As The Gazette reported over Thanksgiving weekend, Colorado’s suicide rate has dipped. It hasn’t dropped a lot – but enough to give experts an inkling they’re on the right track in their approach to suicide intervention.

There were 1,287 suicide deaths last year, down slightly from 1,370 in 2021 and 1,294 in 2020, according to The Gazette’s in-depth report. There have been 977 recorded suicide deaths so far in 2023, though there is a three-month lag in data processing.

The statistics, from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, also show youth suicide rates are lower. The suicide rate for 10- to 18-year-olds was 8.53 per 100,000 people in 2022. In 2020, that rate was 13.06 per 100,000.

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Meanwhile, the national suicide rate for youth ages 10 to 24 was 11 per 100,000 people in 2021.

So, it’s progress, of a sort. The state seems to have put a dent in its suicide rate, for now, at least.

Does it reflect something Colorado is doing right? One factor could be our state’s willingness to include voices of bitter experience – survivors of suicide attempts – in the approach to suicide intervention.

It’s the focus of debate among experts nationwide; some resist the use of suicide survivors while others support it. Its implementation in Colorado may be having a positive effect.

“Colorado is ahead of the game in a lot of ways,” Eduardo Vega, executive committee member of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention – and himself a suicide survivor – told The Gazette.

Indeed, the Colorado 988 hotline, run by Rocky Mountain Crisis Partners, employs those who have walked the walk – referred to as peer specialists – in its call center. Someone in crisis who calls 988 in Colorado can choose to talk to a trained professional or to a person who underwent a similar experience.

“It is important to have people with the same lived experience as those served in the mental health field informing decisions and providing care because they offer a unique and valuable level of acceptance, understanding, and validation through a lived experience lens,” said Kelly Bowman, who oversees the 988 line for the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration.

Vega agreed, noting two big drivers of suicide are isolation and feeling alone. 

“No psychiatrist is going to help you with those things,” he said. “What you need at those times are people willing to be there with you. Someone who can relate.”

Experts told The Gazette that traditional, research-informed, data-driven expertise, infused with “lived experience” from survivors, could be the most effective approach to suicide intervention.

The inclusion of survivors’ experience seems overdue to Vega and other participants in a national conference held in Golden earlier this month. The first Living Beyond Suicide Summit, hosted by the United Suicide Survivors International, highlighted the breakthrough. Colorado’s Behavioral Health Administration has an advisory board made up of people with firsthand experience, as well, whether they have survived their own attempts or lived through those of others.

Let’s welcome the positive turn in suicide statistics as well as the fresh thinking that may be a factor. Colorado needs all the help it can get turning the corner on a social ill that takes so many lives – and crushes so many others who are touched by it.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board