This podcast episode features a crucial conversation about the pressing issue of suicide in Rock Springs, Wyoming, led by host Dr. Kent Corso and Mayor Max Mickelson. Mayor Mickelson shares his insights on the alarming suicide rates in his community, emphasizing that many individuals who take their own lives often appear to be thriving, challenging common misconceptions about warning signs. The discussion reveals the complexities of mental health, particularly how societal pressures and expectations contribute to the suicide crisis among affluent youth. Highlights include the importance of community connectedness and proactive measures to support individuals struggling with mental health challenges. As both a leader and a community member, he advocates for open dialogue, self-care, and collective action to reduce suicide risk.

The discussion sheds light on the cultural acceptance of certain behaviors related to mental health, where individuals may be hesitant to acknowledge the severity of the problem until they are personally affected. Mickelson articulates the need for a shift in mindset, advocating for proactive measures that encourage individuals to seek help before reaching a crisis point. The episode also delves into the importance of fostering community ties, suggesting that creating opportunities for connection can significantly reduce the risk of suicide. Mickelson shares plans for community events designed to bring people together in informal settings, allowing for the kind of social interaction that can create a safety net for those in distress.

Ultimately, the episode serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of communication and support within communities. Both Corso and Mickelson urge listeners to be vigilant and compassionate, encouraging them to check in on friends, family, and neighbors. They reinforce the message that conversations about mental health should not be shunned but embraced, allowing for a culture where individuals feel empowered to share their struggles. By addressing the issue collectively and openly, they hope to foster an environment that not only recognizes the signs of mental health challenges but actively works to support those in need.

Takeaways:

• Suicide prevention requires community engagement and proactive measures to address mental health challenges.
• The presence of both life-oriented and death-oriented behaviors can complicate the detection of suicide risk.
• Connectedness within the community is crucial for reducing suicide rates among youth and adults.
• It is important for individuals to actively check on friends’ and neighbors' well-being.
• Cultural shifts are necessary so that self-worth is not solely tied to achievements or possessions.
• Striving for a balance in life, including social connections and self-care, is essential for mental health.

Hi, my name is Kent Corso and I'm your host for this episode of One Minute Can Save a Life. While I am a licensed clinical psychologist, none of these guests are my patients, nor does anything I say constitute medical advice.

The views conveyed during our conversations do not reflect the views, positions or policies of any private or public organization. This is simply a series of conversations with people who have some connection to hardship, suicide, mental health, or loss.

There's so much we can learn from one another. So let's get started. Today. Our guest is Max Mickelson, mayor of Rock Springs. How are you doing, sir?

Very well and happy to be here. How are you this morning?

I'm doing well, thank you. I'm grateful that you are willing to do our podcast.

Absolutely, it's my pleasure.

So you've been mayor for a little while. Can you sort of start at the high level and just tell us a little bit about what that has been like for you?

Yeah. So I've been mayor for almost two years now here in Rock Springs, and it has been a very educational experience.

I did not come from a background in municipal governance, and so I likened it to being shot by a water cannon into the middle of the Pacific. Was kind of my dive in.

Sounds like a pretty uncomfortable, rushed, surprise filled experience. Is that fair?

Yeah, no, it was. It was definitely. It had never been my intention to run for mayor. Then events sort of conspired to put me in that position. And so, you know.

But it was very bracing and engaging and I really have enjoyed the experience.

Excellent. Well, we're glad to hear that. And I think since our discussion today has to do with suicide and suicide prevention, you know your community best.

Tell us a little bit about what is going on there with regard to suicide.

Yeah. So Rock Springs and Wyoming in general really struggles with suicide. And that's something that we all sort of just knew, right?

Like everybody knows, like, oh, yeah, we've got a lot of suicides. But in this position, I was sort of forced to really attend to what that looks like.

And when you sort of realize the magnitude of what having that problem means and its impact on, you know, not just our community in terms of its functioning, but on the well being of the people who are left to deal with the aftermath, it's really impossible to not want to take some action to try to reduce that.

In other words, when you're leading a community, or let's say, in charge of multiple things within a community, it's pretty hard to sit on your hands when you watch suicides repeatedly Happen.

Absolutely. And you know, we do a lot in these positions of sort of almost triage, like prioritizations, and things can feel very big to people.

I had someone yesterday who was quite upset that our flag was some American flag was somewhat faded at the rec center. This was a huge deal to them. Now that's a really easy fix, right? So that was great.

And we have lots of challenges with housing and economic development and all these sorts of things that you would think really would automatically become my priority.

But suicide has such a broad negative impact on the community that it doesn't really matter if our economy is going gangbusters when we're still losing so many people to suicide. Doesn't really matter if we resolve the housing issue when we're losing all these people to suicide.

Educational attainment, like all those other factors, are very negatively impacted by our suicide rate because it is so high.

There are a few places that I'd like to go from here. You just mentioned several things, so I'm going to try to try to keep it simple. But let me just start with the flag flying issue.

It's great to see someone so vigilant about what's going on in their community. And to want to see a shining, bright new flag is a great thing. It reflects how much that person cares.

So do people care as much about suicide prevention in Rock Springs as they do about having the flag be crisp and fresh?

Folks do once they've been directly impacted. Otherwise they're kind of like, I was right. Oh, yeah. We've got like, suicide's an issue. Zoe's drinking.

There are lots of just sort of cultural behaviors that we just accept as a part of who we are. And it's not until someone draws your attention to it that you really understand how impactful it is on the community as a whole.

So it's easy to see that a flag has been sunbleached. It's harder to see the effect that suicide has within the broader community.

That's a great point, because a flag being sunbleached might be fairly obvious, but when someone's struggling with thoughts of suicide, it's not always obvious.

In fact, most people, because they have, whether it's a sense of pride, whether it's wanting to put their best foot forward in life, whether it's just a matter of boundaries and privacy, many people may not demonstrate those signs or may not sort of wear it on their sleeve.

We've had several suicides over the last year where the individuals who died by suicide had every protective factor that you would look for and the behavioral factors that you would look for to indicate that they were struggling were not overt. And the first sign that they were in crisis was the action of suicide, which too late to step in and help them.

So it sounds like what you're saying is what we would traditionally consider as the warning signs for suicide did not appear in some of these most recent suicides.

Correct. I just said we had people who were engaged in making future plans. They were know, doing online shopping.

So they're ordering things out, being active and social with friends and family and just really sort of fully engaged in life, and then they're gone.

And that makes it very difficult to understand what we can do differently sort of on the front end to provide some better tools to help them cope other than this sort of approach of I'm going to fake it till I make it or I check out.

Right. As if it's only a choice between two potential options. Either keep pushing along and faking it or checking out.

Your comments, Mayor Mickelson, reveal an important myth that I think many people believe. And so let's just take a moment to clarify or debunk that myth.

There's this idea that the person who is thinking of killing themselves is going to have nothing else going well for them in life.

And it's so obvious that they're struggling because everything around them is negative, whether it's how they speak to others, how they look, how they describe their feelings.

And while that does happen in some cases, what we see more often than not is the presence of both life oriented behaviors and death oriented behaviors all at the same time.

So that idea that someone might be doing online shopping or making some vacation plans or doing something else that is future and goal oriented, just because they're doing that doesn't mean they can't also be thinking of suicide. In fact, because suicide is a state of having mixed feelings, feeling two things at once, two opposing things. Sometimes we call that ambivalence.

Because of that, it can be very deceiving.

And when someone says like they've had a terrible day or that things are not going well, but then they also, in the next sentence, talk about all these future plans, it really throws the rest of us off. It does not send a crystal clear message that this person is in distress or crisis.

And it's that moment we've all been trained for to ask those difficult questions.

Exactly.

One other thing that you mentioned before was that the people who tend to care about suicide prevention are the people who have been Directly affected by it. Now, before you were the mayor, you worked within the school system, is that correct?

Yes.

So how did you interface with suicide in those settings? That is. And understandably, there are probably some similarities and differences between how you're approaching this topic of suicide prevention.

Now, as mayor.

So I should. I should clarify. I didn't work in the school setting. I was on the school board. There was a lot of.

When we had a student loss, you know, how do we handle that for the other students? What kind of preventative plans do we have in place? Are we providing ample supports to them?

And in our community, we are neatly split between the haves and the have nots. There's a very, very small middle class in our community, and so we have tremendous poverty that is right next door to affluence.

And how do we help the kids navigate that? How do we help them know that they're all meaningful?

But it was not a focus of our district, despite the frequency with which we were losing children. We were much more focused on graduation rates and test scores.

I see.

And would you say that the difference in, let's say, wealth or income, are those the things that you think are driving the suicides in your community? Or is that just part of a bigger, more complex.

It's just a part of a bigger, more complex picture of who we are. For the most part, amongst the youth that we've lost, they've all come from affluent families.

I see.

Now we lose a lot of kids from less affluent families to overdoses, you know, drunk driving accidents, those sorts of things. But when it comes to suicide, it tends to be the affluent kids.

Why do you think that is, Mayor?

There is, and I don't know if this is more broadly true in other communities, but certainly here there's a lot of performative pressure put on our kids and families that, you know, the expectations are that you will excel in athletics, in the arts, academically, be successful, and that that success is very fairly narrowly defined, which puts a lot of pressure on the kids to succeed within that narrow definition.

I see.

So because the expectations of them are so high, probably from multiple directions, not just within the family, but maybe the broader community, that they are sort of cracking under that pressure.

That is my best guess.

Yeah. Well, look, you know your community best, so I think that makes good sense.

And it certainly ties into some of the things that we've seen in other affluent communities in Wyoming where there's sort of that party culture, the skiing culture, the resort culture. So there's definitely a common thread There. Now, I understand there was recently a death at uw.

Yes, we lost one of our best and brightest, a young man named Dawson, to suicide. He was a trustee scholar.

So in Wyoming, if you're a trustee scholar all four years of your education, inclusively, everything boarding, books, fees, is covered by the scholarship fund. So this is a young man who was meeting all of those performative standards very nicely, and also a very kind and compassionate young man.

And September 28th, we lost him.

I'm so sorry to hear that.

As I understand it, it has really not only rattled the university community, but because he's from Rock Springs, There have been several ripple effects in your community about it.

There's that performative thing again. Now I see partly where you're getting it from. That makes good sense. What are some of the things that people are saying?

And I realize it's a sensitive issue, so please feel free to use as much discretion as you feel needed. But what are people in the community saying?

I mean, is this a bit of a wake up call or does it just feel like a kick in the shins and now we're down, feeling down even worse than we were before?

You know, one of the great things about this community, going back probably to our origins as a mining community, is that when things go wrong, we tend to take all of those feelings and try to put them into action so that we're doing something constructive and positive that will hopefully reduce the risk. Right. Like you want to ensure that we're providing sort of the immediate help to the folks who are in a really bad place.

Because dealing with that loss. And then how do we adjust our practices so that we reduce that risk going forward?

So we've had a lot of people who are paying attention now that were not paying attention before, but they're just asking, what can we do as a community to better prepare our kids so that when they go off to college, they have more tools in their tool belt to deal with the challenges and crises that people will experience as a part of being human and alive, so that hopefully they can rely on those rather than having that sort of black and white, it's this or that.

Got it.

So on one hand, while it is a tragedy, out of this tragedy has been a bit of a wake up call where more people are coming to the table to Talk about solutions and how they can be part of the solutions.

And not only are those solutions short term related to helping people with their grief and bereavement from having lost Dawson, but then looking forward in a much more strategic way.

What are the long term things we need to do so that when our children of Rock Springs leave home and go out into, I'm going to say the real world, not, not because Rock Springs isn't the real world, but whenever we leave home at age 18, it's. It's a big transition and it's a very important step in life.

And what I hear you saying is that your community is now trying to drill down on how we need to better prepare our youths to leave this community and enter university, whether it's at UW or elsewhere, and hopefully not resort to suicide when that going gets tough or when they seem hopeless.

That is one thing we can all count on, is that life will kick you in the teeth at least a good half dozen times before 30. Right?

That's right. And then subsequently thereafter. Right. Just for fun.

Exactly.

And you know, while we've been focused on the university, we have students who go off for technical training, the students who go off to the military. We just did a groundbreaking for a new VA hospital. And of course, our veterans and suicide unfortunately go together very strongly.

So it is a, as a community, how do we prepare our young people to be more resilient adults, regardless of what path they take? And we've been working with the university.

Their response to Dawson's loss, I think was like a lot of ours where it's just kind of, it's best if we just don't talk about it and then maybe it will go away. Which I've learned through my attention to this subject is not an appropriate response.

I had operated under the belief that if you talk about suicide, you will inspire people to commit suicide. And happily, you assured me that that was not in fact, true.

It's not contagious that way as an idea.

I mean, to be honest, what makes it contagious as an idea is when people die by suicide and peers or onlookers of that deceased person who are also struggling when there isn't a conversation and they say, wow, that worked for him, maybe that's the solution that I should employ.

So that's sort of the way it's contagious, simply talking about it in a prevention way or even an intervention way that doesn't lead to more suicides, which.

Is very good to know.

So then we're Also working with our local community college, our school district, our neighboring city school district, to really as a whole county, all of Sweetwater County. How do we tackle this issue long term so that we're not losing our youth, so that we're not losing young adults?

You know, that we could maybe move out of the top three categories, the Sioux Water county is third highest suicide rate in the state and Wyoming leads the nation. So we're winning a race that nobody wants to be competing in, much less winning.

And we are, I think waking up to this is something that all of us need to put quite a bit of energy and resources into addressing.

There are two questions I have related to what you just said. The first one has to do with the solutions you're working on employing.

Would you say that one of the solutions has to do with culture and behavior that happens at sort of this population level or group level?

Absolutely. We have always prided ourselves on being a work hard, play hard kind of community. And especially for men, but also for women.

Your value as an adult is tied directly to being a successful provider. So if you have a camper and side by sides in a boat, you have worth and value.

If you lose those things, there's not really much point in you being around anymore. So culturally we have to shift that so that people understand that they have. Life has inherent value.

So in other words, it sounds like you're saying we have to broaden how we calculate or assess our own self worth. It's not necessarily about achievement or even possessions, but it's really about who we are as humans. Am I understanding you?

Absolutely. And how we connect to each other and provide that sort of ongoing support. Right. Like that's really what we're lacking.

So it's like connectedness. In other words, we know that if we can increase connectedness in a community, we can reduce suicide risk.

It sounds like what you're saying is we could stand to boost our connectedness within Sweetwater County.

Absolutely. And we've lost a lot of the sort of social organizations that used to foster that.

It's so easy to be entertained now that no one has to get together to watch Billy Bob play the piano. Because we can YouTube and stream in, I don't know, Def Leppard. Right. Like right into our living room. Why do we need that?

And we, as I think humans rely on that connectedness. So boosting that and figuring out. So one of the things like that we're doing is a quarterly check in event.

Just come down, play games, have some snacks, just see how you're doing, how are your neighbors doing? And it doesn't have to be like a heavy, you know, therapeutic experience, just a social community event.

How do we get people to show up for the college and high school and junior high, you know, sports events? Because we used to do that, and that kept us together, and we had that sense.

If I was gone tomorrow, you know, John and Susan would miss me at the next football game, and that's gone.

It sounds like what you're saying is there's some sort of an informal accountability that happens between humans when they show up repeatedly for certain types of events. There's this impetus or this pressure to keep showing up.

And if someone doesn't show up, the others who did show up feel compelled to reach out and say, hey, where were you? And I think that's a great point when it comes to connectedness and reducing suicide risk.

Because what we know is most people don't ask the question when they see someone struggling. And that connectedness is likely to motivate them to ask those hard questions. Are you thinking of killing yourself?

Are you thinking of ending your life?

Exactly.

Would it be okay if we put some information about that quarterly meetup on the podcast page so that anyone who listens to this can follow the link and check it out for sure?

We don't have anything quite that formal, but we will get something that formal and get it to you.

Okay, sounds good. Thank you. Last question.

With all of the hard work that it takes to bring people together around a difficult, unpleasant issue, how do you maintain your hope and your motivation and your positivity as the leader?

Yeah, that's a good question. Exercise is very helpful, but mostly I've relied on my connection to my friends and family to give me the feedback.

One, to check in and be like, hey, you don't seem like you're in a great mood right now. And I'm like, well, no, I've been dealing with a lot of really heavy, not so fun stuff.

And then two, you know, we went with some friends this weekend down to Salt Lake. We went to the amusement park and haunted houses.

And it is just that you have to actively find ways to refill yourself so that you can continue doing the work to help others.

It sounds like what you're saying is balance within life.

So outside of work, making sure you're taking care of yourself physically, whether that's nutrition, exercise, we know there's a connection between the mind and the body that is not anything that can be disputed.

But a part of that wellness Also has to do with your family, your social circles, and making sure that you're sort of, if I can use the words, feeding your soul in different ways so that you have the strength and your batteries are recharged and you're able to continue trying to chip away at these very difficult issues.

Exactly. And for myself personally, church plays a big part. I think it's very helpful for me to have that sort of.

You're sent here to do work, and it's not your job to ask, why did we have to lose Dawson in order to get me to really drill down? We lost another young man in February of 23, and that was really sort of the start of my paying attention.

And that seems like a really high price, but not for me to question. Right. So those are all the ways that work for me, and they may not work for other people, but you need to figure out what does work for you.

Right. If you're not actively looking at how to take care of yourself because life is going to be difficult. Right. That's a guarantee.

If you're not looking to how to take care of yourself, then you may become a statistic yourself. That's a very fair point. Really.

Like what you said about faith, it can play an incredibly important role in people maintaining hope or continuing to grapple with whatever they're facing in life. You also mentioned something that I think it's worth pointing out.

You're talking about meaning and purpose and why you're placed here on Earth, Mayor Mickelson.

And that's exactly what gets compromised or jeopardized or somehow threatened when people are thinking about killing themselves is they question, why bother waking up in the morning? Why am I here? What am I doing?

And so what's so interesting is it's almost ironic that you're continuing to seek activities that drive your meaning and purpose in life in order to reduce a problem that arises when people lose their meaning and purpose in life. And I think that's pretty cool.

Yeah, that is. I like that very much.

This podcast episode is going to be pushed out not only all over Wyoming, but beyond. Is there anything you want the people of Wyoming or the people of Sweetwater county or Rock Springs to hear directly from you about this issue?

Yes, all of us need to be active in checking in on each other. You don't have to be formally trained. You don't have to be a clinician.

You know, you just need to check on your neighbors, check on your friends, check on your friends, kids, and build those connections. It takes work. They don't just spontaneously happen.

And if we could all give each other a little bit more grace over really controversial issues like whether you drive a Ford or a Chevy, perhaps we would be a little more connected and we could really move forward in reducing the suicide rate and within our community.

That's great. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time and appreciate what you're trying to do in Rock Springs and Sweetwater more broadly.

Thank you. And thank you for your work.

Thank you for listening to this episode of One Minute Can Save a Life. Take care of yourself. Take care of your neighbor. Be bold. Ask the hard questions. Because if you don't, who will?