suicide

(Runtime :56)In West Richland, the pink dogwoods are in bloom but the sunny spring days have been tarnished by three dead in the community and several…

Starting in mid-2022, people in Washington will be able to dial 988 instead of 911 to access different types of services in a mental health crisis.

For the second time in less than a year, Washington’s Corrections Ombuds (OCO) is warning that the state’s prison system needs to do more to prevent inmate suicides. In a 15-page investigation released Monday, the OCO found that two inmates died by suicide in 2020 after prison staff failed to recognize signs of mental distress and didn’t follow suicide prevention policies.

In recent months, many suicidal children have been showing up in hospital emergency departments, and more kids are needing in-patient care after serious suicide attempts. "Across the country, we're hearing that there are increased numbers of serious suicidal attempts and suicidal deaths," says Dr. Susan Duffy, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Brown University.

It stands to reason that all the stress, anxiety and isolation of the pandemic could lead more people to take their own lives. But newly obtained data for Washington and Oregon show this is one bad thing that 2020 has not delivered. Public health agencies and suicide prevention groups have been keeping an eye out since spring for a possible rise in suicides.

Catherine Perusse is a counselor in Sandpoint, Idaho, who knows first-hand about the devastation of suicide: Two of her sons died of self-inflected death six years apart. In this episode of StoryCorps Northwest, Catherine and her daughter, Ali Bretthauer of Moscow, Idaho, share how the deaths changed their lives.

Tens of thousands of Americans die every year from gun suicide, and some of hardest-hit areas spend the least on prevention. In the Idaho Panhandle, some small-town residents are stepping in where the government has failed.

The state of Washington has agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a 29-year-old man who died by suicide in an isolation cell at the Airway Heights Corrections Center near Spokane in May 2014.

Between 2008 and 2018, suicide accounted for 47% of jail deaths with a known cause in Oregon and Washington, according to an investigation by OPB, KUOW and the Northwest News Network. But an analysis shows the region’s prisons aren’t plagued by the same crisis.

While suicide was the 10th most common cause of death among Americans of all ages in 2017, it was the second leading cause of death among young Americans age 15 to 24, according to new data released Thursday from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.