BUFFALO (WBEN) - The Suicide Prevention Center of New York has been awarded a grant from the New York State Health Foundation to develop an in-depth review process in four counties - one of which being Erie County.
The purpose of the grant is collect accurate data from suicide investigations, and it's also meant to conduct community reviews with the goal of finding systemic patterns.
This model of study is being based off a program in Washington County, Oregon, which has seen drastic positive results. The Oregon team is composed of members of the medical examiner's office, healthcare providers law enforcement, crisis workers and clergy, and they work together to share information regarding suicide investigations.
On Friday morning, Dr. Kimberly Repp, the program supervisor for the medical examiner's office and epidemiology program in Washington County, spoke to members of the local Suicide Fatality Review Team, and she discussed her experiences and what has made the program so successful.
"Across the country, the suicide rate is going up astronomically - Oregon is much higher than the national average - and our rate has been going down year after year after year from 2012 in Washington County," said Repp. "Even though we are surrounded by counties that the suicide rates are going up...ours is going down, and I think it's largely due to these prevention efforts. We've had a drop of over 40% in our suicide rate since 2012."
Repp noted that data analysis and pattern identification are critical to the success of this program, but what exactly does that mean. For example, the Oregon review team discovered that several people had dropped off their pets at animal shelters prior to killing themselves. Once that pattern was recognized, the team moved quickly to train animal shelter staff who have already intervened in several instances.
Repp provided another example.
"We identified eviction as a major risk factor in our community," she began. "We went out to our law enforcement agencies and asked if they would consider putting the crisis line information within the eviction paperwork, and they started doing that. In addition, they sent out a member of the mental health crisis response team - a licensed clinician - to each eviction in the county, and within two years, we had gone from 30 deaths with eviction as a risk factor to one this year."
"I think suicide is a big problem in every county in New York State and throughout the United States - it's very, very sad...these are all preventable causes of death," she began. "Just looking at what they found in other suicide prevention work like this is, hopefully we can identify triggers or signs that can give some type of hint that a person may be considering suicide and then develop some systems changes so that we, in Erie County, can hopefully prevent some or most of these suicide-related deaths in our community."
