Porter County officials are gathering stakeholders to move forward with suicide prevention efforts. Jan Pyrce with Pyrce Healthcare Group says the county needs to look beyond behavioral health professionals to put together an integrated task force.
"I think involving the university — oftentimes, if you want to be sure that there's some evidence-based research going on, you know, there may be some connections through a university. That could be part of that, as well," Pyrce told the county council last month.
Pyrce shared the findings of a community assessment with council members, after presenting them to the county commissioners back in May. Porter County's age-adjusted suicide rate in 2020 was 15.3 per 100,000 residents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's compared to 10.9 in Lake County and 20.1 in LaPorte County.
Nationwide, Pyrce said the suicide rate is particularly high among middle-aged white men. "Firearms accounting for the majority of suicide deaths, rural counties being harder-hit in terms of suicide, and I think that what I'd really like to highlight here is this last bullet here: that suicide touches whole communities," Pyrce said.
But she said it can be hard to take an integrated approach to suicide prevention, in part, because grant funding is earmarked to individual organizations. One thing Pyrce's assessment did do is help identify the people and groups who should be part of the conversation, since many of them don't already know each other.
Council President Jeremy Rivas noted that Porter-Starke Services would also likely be part of the process, along with the other groups that were interviewed for the assessment. He plans to work with the county commissioners to figure out how to move forward.
