S. Dakota Battles Teen Suicide Epidemic

When high school senior Reid LeBeau thinks about his city’s future, he worries about his 10-year-old sister.

“I pray to God that the problems we’re having right now she doesn’t have to face,” the president of the Pierre Riggs High School Student Senate said at a recent meeting of a suicide-prevention task force.

Eight teenagers have committed suicide in the last three years in the South Dakota capital, a city of about 13,000, and the county’s rate for young suicides is 12 times the statewide average.

Some wonder whether the suicides are related to a series of bad events in state government. Pierre’s social and economic well-being is tied closely to state government, by far the biggest employer.

A 1993 plane crash killed Gov. George Mickelson and seven others, most of whom lived in Pierre.

Many people feared losing their jobs when the video lottery, the state’s second-largest revenue source, was shut down for several months in 1994 due to a court ruling.

And job uncertainty continued in recent years when state government was trimmed to help finance property tax cuts demanded by South Dakota voters.

“Lots of questions, very few answers. That’s the frustrating thing, but that’s where you start,” said Dr. Tom Huber, a spokesman for the task force of students and adults who are focusing on ways to prevent suicides.

The Rev. David Zellmer, senior pastor at Lutheran Memorial Church, said many factors probably caused the suicides.

“For a young person, it’s hard for them to envision a time in the future when they won’t be hurting,” said Zellmer, who also is a task force spokesman. “So they end up choosing a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

He also pointed out that, as state employees’ ranks have been cut, those who remain work even harder, staying late and taking work home at night.

And because many people move to Pierre to work for state government, many children don’t have aunts and uncles, cousins or grandparents nearby, Zellmer said.

In addition to the eight teenage suicides, six Pierre adults have killed themselves since 1995, Sheriff Mike Leidholt said.

No matter the reason, Leidholt suspects that after the first suicides, teenagers began considering it as a way to handle tough problems.

“We need to get it stopped so it doesn’t become the norm,” he said.

The suicide prevention task force has arranged to have a hotline at a hospital in Sioux Falls, 225 miles away, handle calls for help. Teachers and others who work with young people are getting additional training in how to recognize danger signs and get help.

The task force wants to change the system for handling those in imminent danger of committing suicide. Instead of putting them in a jail cell, they would be placed in a special room at the local hospital.

“The only way we’re going to change anything is if we change ourselves,” LeBeau said, “because it all starts with us.”