Havre Suicide Awareness Walk draws a crowd

The Hill County Suicide Awareness Coalition's ninth annual Suicide Awareness Walk was held at Montana State University-Northern Thursday night, with local residents honoring the memory of those who lost their lives to suicide and providing a message of hope to those who need support.

Coalition Chair Amber Spring addressed the crowd that evening saying she believes they have the potential to address suicide in the state and reduce the stigma that surrounds mental health and seeking help for it.

"I encourage you to think about your own strengths and where you can play a role," Spring said.

Spring introduced this year's speaker, Havre Public School Education Foundation Executive Director Krystal Steinmetz, whose life has been touched by suicide, like most of the people there.

Steinmetz said talking about suicide is difficult and uncomfortable, especially for people who did not grow up with the tools to understand it or the support to seek help, but that shouldn't stop people from reaching out to those that may need help.

"You don't need to have all the answers when you talk to someone," she said. "You just have to care."

She said people don't have to become therapists to help the those in their lives who are struggling, they just need to talk to them if they see signs that something is off, tell them if they think they need to get help and follow up with them.

She said people in her generation, with her in her 40s, did not grow up in an environment that was widely cognizant of mental health as an issue, or compassionate toward those who were struggling with it.

Steinmetz said she never even heard the term mental health until she got to college, and looking back on her younger years the issue was often swept under the rug, and those struggling were frequently derided.

If people were having trouble, she said, the prevailing sentiments expressed were less than helpful.

"We were told things like 'suck it up buttercup,'" she said.

New generations are more cognizant of the issue, but Montana is still one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to suicide, having been in in the top five states in the nation for suicide rates for 40 years, she said.

She said a lot of people seem to think that a lot of mental health issues originated with the pandemic, but COVID-19 was just a catalyst for problems that were already there.

Even today, the stigma around talking about therapy and asking for help persists and as long as that is the case people will not seek support when they need it, and many of them will not make it through their struggles.

"There are wonderful people here," she said. "But I don't want to keep coming to events like this."

Steinmetz said she still hears people talk about suicide in very derogatory ways, as if it were evidence of a moral failing, or selfish.

Typically, she said, when someone is in a dark enough place that they think about taking their own life they are so deep in self-hatred that they feel that they have no value, that they are a burden to the people they know and that everyone would be better off if they were gone, and they just want the pain to stop.

Those who struggle with suicidality are not selfish, she said, and people need to stop saying that.

She said she has personal experience dealing the depression and anxiety, and she wouldn't be around today if it weren't for the medicine and support she's found for it.

Others aren't so lucky, Steinmetz said, and many, including a close friend of hers, don't get the help they need even if they have the money for it.

"Suicide doesn't care," she said. "It doesn't discriminate."

She said her generation wasn't given the tools to understand the issue when they were young, but they can help break the cycle, and make sure their children do.

Steinmetz said Northern and Havre High School will be hosting screenings of the Ken Burns documentary "Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness," a film that looks at the daily life of young people with mental health challenges.

The film will be followed by a discussion facilitated by two of the people featured in the documentary.

Steinmetz said this film is incredible and important, not just for young people, but for parents, educators, really any community member.

Steinmetz was followed by a number of people from the audience who talked about their personal experiences.

Among them was Karen Stacy, who survived an attempt in 2017 after long struggles with depression and anxiety herself.

Stacy said she had been fighting against addiction for decades and was so beaten down that she felt like she couldn't take it any more.

"I just didn't want to live anymore," she said.

But, she said, she survived and now has grandchildren who lifted her spirits and that helped her get back to living.

She said she still struggles with with her mental health, even with a robust support system, but there is always hope.

"The world today is crazy," she said. "But, we're going to make it through... it's going to get better."

Another person who spoke was Mindy Smith-Langel who talked about some of the things that helped her since her attempt when she was 18.

Smith-Langel said her depression manifested as an intense self hatred that accumulated over years of her life and put her in very terrible states of mind.

"I would think things like, 'sometimes a feel like everyone is hurting me so why does it matter if I just hurt myself,'" she said.

Even if these dark thoughts passed, she said, they feel awful and made her so desperate to never feel that way again.

But there are things people can de, Smith-Langel said.

Sometimes it takes a long time to find a therapist that works, she said, but there are resources online that people can use while they are trying to find someone they connect with, like podcasts of people sharing their own stories, or groups within their own community of people that will understand them.

She said these things are not a replacement for therapy, but they can do a lot to help.

She said people have a tendency to isolate themselves when they are facing difficulties because they don't want to bring other people into their problems, but if they reach out, they will often find people who know what they are going through and they can share hope instead of pain.

The strength those interactions provide, she said, can be enough to help people change their own lives.

After these stories attendees walked a route around the Northern campus, many holding signs and pictures of those they have lost.

Before departing on the walk, Spring said people who think they can help support the community should consider joining the Hill County Behavioral Health Local Advisory Council, and if they are strategically minded or influential they are needed in government.

She said she thinks people can use their experience and influence to address the factors that lead to suicide, including access to lethal means of taking ones own life, and the prevalence of drug use as a coping mechanism.