Good news and bad news at mental health town hall

Although uplifting messages were shared, with the subject matter of mental health and suicide in Wyoming, the atmosphere at Governor Mark Gordon’s Mental Health Town Hall at the Wyoming Boys’ School on Oct. 25 was a somber one.

In the wake of the news of House Bill 65 replacing the permanent funding plan for the 988 Wyoming Suicide Prevention Hotline with a biennial funding system, the future of mental health activism in Wyoming has become uncertain.

To be transparent and combat this uncertainty, Governor Gordon held a mental health Town Hall meeting shortly after attending the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Lighthouse crisis center on North 10th Street in Worland. A town hall meeting was also held in Powell earlier in the day.

Gordon brought with him Stefan Johansson, the director of the Wyoming Department of Health, and Korin Schmidt, the director of the Wyoming Department of Family Services. The three began the meeting with introductions and provided explanations of how they deal with mental health in their respective duties. Gordon spoke frequently about a “change of culture” that Wyoming must undergo to begin minimizing the impacts of mental health issues.

They said that efforts are being newly made in partnership between all three branches of Wyoming’s government to advance mental health awareness and services across the state.

Gordon also took the opportunity to share that Wyoming was announced as no longer being the No. 1 state in suicides per capita, now No. 2 to Montana. Wyoming still has just under 32 suicides per 100,000 people.

Having began the meeting with good news, the panel of officials opened the meeting up for public participation.

One guest, a woman who identified herself as being from Thermopolis, asked the panel a question which became a prominent topic of discussion of the meeting. She said, “I was curious if you could speak to some of the efforts around bullying in schools, especially when it comes to our LGBTQ community. We had two young people in Thermopolis take their own lives in April, and both of them were part of that community. I want to know what’s being done to better embrace that community and to help those children.”

Johansson was the first to field the question. He said, “This is probably not what you want to hear, but the awareness of that issue has changed.” He cited collaborative and communicative efforts between his department and Family Services, and a more holistic approach to mental health from Wyoming’s government as a whole. He added, “I’ll be blunt – I wish I could just analyze the issue and give you a straight answer of how to solve this problem.”

Gordon said, “We need to understand people, to meet them where they are. Not to group them in categories. I think if we group, it’s easy to dismiss. When we depart from talking about the individual, I think we depart a little bit from what Wyoming has always been about.”

In a 2019 survey from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, results indicated that LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately affected by bullying compared to their heterosexual/cisgender counterparts. Gordon, however, stated he is of the opinion that “grouping” this demographic would weaken the overarching sentiment of mental health awareness. He would rather view those affected individually, he said, adding, “Wyoming problems require Wyoming solutions.”

OTHER COMMENTS

Ralph Neider-Westermann, the executive director of Wyoming Lifeline in Greybull, one of two crisis call centers for the 988 hotline in Wyoming (the other being Central Wyoming Counseling in Casper), thanked the three and their agencies for the funding his organization has received thus far, and he was optimistic for the future of his program.

He said of the hotline, “It’s confidential, it’s private, and it’s non-judgmental. We split the day into 12-hour shifts between us and Central Wyoming Counseling. We listen, we make sure that the caller is OK for now, and we triage with mental health professionals.”

Neider-Westermann added that of the calls made to his call center this year, only 2 percent of them resulted in having to call law enforcement to de-escalate.

Washakie County Commissioner Chairman Aaron Anderson said, “On behalf of Washakie County, I’d like to thank the governor, the Department of Health and the Department of Family Services, as well as Mary [Johnson, Cloud Peak Counseling Executive Director] and the whole staff at Cloud Peak Counseling.”

Anderson gave a brief background on the Lighthouse Crisis Center, and voiced that he was grateful that, “We live in a state where if you call the State Loan and Investment Board about a grant, they call you back.” He added, “I really want to advocate for community mental health, and I think we’ve got a really great model here that could work in the rest of the state.”