(Apr. 15, 2015) In the past three years alone, 40 people in Longmont, Colorado have committed suicide and police have received 2,100 calls involving suicide threats, announced the city’s public safety chief this week (“Public safety chief: 40 people in Longmont have committed suicide in the last three years,” Longmont Times Call, Apr. 13).
"If we had a virus in our community that killed 40 people in three years and affected or impacted thousands of others…the level of conversation, the fury in the media and the community and the number of people asking for conversations would be unbelievable," said Mike Butler, public safety chief with the Longmont Police Department.
Butler has called for “a community-wide conversation regarding mental health” following two violent incidents involving individuals with mental illness that occurred in the city last month.
Jennifer Leosz, clinical officer with non-profit Mental Health Partners, blames the stigma attached to mental illness and that many people are not very well-informed about mental health.
But being “well-informed” about suicide and the stigma surrounding this common tragedy will not decrease the likelihood of it happening among people with severe mental illness. Treatment will.
The lifetime risk of suicide among people with schizophrenia is around 5 percent and the risk for people with bipolar disorder is around 10 to 15 percent. Multiple studies have reported that the failure to adequately treat individuals with serious mental illness increases the risk for suicide.
Too often overlooked in “conversations” of mental illness is the fact that the most likely victim of a violent act associated with psychiatric disease is the individual him/herself.
Treatment Advocacy Center backgrounders are useful tools for raising awareness about mental illness and treatment issues. For a complete list of backgrounders, visit the “Reports, Studies, Backgrounders” page of our website. To see the Treatment Advocacy Center’s original research, visit our TACReports.org site.
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