woman explained that her daughter had attempted to kill herself before and had talked about wanting to die since she was 8 years old. In November, when matters boiled over, her parents took her to the emergency room because they were desperate. It was the only place where they could get immediate help.

Every day, the emergency rooms in Linn and Benton county hospitals become the after-hours point of access for adults and children seeking help during a mental health crisis. The patients may be ridden with anxiety, depressed, combative or at risk of hurting themselves.

The ER at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis sees two to three adults per day and two to three minors per week who are in mental health crisis, according to Dr. Caroline Fisher, chief of child psychiatry for Samaritan Health Services.

Mid-valley hospitals are too small to staff a 24-hour mental health unit, so the emergency room doctor and nursing staff are tasked with cases they may not be trained to handle. In 2012, emergency rooms in Albany, Corvallis and Lebanon hospitals saw 102 children and adolescents with psychiatric issues.

In cases that appear serious enough, emergency room staff bring in the on-call mental health clinician.

“We took her to the ER, where they threatened to restrain her to the bed,” the mother recalled in the letter. “When the county crisis worker got there two hours after us, she (my daughter) screamed herself to sleep. The worker looked at us and her and said, ‘Things seemed to have calmed down.’ He gave us a number and sent us home.”

Difficult decisions

The emergency room staff and the on-call clinician assess the suicidal child or adolescent, determine the level of danger and come up with a plan to keep everyone safe.

The truth, however, is that they have only one decision to make.

“Ultimately, at the ER, it’s do they need to be at the hospital or not?” said Mitch Anderson, Benton County Health Department director and head of the mental health division.

Patients are hospitalized overnight only if they’re considered an imminent danger to themselves or others, Anderson said. The hospital offers added security and 24-hour monitoring, but no active psychiatric treatment.

Mid-valley hospitals don’t have inpatient psychiatric wards for minors, so potentially dangerous youths are housed in the pediatric ward until a bed at an inpatient facility comes open at the Children’s Farm Home in Corvallis or in other facilities in places such as Portland.

Thirteen of the 102 youth who walked into mid-valley emergency rooms in 2012 with a mental health crisis were placed in inpatient facilities of some sort, Fisher said, while two others had already been staying in residential treatment at the Children’s Farm Home.

The hospital, Fisher said, is far from the ideal place to house suicidal youth.

“The pediatrics ward is not set up to be safe from (sharp objects) and this ward (in Corvallis) is integrated with the maternity ward” with babies and new mothers, Fisher said. “If you get an out-of-control, manic teenager, that screws up everybody on the pediatric ward.”

The Benton County Health Department assesses youth in crisis but for the past couple of decades, the county has held contracts with and referred children to providers such as the Old Mill Center and the Children’s Farm Home for treatment and case management, Anderson said, on the principle that the county shouldn’t compete with private providers.

As a result, Fisher said, a Benton County youth who walks into the ER is more likely to be sent home with a referral and no follow-up.

“They make the decision — in or out — and then it’s over,” she said.

The situation is somewhat different in Linn County: Because the Linn County Health Department has its own child mental health program, the on-call clinicians can schedule a next-day appointment at the county office and follow through with case management.

Long waits

Kids in crisis make it to the front of the line at the cost of other at-risk youths, who wait at least two weeks to get an initial assessment from a mental health professional.

If more next-day appointments were available in the mid-valley — through private or county providers – it would likely cut down on emergency room visits, said Dr. Cindy Smith, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Smith is medical director of the Children’s Farm Home in Corvallis, which provides inpatient treatment for up to 64 youths.

“I think a lot of parents could wait a few days if they knew it was just a few days, but usually when they call around to counselors, they hear they’ll have to wait at least a week,” she said.

Seeing a psychiatrist, who can offer medication management and therapy, will take even longer. The wait is at least three months, Fisher said, and it doesn’t matter whether families are on the Oregon Health Plan, privately insured or paying out of pocket.

“I have people coming in six months later,” Fisher said. “If they are in crisis, it can be a long wait before they can see a psychiatrist.”

Locally and nationwide, there just aren’t enough providers, she said.

And without quick interventions, small problems snowball into bigger ones, Smith said. A teenager’s inner turmoil may begin spilling outward in ways that affect schoolwork and involve the juvenile justice system.

“We don’t have adequate intervention services for children who are not yet suicidal, but they’re depressed and heading that way,” Smith said.

Some programs, like Linn County’s Youth Services Teams, aim to intervene when trouble is on the horizon by bringing together agencies, schools, service providers and the families of troubled youth in one room to offer support and solve problems. Last school year, the county’s five teams served 96 families of at-risk — but not necessarily suicidal — adolescents.

But the Youth Services Teams are limited to serving those most at risk. Frank Moore, the Linn County Health Department administrator and mental health director, admits the teams could benefit a lot more kids.

“We are not reaching as far down in acuity as we’d like,” he said.

Other services

Depressed or suicidal children and adolescents have many points of access to get help — private providers, school districts, the juvenile justice system, Boys & Girls Clubs, county mental health programs and so on. Each supplies different services funded in different ways. The result is a fractured and difficult-to-navigate system that treats symptoms differently.

“Depending on who you talk to, you may get the Cadillac treatment plan or you may get a basic treatment plan and it may have nothing to do with the severity or your insurance,” Fisher said. “It’s much more determined by where you came into the system.”

Mental health professionals agree that, when possible, it’s best to treat children and adolescents in their own environments, using the natural supports of their families, friends and schools to teach them how to cope with everyday stressors and build resilience.

But the pressure, depending on the advocate or point of access, sometimes leads officials to send individuals to inpatient treatment even when they don’t need that intense level of care, said Smith, from the Children’s Farm Home.

“I don’t think we have a very uniform agreement of what needs to happen when a child says they’re feeling suicidal,” she said. “A lot of children who are having suicidal thoughts are treated quite effectively in outpatient programs. I think there’s sometimes an idea that every child having suicidal thoughts should be hospitalized, and that’s seldom the case.”

Stigma lingers

On top of the myriad resource and infrastructure-related hurdles in getting care for the kids who need it, another barrier often stops kids and families from seeking help in the first place: the stigma of mental illness.

The shame is so strong, Smith said, that it leads kids to stay quiet when their friends confide that they’re suicidal. It sometimes causes parents to ignore warning signs. It means that society still tends to not take mental health issues as seriously as physical health, even though the two are intrinsically linked.

“There has been a lot of shame, either for the teen or their families, recognizing that there is a mental health problem and something is really wrong,” Smith said.

By the time an adolescent is actually considering suicide, he or she has been

on that path — planning and thinking about it — for months or years. Signs get ignored for a long time, Smith said.

“I think stigma is a huge barrier to people getting help before it becomes an emergency,” she said, adding, “One of their biggest worries (for kids) at the Farm Home is what will people think of them when they go back to school.”

A brighter future

Health care reform is moving toward emphasizing prevention and integrating mental health treatment into primary care.

It’s a hopeful move, Fisher said. Soon, she believes, screenings for depression will be as common in preventive care as testing for diabetes and hypertension.

“We now have, in the Samaritan system, six or eight behavioral health psychologists embedded in primary care offices,” Fisher said.

In fact, she added, “My son just got a depression screening today with height, weight and blood pressure screening.”

Increasing support for mental health support in primary care offices, in theory, will improve the diagnosis and early treatment of mental illness so that patients can be treated more effectively.

Treating mental health issues like any other physical illness may have another welcome result: It could reduce the stigma attached to getting help for mental health issues.

That’s a development Gelser would welcome.

After the first article in this series was published last month, Gelser heard from other parents whose kids are struggling or have thought about suicide. They weren’t strangers, but rather people she knew through her network of friends and family.

“It struck me — how many people are holding this in and how common this must be, given that response? That was heartbreaking to me,” she said. “It made me think, gosh, I wish we could talk about these things because it’s easier when you know you’re not alone.”

Facts and figures

• Rank of suicide as a cause of death for Oregonians ages 15 to 34: second (vehicular death is first).

• Percentage of Oregon eighth-graders who said they had seriously considered attempting suicide, according to the 2011 Healthy Teens survey: 13.6.

• Percentage who actually tried: 3.5.

• Percentage of adolescent males who died by suicide between 2003 and 2010 who first told someone they planned to kill themselves: 29.

• Percentage of those males who had a previoius attempt: 12.

• Percentage of adolescent females who died by suicide between 2003 and 2010 who first told someone they planned to kill themselves: 41.

• Percentage of those females who had a previous attempt: 27.

• Rise in the suicide rate for Oregon as a whole since 2000: 21 percent.

• Rate of suicides in Oregon per 100,000 population as of 2010: 17.1, or 41 percent higher than the national average.

• Last time the Oregon Youth Suicide Prevention Plan was updated: 1997.

• Number of people total between the ages of 10 and 24 who died by suicide in Linn and Benton counties in 2012: 5.

• Number who died last year: 3, anecdotally. Data is still being compiled.

• Number of years in which nobody between the ages of 10 and 24 died by suicide in either Linn or Benton counties since 2003: 0.

WHERE TO GET HELP

Here are some resources to help in emergency situations involving suicide risks:

• National suicide prevention hotline: 1-800-273-TALK, www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org, www.suicide.org.

• Benton County Mental Health crisis number: 541-766-6844, 1-888-232-7192.

• Community Outreach crisis line, serving Benton and Linn counties: 541-758-3000.

• Linn County Health Services crisis number: 541-967-3866 or 1-800-304-7468.