Department of Health shares suicide prevention strategies

Suicide rates have been increasing by 30 percent nationwide, an official with the Arkansas Department of Health said last week.

As part of the Moving Forward: Suicide Prevention Conference 2018 on Thursday, Joe Martin, injury and violence prevention section chief for the department, said the Centers for Disease Control released data recently that showed a 30 percent increase in suicide deaths nationwide from 1999 to 2016.

“That study was impactful to our office because Arkansas was not immune to that,” he said. “We have actually seen an increase in suicide deaths ourselves and I will tell you for 2017, 621 Arkansans killed themselves last year.

“Suicide actually is the No. 1 injury-related killer in Arkansas. It’s not motor vehicles, it’s not the opioids, it’s not falls — it’s suicide. We are losing a lot of Arkansas who are our brothers and our sisters, our neighbors, our family members we’re losing, and we’re losing them quickly.”

Martin said the state office has a fourpoint plan for preventing suicide in Arkansas.

“Our first point in that is to actually get agency collaboration,” he said. “We have a staff of three people who run our suicide program and they are some of the most dedicated staff members I have ever had the pleasure of leading, but they’re not enough. We’re very proud of these agency collaborations that we get to work with. It seems like every day it’s always someone new.

“To me of all these points and plans, that’s the one thing that I actually enjoy doing is getting to meet all the people that work for these different agencies and the different and same passions that we all share. … We do not want to see another 600 Arkansans kill themselves next year. We don’t want to see another one Arkansan kill themselves next year. So, we all need to come together.”

The second point is building awareness among citizens of Arkansas and changing the stigma surrounding suicide.

“In Arkansas, we do want to talk about it,” Martin said. “We’re changing that stigma. It’s no longer a stigma. It’s no longer a taboo. We do want to talk about it. We want people to talk about suicide to their families, to their schoolmates, to their organizations, because we want to reduce that stigma. So part of our second point is actually to do awareness campaigns.”

In building awareness, the state department offers, as its third point, courses to empower citizens to be first responders in these crises.

“One of those classes, one of the better ones that is a gold standard across the country, is SafeTalk,” Martin said. “That is a basic level class that teaches you to watch for the signs and symptoms of someone suffering from suicide ideation. We want you to recognize that. We’ve preached for years that everyone should learn CPR because anyone can have a heart attack. Now we’re preaching that people should carry nasal Narcan and what that does is actually reverses the sign of an opioid overdose. Again that’s a first responder. If someone falls over and has a heart attack, you give CPR and are extending their life ‘till help comes. You give someone Narcan, you’re extending their life until someone comes to help. SafeTalk is the next CPR for us. Everybody should have this training so that you can help someone to extend their time ‘till they get help.”

A more intensive program is ASIST — Applied Suicide Intervention Skills and Training — which Martin said is another gold standard course.

“It’s a two-day course and it gets down deep into what suicide is and how to talk to someone,” he said. “It talks them off of a bridge. While SafeTalk helps someone before they get to the bridge, this will get them off. These courses are offered for free and we offer it to every citizen in the state of Arkansas.”

The state, he said, is leading the country with the Arkansas Lifeline Call Center which is nearing a year since going live. For Arkansans who call the national suicide prevention hotline, a fellow Arkansan will be on the other end of the line providing resources and support when that previously was not the case.

“There was no Arkansan that was talking to other Arkansans,” Martin said. “Those calls were going to Memphis, Ohio, New York, and whereas we appreciate the other states answering our calls, they don’t know how to help Arkansans. They don’t know where the resources are.

“We developed the Arkansas Lifeline Call Center which basically means we embedded a call center to answer the national suicide prevention lifeline number within the state agency. We are the first state in the country to do this.”

The call center averages about 1,200 calls a month or 30 to 40 calls a day, he said.

“We get the privilege to talk to Arkansans to be able to help them through their issues every day,” he said. “We also do follow up from our call center. When someone calls us, we ask them can we call them back in a couple days just to see how they’re doing … most of the time they say yes.”