“At the time I previously had been dealing with a lot of different issues and coming to school and working in nine classes just completely giving myself to school made me neglect myself. So at the time I was just very overwhelmed with everything else and not focused on myself.”
Those thoughts that Mercer student C shared with The VOICE led to suicidal thoughts.
She’s not the only one. According to the 2016 New Jersey Youth Suicide Report, Mercer county had one of the three highest rates of attempted suicide among state counties.
Recently, a number of suicide deaths of young people from the Mercer Area has had experts worried.
Doctor George Scott, a teen suicide expert with the Traumatic Loss Coalition (TLC) of Mercer County, spoke to The VOICE about the recent deaths.
“There have been seven known and declared, meaning the medical examiner, in those deaths, determined it was a suicide death” Dr. Scott said, “However, there have been some other deaths that I’m still waiting for the medical examiner’s ruling.”
The New Jersey Youth Suicide Report for 2017 marked 12 suicides of youths between 10 and 24 in Mercer County between 2013 and 2015. With at least seven in the past 20 months the numbers seem to be on the rise.
When asked about subpopulations within the youth demographic at risk, Dr. Scott said “Within that group, students that leave high school and go off to college or some other career or some other post high school work [are at risk]. Our college kids who are under a lot of stress who go off to college are very vulnerable.”
He continued to explain, “For people who are vulnerable, transitions are very difficult. So think about break-up in a relationship, that’s a transition, going off to college, that’s a transition … Our college kids stay in a school system where everybody knows them, where it’s predictable, where there’s a safety net under them, where they have access to people who keep an eye on them, and then they give all that up, that safety net gets given up when they go off to college.”
When asked about the recent string of deaths, and whether those students were going through that transition, Dr. Scott told The VOICE, “In that number of seven, eight or nine there are two that happened at college, but they were Mercer County kids.”
This is not the first time that youth deaths have swept the Mercer County area. “Back at the founding of the TLC, in 1995, we had approximately 8 youth, 3 serial clusters in 18 months,” said Olsen, “At that point, Mercer had the highest rate in the country.”
Dr. Scott said of the TLC’s founding “That was a number of suicides that there was a response from a number of really well intended, good hearted and smart people that created the Traumatic Loss Coalition.”
Olsen also said of that time, “We found in the research that there was a relational element. Through discovery, each youth somehow knew another youth that had completed suicide.”
The number of deaths has also caught the attention of other local officials. The joint superintendents of the Mercer County area have joined together to combat the rising levels in what they term a “Call to Action.”
The Superintendent of Robbinsville schools, Dr. Kathleen Foster, one of the organizers of the Call to Action project said, “Well, sadly, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in suicides themselves, attempted suicides. Certainly mental health has emerged as a large concern for us … not only our students, but also our young adults as well. So I think that that’s really what prompted this initiative.”
The first result of their Call to Action was a public information session held at Rider University on January 9th. The session, hosted by representatives from the Traumatic Loss Coalition, including Dr. Scott, was intended to “serve as a first step in raising a countywide focus on mental health,” according to a letter written by the Mercer superintendents.
Dr. Scott said of the session, “Many of those school districts, many of those superintendents, have been alarmed previously and are doing in-house things with their own staff and their own parents to provide the information necessary to do suicide prevention.”
He continued, “What you saw at Rider was the first kind of collective of all the united superintendents saying we need to raise the level of concern about what we’ve already done.”
Dr. Foster, said, “The purpose was to begin those difficult conversations around mental illness and try to address some of the root causes. I think providing resources to parents and school communities is really going to be the next step.”
There are a number of resources available to those in need of them. The college has three counselors that can assist students with problems.
Janet Haag, Executive Director of the Mercer branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness told The VOICE about what people should do if feeling suicidal. “Talk to somebody, tell somebody what they’re thinking and feeling because if they can do that, and preferably someone who is going to be in a position to actually assist,” she said.
She continued, “Now you know that could be a trusted friend, but hopefully if we’re talking about young people here, we’re talking about kids or adolescents, the hope would be that the trusted friend will direct them towards getting the professional help that they need, like talking to the counselor at the school”
When asked what led to her getting help, C said “Being close with my professors here at Mercer. They noticed I was kind of off and they all just assumed I was tired, many times when you’re sad you’re just like ‘Oh I’m tired, I’m tired’ and it got to a point where I was really tired of people telling me I need to go to sleep so I just blew up on one of my professors.”
She continued, “I told them ‘It’s a suicidal kind of day’ and it really freaked them out and so I had to sit down with them and then I had to go with them to Martha Gunning [one of the college’s counselors].”
Gunning, C said, called the Crisis Center at Capitol Health to do a mental health screening.
Eventually C was hospitalized to help her recover.
C says that “Right now I feel a little more hopeful. Beforehand I just felt as if this is how life is, this is how everything’s going to be for the rest of my life, and right now after meeting people in the hospital, struggling from God knows what, to meeting people … who have really similar issues as me, who’ve actually become friends of mine, I feel like there’s a chance, which helps tremendously just living daily.”
C also said “I feel as if even at the time when I didn’t want to be taken seriously, I think it’s really important for people to notice signs of these type of things and be taken extremely seriously, even if the person’s unwilling to see that they’re in that much trouble.”
Haag told The VOICE about what to look out for, saying “When people are behaving or talking in ways that are unusual or that seem particularly concerning then it’s worth exploring that a little bit and finding out more about what’s going on to get at whether or not it might be creating suicidal ideation.”
Experts stress that everyone can help. Michele Madiou, a Mercer county mental health coordinator that oversees the Traumatic Loss Coalition, and Olsen, recommend that everyone, both professors and friends, use a technique called QPR – Question, Persuade, Respond. According to the Traumatic Loss Coalition’s page on the Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care website, QPR “…Follows three steps: (1) Question the individual’s desire or intent regarding suicide, (2) Persuade the person to seek and accept help and (3) Refer the person to appropriate resources.”
Importantly, the two TLC experts told The VOICE, is if you believe suicide is imminent, is to not leave the person alone until they have safely been brought to a trusted authority that can help.
When asked about advice for others in the situation C was in, she said “I would just say for people to just listen to themselves, it’s really easy to ignore what you’re actually feeling and it’s really difficult to pay attention to your emotions when you don’t want to be feeling them, but one of the biggest thing I’ve found that’s helpful is realizing ‘Hey I feel this way, this shouldn’t be this way and I should do something about it.’’
Haag also offered advice, she said “It’s a message of hope, that people are not alone, there are lots of other people that struggle the same way and that they can be very resilient and that recovery is truly possible.”
She concluded, “If you’re not alone then that means that there are people that care about you, to whom your life matters, and that the truth of the matter is that whatever the struggle is that you’re going through, whatever it is that you’re facing, whatever it is that you’re afraid of, whatever it is that is making you feel like life is hopeless, it really is not, there can be hope there and you need to reach out and find your way to it.”
