Support Groups Help : Rugged West--a Climate for Suicide

They call themselves survivors and they gather every month or so in towns throughout the West, strangers bound together by a loss so deep and so unfathomable that some cannot even speak of it.

Their support group here is known as Heartbeat, and when they arrive, 20 or 25 strong, at 7 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month, they clear away the tables in the conference room, place the folding chairs in a tight circle and await the few words from LaRita Archibald that will open the meeting.

“We are all here tonight because someone we care about very much intentionally ended their life,” she says. “For each of us our grief is private and individual, but we all share the commonalty of suicide.”

Her son, Roger Kent Archibald, shot himself to death one night 10 years ago in the family dining room. He was 24. His college career had been derailed by a serious strain of flu.

Note Excerpted

He had later searched desperately for a job, any job, and as his friends began moving into professional lives, it seemed he was being left behind. The note he wrote read: “Mom and Dad, this is not your fault. I tried. I can’t make it. I guess I’m just not worth it.”

Archibald and her husband Eldon, an insurance agent, knew Kent was discouraged but had not sensed the depth of his depression. Said LaRita Archibald: “I really believe we were good parents. I did all the things a good mother does. But I never talked with him about depression. And certainly not about suicide. I’m sure if I’d tried, I’d have said all the wrong things.”

Suicide, which claims 30,000 lives a year in the United States, is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged 15-24, ranking behind accidents and homicides, and the eighth-leading cause among persons of all ages.

Mountain States Lead

One region--the mountain states of the West--leads the nation year after year with the highest per-capita incidence of suicide. Its rate is typically half again the national average of 12.8 suicides per 100,000 population.

Although psychiatrists are unable to explain precisely why, the seven states with the highest suicide rate are, in order: Nevada, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho and Colorado--states whose characters are entwined with the rugged, sometimes violent individualism of the Old West. The only one of the mountain states not on the list is heavily Mormon Utah.

“We look at the numbers and we wring our hands,” said Sam Sperry of Montana’s Health Department.

Ironically, it may be the very qualities of the mountain states’ celebrated past that help explain their high suicide rate: isolated, hard-drinking, young, mobile populations, with the gun as an affirmation of manhood. This is the one-time bonanza land of the Golden West, a land whose giant mountains can cast a cold shadow when dreams do not materialize. It is a place where what John Sanford calls the “Western dynamics” are constantly at work and in conflict.

“I don’t want to stereotype my fellow Westerners,” said Sanford, a suicidologist and family therapist in Cheyenne, Wyo., “but in general the image of the Western male is a classical sexual stereotype. He’s tough. He’s controlled. He’s physically violent if necessary. The image is built into the West’s cultural heritage.

One Feeling--Anger

“These dynamics tend to give rise to a denial or inhibition of expression. A man’s really limited to one feeling--anger. The anger becomes physical. And when you stop feeling until you have to explode and the explosion comes in a physical manner, that’s what kills.”

But in Wyoming, the nation’s most sparsely populated state, crisis support is often difficult to find in the long, lonely winters simply because distances are so great and people so few. In Montana, saloons are revered as shrines and men feel naked if there’s no rifle mounted across the rear window of their pickup trucks. Nevada, unique because of its gambling and 24-hour life style, has in addition to the highest suicide rate the nation’s highest divorce rate, the fourth-highest homicide rate and the lowest church attendance, according to the Crisis Call Center in Reno. Colorado and Arizona have populations swollen by tens of thousands of newcomers seeking the promise of the West.

“We arrived at an explanation that Arizona has such a high suicide rate,” said psychologist Goanne Gersten, chief analyst of the state Office of Planning and Health Status Monitoring, “because the social milieu makes it more probable that when an individual has a suicidal impulse, there are no restraining forces in terms of cultural heritage, sense of community or neighborhood, or just knowing your neighbors. Arizona’s in- and out-migration are so high that there is no stability, no sizable group that can pass on its history to newcomers as Bostonians or New Yorkers can.”

Into the 1960s, the port cities of the Western seaboard--Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego--had the nation’s highest incidence of suicide. Experts attributed this to unrooted, unstable populations, the illusions of a Promised Land and the transient qualities associated with port areas. In the last two decades, however, the rate has dropped dramatically in Los Angeles and the other cities.

“Perhaps we’re more like the rest of the country now,” said psychiatrist Robert Litman, co-director of Los Angeles’ 30-year-old Suicide Prevention Center, the first facility of its type in the country. “The cities are no longer dominated by the ports. We’re more settled and have more community. That would be my sociological interpretation because I don’t think the people themselves are any different.

“In the mountain states, I think you find more emphasis on individualism. Men are help-rejecters. They’ll say, ‘You’re a good guy, doc, but I’m going to solve this my way.’ That attitude can carry a person far in life if the breaks go with him; if the breaks turn bad for a while, it can lead to suicide.”

Suicide is democratic and there is little to distinguish one of its victims in the West from those elsewhere. Women are three times more likely than men to attempt suicide, but men are far more likely to complete it. Whites--particularly the young and elderly--are at greater risk than blacks or other minorities. Alcohol is closely related to the act of suicide, especially when guns are used. Typically, there are more suicides in wartime than in peacetime, in shifting population centers than in stable ones, in bad economic times than in prosperous ones.

Marlene Scanlon, a registered nurse in Colorado, believes academic and financial stress contributed to the death of her son Patrick, a second-year medical student. “Do you realize, Mom,” he said one day, “that when I get out of school, I’m going to owe more money than your house is worth.”

Not long afterward, in December, 1985, Patrick Scanlon, a chemistry major as an undergraduate, took his life by inhaling the toxic fumes of a substance he had mixed.

Never Know the Reason

“How long he planned it, I have no idea,” said Scanlon, whose ex-husband also committed suicide, last April. “My son and I were very close and you ask yourself, ‘Why couldn’t he have come to me just this one time?’ You search and search for answers and you finally realize there are none. You will never know the reason why.”

The Suicide Prevention Center in Reno started 22 years ago in a phone booth donated by Nevada Bell. Today the center, supported by United Way, is located in a house near the University of Nevada campus. It receives 18,000 calls a year and is staffed round the clock by volunteers, one of whom is a 31-year-old man named George.

Five years ago, depressed over his battle with cancer, George loaded a 10-gauge shotgun, placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened and, stunned, he returned the weapon to his father’s gun rack. Three hours later it fired, blowing a hole in the roof.

“I’m not a religious person, but that damn sure made me believe in divine intervention,” he said. “I should be a statistic. I shouldn’t even be here.” No longer suicidal, he looks at the help he now offers anonymous callers on the phone as his way of repaying a debt.

Thirty years ago, a suicidal person had nowhere to turn, except perhaps his minister. Today, there are scores of hot lines nationally for potential victims and hundreds of support groups such as Heartbeat and Compassionate Friends for survivors.

For the survivors, suicide brings more than grief. There is confusion, denial and a sense of rejection, compounded by the shame and stigma attached to suicide and the knowledge that one’s love wasn’t enough to save a life.

“We believe most suicides can be prevented,” said Deborah Lewis, executive director of Reno’s Suicide Prevention Center. “But you have to know what to look for and what to do and where to go for help. Yes, Nevada has the highest rate. And we’re going to change that. We’re going to change it by educating people, by talking about suicide.”

Out of the Closet

Lewis spends a good part of her time giving speeches around the state, trying to take the word suicide out of the closet. She talks to groups as diverse as Rotary Clubs and high schools and mental-health organizations. What she and other experts like her have found is that few people either understand suicide or initially want to talk about it. Suicide is something that touches another’s life, not one’s own.

“After I lost my boy,” said Margie Means, who belongs to a support group in Reno, “I just wanted to stay in bed and do nothing. But my husband wouldn’t let me. He made me get up in the morning and get on with my life.”

Within two years of Russell Means’ death in 1974, the teenager’s psychologist, his social counselor and the Meanses’ family doctor also had committed suicide. “Who do you get to help you then?” mused Margie Means, who still ponders what, if anything, she could have done to prevent the unthinkable.

“I wish I could do it all over again,” she said. “I’m sure I’d have done a better job.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.