September is Suicide Prevention Month, a time to raise awareness, spread hope, and spark meaningful action around one of the most urgent mental health issues of our time. The topic is even more acute on the farm, as suicide rates are as much as three-and half times greater in rural American than in urban areas. But good work is being done to reach those who need help, someone to talk to. Sarah Gideon, Executive Director at Health Innovations Network of Kansas, says the stigma of mental illness is still a factor which holds people back from getting that help.
“When we started thinking about this, I could only envision in the town that I was living at the time. Our community mental health center was on one of the main thoroughfares in town. My good friend Dan owns the livestock market there, and I could not envision Dan or any of his staff parking their truck with the bale fork on the back or the dualies out front of that building, with concern that someone would look at it and say, ‘Well, what’s Dan doing there?”
Gideon says to bypass that stigma, they began to integrate care services.
“We’ve really focused on integrating behavioral health into our rural health clinics, so that there are social workers or other licensed individuals that are in that rural health clinic. So that if Dan were to pull up to one of the rural health clinics, someone sees his truck, he might be there for a checkup of his blood pressure, or he might be there for another reason, but nobody needs to know that.”
She says they also use discreet distribution to get the word out/
“In 187 different businesses across Northeast Kansas, including sale barns, co-ops, veterinarian clinics, libraries, liquor stores, coffee shops, cafes, truly anywhere that we think that we’re going to meet our audience, we have cards, stickers, coffee cup sleeves for those coffee shops that literally put resources in the hands of the individuals that pick them up. There’s small cards, signs in the bathroom stalls or clinic rooms where things are private. People can click on the QR code and take them to our website and to the list of resources county by county in our region.”