The suicide this summer of a teenage girl on the snowboarding team devastated Routt County, again.
On top of that, the Steamboat Springs community lost several of its oldest residents to suicide, some in their 70s and one at age 81, adding to the rising numbers of older people in rural and mountain areas who are taking their lives because of stress and isolation.
Last year, a father killed his two children and then himself in the tiny town of Phippsburg, population 250, just down the road from the ski town.
It’s been overwhelming for the northwestern Colorado county. But the compounding losses over the past several years have led to real change.
The latest effort is a new program to bridge a long-standing gap between public safety and mental health — a two-person team of a sheriff’s deputy and a licensed clinical social worker who are responding to calls that involve suicide, domestic violence and other mental health issues.
Meanwhile, the lead suicide prevention organization for Routt and neighboring Moffat County has expanded school programs and support groups for those who have lost someone to suicide, as well as offered more training sessions for community members to learn how to react when someone seems depressed or says they want to end their life.
A wider swath of nonprofits and businesses are pitching in to support the efforts.
“When we lost a child at 17, the community members, organizations and businesses started to recognize that suicide prevention must be a priority for all of us if we are going to change this narrative,” said Mindy Marriott, executive director of that organization, called Reaching Everyone Preventing Suicide.
After the teen’s death in July, Steamboat Police Chief Mark Beckett, who lost his teenage son to suicide in 2021 before moving to Colorado, pleaded for “something more” in an open letter to the community. He said that city council debates on short-term rentals and lift ticket taxes were not nearly as important as the mental health crisis.
“Our first responders were dispatched to one of the worst calls imaginable. A local youth who was missing and suicidal,” he wrote. “Our police officers and firefighters worked with a parent who was facing the worst thing a parent can face. Our community lost a youth to suicide. Again.”
The chief said he was relieved that he wasn’t working on the early morning of the suicide, that he “did not see this horrible thing.”
“I don’t know if I could handle that again,” Beckett wrote. “I know our first responders cannot keep doing it. One of the police officers who responded has seen more suicide in his short time here than I saw in 21 years working for a large police department. These calls are incredibly impactful to our public servants and the entire community, and I’m frustrated that we have not done more for those struggling with mental crisis and behavioral health.”
New mental health response team started work last month
One thing the community has done, however, is create the new Routt County Mental Health Response Team. The team has been in the planning stages since 2022 and began responding to calls Sept. 1. Though it’s impossible to know whether the team has prevented a suicide, it seems like it.
In one case, after someone reported that a woman had planned to kill herself, the two-person team of Routt County Sheriff’s Deputy Dawn Smith and mental health professional Tracy Dierksen went to the woman’s home and spent about an hour talking to her.
Routt County Sheriff’s Deputy Dawn Smith and licensed clinical social worker Tracy Dierksen make up the two-person Mental Health Response Team. (Provided Photo)“She was spiraling,” Smith said. “She was losing her marriage. She was facing financial strain and difficulties with child care and all sorts of things that she really hadn’t faced in the past. She needed some legal advice. She was under the impression that her ex could accomplish a lot of things that he couldn’t. She just felt kinda crushed by everything.”
The team helped the woman get legal advice and linked her to a variety of community services that could help with child care and other strains. They spoke to her a few more times on the phone over the next couple of weeks, then one final time about a month after they had first met her.
“She’d found a job she really liked and had figured out her child care situation and had gotten some legal counsel, but more than anything, just felt very empowered and capable,” Smith said. “We got off the phone with her after that last conversation, and kind of looked at each other and went, I think she’s good!’”
It was how it was supposed to work — that once the team pointed people in the direction of help, they found their way. “That is what I always envisioned, this ability to do 80% for somebody, then 60%, then 40%, then 20%, then let them take it on themselves,” Smith said. “And that’s what we are seeing people willing to do.”
It was a stark contrast to past encounters that Smith had dealt with, prior to the Routt County Mental Health Response Team.
One that sticks with her was with a man who lived 45 minutes from town, didn’t have a driver’s license and was delusional. He wasn’t threatening to take his life or to hurt anyone, so there was no legal authority to bring him in for a mental health hold, Smith said.
“I knew what he needed,” she said. “He needed a ride to town. He needed a therapist. He needed help getting his medication. None of that was appropriate for a law enforcement officer to start doing. If I’ve got this guy in my car and I get a call for an armed robbery in progress, that’s not appropriate.”
Instead, the man tried to find help at an organization that didn’t know how to help. He ended up in the hospital on a psychiatric hold, was evicted from his home and had his belongings thrown out along the highway. His mom called law enforcement about a month later, looking for his stuff.
“There were situations where there was a palpable impotence about what we could do for somebody,” Smith said.
With the new team, the man could have at least gotten a storage unit, and likely would have gotten mental health help before losing his home, she said.
Routt County is 22,000 square miles, and the team works not just in Steamboat, but in Hayden, Oak Creek and Yampa. The county contributed $165,000 for the team, which is also funded by a yearly grant of $184,000.
Dierksen, the mental health clinician, is employed by UCHealth, working on contract for the county. UCHealth partners with law enforcement on similar programs across the state, including in Fort Collins, Aurora, Fountain and Manitou Springs.
Routt, Moffat have some of the highest suicide rates in the state
In 2023, when the sheriff’s office pitched its idea for the team to county commissioners, Routt County deputies and Steamboat police received 93 mental health-related calls, the majority of which were regarding someone who was suicidal. About half of those resulted in transports to the hospital for a mental health evaluation, which can now happen on-site with the new team. And 40 of the 93 calls lasted more than two hours, meaning two patrol deputies were unable to quickly respond to other calls because they were dealing with mental health crises.
Routt County had 10 suicides last year, while next-door Moffat County had nine, according to data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The two counties have some of the highest suicide rates in the state, at 39.6 per 100,000 people in Routt County and 68.2 suicides per 100,000 people in Moffat County.
Combined, the counties have had 13 suicides so far this year, according to Reaching Everyone Preventing Suicide.
“Regardless of the final count, every loss deeply impacts our close-knit communities and reinforces the urgency of continued prevention, education, and postvention support,” Marriott said.
Routt County’s assistant county manager, Melina Bricker, said the community has been making “concerted and ongoing efforts” to improve behavioral health programs for years. The co-response program addresses the gap between “acute and sub-acute intervention,” she said, meaning that people can get help during an immediate crisis and also when one is simmering.
The latest teen suicide was another “stark and tragic reminder that existing supports must necessarily extend beyond crisis moments to the preceding circumstances and events leading to loss of life,” she said.
Dierksen, the mental health clinician on the team, said suicide rates are higher in rural and mountain areas in part because of isolation. Moving to the mountains often means moving far from family or friends. Other stressors include substance abuse and domestic violence, which are exacerbated by financial struggles and the high cost of housing in Routt County and other resort communities. On top of all that, menacing networks are targeting people with elaborate scams that cause stress, she said.
The team recently helped one person who had received, and believed, a phone call that they were going to jail because they had something illegal, she said.
Dierksen typically begins by taking in the person’s body language and asking what’s going on. “People tend to tell me what is up,” she said. “People tend to trust me.” Then, Dierksen goes into the “hard questions” that decades of experience in the behavioral health field has trained her for: Have you thought of hurting yourself? Do you have a plan?
“It’s a very rural community and people aren’t actually aware of the services that are available,” Dierksen said. “The first thing is to educate people. If you have a mental health condition, maybe you’re having a social issue. Maybe you need some housing help. Maybe you need some food assistance. You need to know that that’s even out there, that it’s available for you.”
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