Suicides Increasing in Hard-Hit Oklahoma Oil Town

He owned a business, a thriving communications-equipment concern in Oklahoma’s oil patch, and supported a family of teen-age children as well. In his early 40s, Bill was living an entrepreneurial dream.

But then, sales came to a dead halt, and repairs were put off. Bill’s business, seemingly so secure in this solid town 45 miles north of Tulsa, had fallen victim to diving oil prices.

“When the oil business busted, his business fell off bad,” Washington County Sheriff Larry Silver said. “He took it personally--that he had let himself down.”

11 Dead This Year

Bill drove to the outskirts of the county one day and parked his pickup. Then he placed a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, one of 11 people in the Bartlesville area who have killed themselves this year.

“He was a personal friend of ours. It was a real shock when we got out there,” Silver recalled.

Already, Bartlesville has had more suicides in 1986 than in the two previous years combined, Silver said. And although authorities and mental health experts say they can only speculate about how many of the 11 deaths can be attributed to the oil decline, most agree that the energy depression is yielding mental depression.

“We’re struggling. We’re tense. We’re scared. There’s some chaos,” said Jean Gonzales, director of Careunit, a treatment center for drug and alcohol abuse in Bartlesville.

Company Town

Bartlesville, with 37,000 people, is a company town, home to Phillips Petroleum Co. Right now, Phillips is struggling, and so is Bartlesville.

For a time this spring, when oil prices were crashing, it seemed that a suicide was reported nearly every week, Silver said. In early April, two occurred in one day, including one in a downtown park.

“It was wham, bam--11 in four months,” Silver said.

The last suicide was May 3, an indication, experts say, that problems are being worked out now, that things are getting calmer.

Various Causes

Some of the deaths resulted from family troubles or personal conflicts, mental health experts say, but several were believed to have been the result of economic troubles. One man lost his job a few days before his death. Others have been affected by layoffs. In some cases, the circumstances remain unclear.

“To try to pinpoint what’s going on is hard to do,” said Dr. Mary Weare, a psychiatrist in Bartlesville. “There’s a lot of anxiety among people. It’s very scary to be so closely tied to just one industry.”

Mental health experts talked with police about the causes and concluded that, in most cases, the economy couldn’t be directly blamed.

“What we decided was that you never really know what is the last straw,” said Nancy Ryan, director of the Grand Lake Mental Health Center.

‘Intense Denial’

The rash of suicides caused the local mental health association to hire an expert to assess the town’s needs. A seminar on stress was held but was poorly attended “because there’s pretty intense denial in the community,” Ryan said.

While other seminars are planned on topics such as drug and alcohol abuse, marital problems and teen-age concerns, most officials agree that there hasn’t been a panic over the suicides.

“The mood in town now is very bleak,” Mayor Arch Robbins said. “But it’s not like 1929, when people were jumping off rooftops.”

Shrinking Payrolls

Phillips, forced to restructure to stave off a pair of hostile takeover attempts, has reduced its Bartlesville employment from 7,800 at the end of 1984 to about 5,200 now, with the last 1,000 layoffs coming since April. TRW Reda Pump Co., Bartlesville’s other major firm, has dropped its payroll from 1,600 last October to fewer than 750 today.