Seminar takes comprehensive approach to battling suicide

Robert Monteith

January 1 , 2009.

Staff at Petersburg Mental Health Services (PMHS) are responding to a growing community concern by hosting a professional workshop on how to identify likely signs of suicide. At the beginning of this year, Petersburg went through an unfortunate spell of suicide attempts that led to three deaths. PMHS also conducted a survey among Petersburg teenagers in 2007 that found over 14% of them had made a plan on how they would attempt suicide. That same survey also found that over 15% of sophomores had already attempted suicide at least once.

PMHS Director Susan Ohmer said that this workshop would help people identify people who may be suicidal, as well as dispel some of the myths surrounding the act.

“One of the myths is that only depressed people kill themselves. In fact, some people that kill themselves are depressed but many others are not. They don’t meet the criteria for a major depressive disorder, so one of the things the training is going to do is challenge a lot of those beliefs,” she said. “You see suicide when people feel like their pain is intolerable, there is nothing they can do to stop it, and that it will go on forever.”

Ohmer said that there would be space for 32 people to take the workshop, which will be taught by professionals at the Tides Inn conference room on February 10. The program is mostly being funded by PMHS, but attendees will be required to pay a $75 materials cost.

Ohmer said that Petersburg had a long history of suicide, starting with founder Peter Buschmann. Recently, however, she’s noticed an increased trend in people chronically at risk.

“There are more individuals showing chronic risks for suicide now than we saw before. We’re seeing people come in and struggling more than usual, struggling with this issue of should I live or not,” she said.

There could be several reasons for the increase, but Ohmer maintains that contemplating suicide is extremely normal.

“What maybe people don’t realize is how incredibly normal thoughts about suicide are. Most people in surveys say that they have at one point in their life thought about suicide. A small portion of them attempt suicide. A small portion of those who attempt actually go through with it. It’s very difficult to assess any one sort of risk factor in all this, but we can hedge our bets a little bit. But in terms of prevalence, it’s not necessarily pathological. It’s a relatively common thing,” she said.

Ohmer hopes the class will go beyond educating people and dispelling myths. She views it as a way for the community to take a comprehensive approach to the problem.

“We wanted our community to be able to have a coordinated response so that we all understand the latest research and the latest recommendations about how to cope, how to respond, and what to say so that as a whole town, we’re better able to respond to this.”

For more information on the seminar, contact Kim Kilkenny at 772-3332.