Mike Wolanin | The Republic Charlotte Barton-Coombs, executive director of Family Services Inc., poses for a photo in the organization’s offices inside the Doug Otto United Way Center in Columbus, Ind., Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024.
Local officials are raising concerns as the number of people in Bartholomew County who have taken their own lives has gone up this year and is on pace to exceed the highest annual total on record.
As of last week, 11 people in Bartholomew County were deaths by suicide, up from eight suicides during all of 2023 and six in 2022, according to the Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office.
With roughly five months to go in the year, the community is on pace for nearly 19 death by suicides, which would surpass the highest annual total on record of 16 suicides in 2019, according to data going back to 2015.
“We are (on pace for) record numbers of suicides this year,” said Charlotte Barton Coombs, executive director of Family Service Inc. and coordinator of the Bartholomew County Suicide and Overdose Review Team, or SOFR. “…Patterns have emerged in our community that must be addressed quickly.”
Formed in late 2022, the SOFR team is a multi-disciplinary group that reviews local overdose deaths and suicides to examine what happened, what gaps may exist in local prevention efforts and develop data-informed prevention initiatives to prevent future deaths.
One of the main patterns that Barton Coombs said has emerged as the SOFR team examined local suicides is the profile of the people who have taken their lives this year — all of them were white males who were at least 45 years old and used a gun to kill themselves.
“Typically, (when you think of suicides), you think of people with serious mental illness,” Barton Coombs said. “You think of individuals in that 18 through 35-year range, which at one point was the highest age range for suicide. What we are seeing is the numbers are shifting now so that individuals 45 through just under 70, or right at that 70 mark, are really surpassing (the other age group), especially in Bartholomew County.”
“In Bartholomew County, the trend that we are really seeing is that men suffer suicide completion at a far greater rate than women,” Barton Coombs added later in the interview. “Women attempt (suicide) more (often), but men succeed more. I’m going to say by a pretty significant amount.”
Barton Coombs said it is hard to say precisely why death by suicides have been increasing, particularly among the 45 to 70 age group, but said it could be correlated with the Baby Boomer generation starting to retire and experience health issues.
The SOFR team has identified those who chose death by suicide in Bartholomew County typically have been seen by a doctor or been to the hospital within two months before taking their lives, Barton Coombs said. They also generally recently had a change in work status or financial status, including reduced work hours or retirement.
The rise in death by suicide so far this year in Bartholomew County comes after federal health officials reported last year that the U.S. suicides reached an all-time high in 2022.
About 49,500 people in the U.S. took their own lives in 2022, the highest number ever, suggesting that suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II, The Associated Press reported, citing figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts caution that death by suicide is complicated, and that recent increases might be driven by a range of factors, including higher rates of depression and limited availability of mental health services.
But a main driver is the growing availability of guns, experts said.
Suicide attempts involving guns end in death far more often than those with other means, and gun sales have boomed — placing firearms in more and more homes, according to wire reports. A Johns Hopkins University analysis found that the nation’s overall gun suicides rose last year to 26,993, an all-time high.
“In the Midwest, (gun suicides) have really been a dominant form (of suicide),” Barton Coombs said. “We’re seeing an uptick in that. I think we’ll see more of an uptick in that as more adults are aging out of the workforce. We are rural, and we are a hunting community, and I think access to firearms is something that no one wants to touch, right? It’s a really hot topic. I know from my own family’s experience, telling my dad with dementia that you can’t access your gun — which you have always taken pride in and you’ve always collected and used safely — but telling you, ‘No, you can’t have access to that,’ was one of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had to have.”
Indiana, for its part, had the 25th highest suicide rate in the nation in 2022, with the rate of Hoosiers taking their lives generally exceeding the national suicide rate each year since 2000, according to the CDC and the Indiana Department of Health. More than 1,000 Hoosiers have committed death by suicide every year since 2016, including 1,152 people in 2022.
The state’s suicide rate was 16.4 per 100,000 people in 2022, up from 11.8 in 2005, according to the most recent figures from the CDC. The national suicide rate was 14.3 in 2022, ranging from 28.7 in Montana to 7.7 in New Jersey.
Should the current pace of suicides in Bartholomew County persist for the rest of the year, the county would end up with a rate of 22.4.
Locally, officials have recently formed the Bartholomew County Suicide Prevention Coalition to raise awareness, including safety planning and talking about firearms with loved ones, risk factors and connection and support systems.
“If you look at Bartholomew County, we don’t do a lot of awareness activities like in other counties, like in Marion County, Jackson County, Monroe County,” Barton Coombs said “They hold awareness events, like walks and groups that get together and do symposiums, discussions and education. There’s a small core group of us that are trying to get those things started, and we just don’t have it there yet.”
“We’re not at an all-time high yet, but the thing that’s concerning is that we’re at 11 (suicides), and it’s Aug. 2,” Barton Coombs added. “We could be looking at a record year, and that’s unacceptable to me when I know that there are things that we can do.”
Andy East | The Republic
