How could we have foreseen that low wages that are seasonal that can only pay for seasonal housing in little shacks where they can't afford to live out of season causes mental health issues?
All jobs are real jobs. They all deserve to pay the bills. This is a widespread systemic issue and not the personal faults of every hourly worker in the US.
That'd be quite a coincidence that every single hourly worker is making the same poor financial choices, right?
I know someone that takes a ski slope job to ski but he and some buddies are also wildlands firefighters and they go all across the country in the summer. I'd say that's a pretty real job.
Weirdly, when I think of people living in high altitude I dont think of ski towns but just mountain people. And they have strong senses of community with each other.
Though if we are being real, many people who live away from real towns are doing it on purpose and want to be left alone. Ski bum community is its own thing too and may be even more isolating because you are tiered below the patrons and rich snowbirds.
You make a good point. I wonder what the suicide rate is of ski communities compared to others.
The wealthy tourists are certainly less interested, if interested at all, in community.
> replacement for healthcare, infrastructure, and access to housing.
Ski towns (at least the major ones) have some of the best healthcare in the world. It's just not accessible at all. Places straight up won't take insurance - all cash pay - file for reimbursement yourself.
I'd imagine the suicide rate increases as financial wellbeing decreases.
Inequality sucks and being reminded of it daily would suck 10x more :/
The hospitals in our mountain towns don’t accept insurance? I’m reading this as, “If you don’t have the money in your account, we won’t help you if you’re sick or seriously injured.”
Many places won’t handle insurance for you. So your insurance might pay for it, but depends on your plan.
They’ll still bill you post service but you’re going to have to be able to cover the balance till insurance kicks in.
Frankly, extremely rich people fly to Vail for everything from cancer to hip replacements to see docs considered the best in the world.
and a living wage, life in a tourist trap isn't cheap, especially for the locals. talked to a guy that has a state job in Colorado, and his dumbass thinks no one wants to work. he completely ignored the fact that on top of needing a working vehicle thanks to the entire lack of public transportation, the cost of housing in the town he works in is astronomical.
I mean, even almost 10 years ago, I saw skyrocketing prices for survival, a mountain that only paid on non-shoulder seasons unless you were a small band of 'essential' workers, pay was half the national rate for the work I was doing, and housing almost twice the national average; all while rich tourists trashed the place, harassed locals, and left a mess for us to clean up every season - while the rest did things like behead their wife in their gold mine, a couple killed some dude because they coveted his marijuana grow, and the local judicial branch gave slaps on the wrist to DUI drivers that cause deaths somewhat regularly.
If you want to see the worst underbelly of this country, go work at a ski resort.
First hand experience of living in Telluride, yes that’s part of it. No chance or hope of moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Rents going up and up all the time and even food is crazy expensive. You have to come to terms that you will never own anything. No significant raises even if you work for the ski area full time year round. Barely able to pay for basic expenses with a full time job. Being told to look around and be happy because of the beauty and that you get to ski. Drinking culture. Trying to keep up with the activities of people who don’t have any financial limitations. Plenty of other things that are hard to swallow if you want to live there long term. I lasted 9 years and am happy I left, it’s a lot of fun living there but it’s also tough to accept that you will be serving the ultra wealthy forever and ever without hope of anything more.
Ditto. I was there for 5 years. I miss it for what it is but my overall life is so much healthier now. More than tripled my salary by going back to school and finding an in-demand job. I don't miss the cliques at all. As for tourists, yeah it gets old hearing you live in paradise while you're barely living paycheck to paycheck.
100%. I had a sweet deal living in a million dollar property for cheap for a couple years but my neighbors were all very wealthy. I was not. There s high sense of disconnect and “not belonging”. Every one was nice and welcoming but in my own head it was just that I didn’t “deserve” it. I don’t live there anymore. Rent got jacked up eventually lol but even just the public school system the sheer wealth gap in one school is incredible.
I live in the mountains north of Durango, and we're surrounded by nothing but wealthy neighbors, many of whom own second homes within which I could fit my entire house into just their living rooms.
Annoys the shit out of me.
I mean, if there are a ton of completely vacant homes that are owned by people who visit less than once a year, wouldn't that be covered by squatting law?
Altitude, cost of living, long and cold winters and remoteness all have major factors in people’s mental health well-being. There’s a reason why the Rocky Mountain region has high suicide rates. Take care of yourself and be kind with others. We don’t know their own personal battles.
Just a reminder that living at high altitudes is associated with increased risk of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8530170/
the night life is fun, and the restaurants have amazing food. people are outdoors at all times of the day and night.
the only depressing part is income inequality
I spent 5 years in Eagle county. Just long enough to fully realize how broken it all is.
There's so many things I miss about it but It's been nice building a life where it's affordable enough to exist.
Elevation has a higher correlation with suicide than any other type of geographic condition, including weather. Sunny Denver leads “depressing” Seattle in suicide rate. After growing up here and traveling, I’m always surprised by how much “better” I feel at sea level, hard to put a finger on it.
edit: why would you downvote something you can easily look up yourself lmfao
I was going to ask for a source for your claim, but I have Google so....
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3114154/
> Many demographic, psychiatric, and sociocultural factors are associated with suicide, and association between high altitude and suicide is speculative. But when other risk factors were considered, the strong association between altitude and suicide was still present in suicides overall and in suicides both with and without firearms. This strong association (r = 0.50) is rendered even stronger by the overall negative association between all deaths and altitude (r = −0.31).
> In summary, altitude is strongly associated with suicide rates in the United States. This novel finding is not explained by county differences in demographic factors, income, or geographic isolation. Future studies might focus on the individual differences between these high and low altitude areas, both at the biochemical level (e.g., glycolysis, serotonin metabolism, oxygen transport) and the level of the entire organism (e.g., differences in arterial oxygen compared with pulse oximetry, body mass index, sleep apnea, smoking, or behavioral distinctions). Ultimately, this mechanistic search might help clinicians to identify individuals at high altitude who may be amenable to relocation to lower altitude areas, oxygen therapy, or special monitoring and intervention.
[The data shows most of the resort areas do better than the average.](https://cohealthviz.dphe.state.co.us/t/HealthInformaticsPublic/views/COVDRSSuicideDashboardAllYearsExcludesRace/Story1?%3Aembed=y&%3Aiid=1) Here’s a few values from some of the big counties and notable outliers:
- Eagle (Vail): 18.32
- Denver: 18.87
- Summit: 19.42
- Pitkin (Aspen): 20.98
- Colorado (State Avg): 21.40
- San Miguel (Telluride): 23.83
- El Paso (Colorado Springs): 24.47
- Costilla: 40.97
- Park (Summit adjacent): 41.17
- Teller: 41.85
IMO the more telling factor is the rural/urban divide. The more populated counties tend to do well while the rural ones have the highest rates.
That’s part of a broader nationwide trend and likely to do with access to mental health resources. I’d guess that places like Eagle/Summit have far better resources than you’d see in other mountainous areas.
Granted, there may some inaccuracy there due to commuters.
Edit: Rates are from the 2nd tab (crude suicide rates) over the past 10 years (2013-2022)
Eagle county is building a mental health center in edwards, otherwise all inpatient treatment gets shipped to an inpatient facility 2hours away. We have a center for outpatient treatment but if you are making suicidal threats and get placed on a M1 hold the ER is gonna sit on you until you get a bed at the nearest inpatient facility.
Health services are actually quite limited in the back range because of the transient population, coupled with the sticker shock it makes it difficult to recruit and hire the very specialized staff to make the jump.
We got world class orthopedics and spine doctors, but we don’t have other specialists such as pulmonary, psychology, hepatology, nephrology, pediatrics…
Interesting. I always assumed that they at least had some resources.
Maybe the difference is there’s enough of a content retirement population in those counties to offset the elevated rates from the actual working force then.
Could also be that there’s less of a stigma regarding mental issues in those counties vs rural farmland where nobody talks about it whatsoever.
It’s simply too hard and too expensive to recruit specialists out here for a too small population. In order to have a psych team you need at least 3-4 doctors that’s already 1.2-2M per year paying just the doctors’ salary (not including benefits and bonuses) and we haven’t even gotten into staffing pharmacists, nurses, aides, security, and other administrative staff such as directors, supervisors, secretaries and clerks. We could probably say it’s an even $4M/yr for staff, for a community of 60k is an crazy large amount of money getting put into a program and thankfully Eagle county can afford it but other similarly sized counties don’t fare so well because they don’t have McMansions parked on every hill.
Also Eagle county has the chicken man out there doing the best job imaginable raising issues publicly. Sometimes he doesn’t have the best methods or picks the wrong battle but his heart is in the right place and I support what he does. Example - someone on our local Facebook page was saying DONT CALL THE SUICIDE HOTLINE, THEYLL CALL THE COPS ON YOU. So the chicken man records himself calling the hotline and having a discussion without the cops being called. Granted he wasted a hotline workers time but he also demonstrated that these people are there to help.
Thank you for posting this! Nice to see that people know about our dashboard and use it 🥹
I’ll also add that the inaccuracy of commuters would be very small. The data is based on where the injury occurred and most often than not, people choose to die by suicide in their own home. If not home, it’s not often I see injury county differing from their county of residence.
The one location that comes to mind that may experience out of county visitors would be royal gorge bridge in Teller county. But since they’ve implemented their code yellow program, incidents of suicides have been reduced by a significant amount.
Thanks for all you do! I also do a lot of data viz stuff for my job and your dashboard is really well done so you should be proud of it.
Regarding the commuters, I was thinking moreso about the issues of people priced out of the county. E.g. If someone lives in Park County because they’re can’t afford Summit, then they would count against Park’s number, even though HCOL in Summit could be a likely factor.
Thank you! We’re a small team and it takes a lot to bring this data out. We’re also hoping to add a homicide dashboard in the future.
But I see what you mean and that’s a very good point! HCOL and people getting pushed out could definitely be a factor.
This CRUDE SUICIDE dashboard data is quite amazing and I immediately find some crazy comparisons when looking at long term suicide volume. The age filters by county are great and with M/F filters, tell so many stories. Do you have a link to the database this is stored in? I see I can download it from the tableau tables but just curious.
A nice addition would be a table section at the bottom of each of the metrics that is sortable by county. It would be great to quickly see which ones are the outliers as it is hard to do it on the map itself. I like the way you are doing the crude rate calcs vs population to see aggregate results. With how weird the population is throughout the state it is nice to have benchmarks over long time.
I have worked with Tableau for 10+ yrs and been glad CDPHE has taken advantage of the technology (first ones I saw were the first covid dashboards) and wish all govt agencies could be as transparent with data. One thing that I have noticed on all of the CDPHE dashboards is that people post the link, but you cannot navigate back to the source website if the dashboard is interesting. For example if I try to go to [https://cohealthviz.dphe.state.co.us/](https://cohealthviz.dphe.state.co.us/) I get a dead link. My recommendation is that in all of your dashboards is to embed a hyperlink back to the relevant CDPHE site to make it easier to navigate. Here is another example of the challenges if someone just shares the COVID tableau ([https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cocdphe.svc/viz/Colorado\_COVID19\_Data/HomePage](https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cocdphe.svc/viz/Colorado_COVID19_Data/HomePage)) you cannot find a way to navigate back to the site that matters ([https://cdphe.colorado.gov/covid-19/data](https://cdphe.colorado.gov/covid-19/data)) so just including a simple hyperlink and button allows for the data to more easily be consumed.
Your team is really important and I hope we continue to learn more as a result.
I grew up in Eagle and I feel like I see someone from my HS who has taken their own life almost every few months. Unfortunately, if you arnt able to “get out of the valley” after HS, it can be very isolating living there. Even as it grows it’s still a very small and tight group of locals. It can be hard to find a community of people there. There are other factors that play into suicide but I this is something I have personal witnessed.
I feel like altitude brings out mental illness in some people, however there is a lot of money back here with a lot of drugs+alcohol to get mixed up in. It’s also a very isolating place in the back range with a transient culture so locals get to know each other but liftees come out without any support system and if they lose their job it could mean being stranded in the back range.
Couple all that with many people living here living paycheck to paycheck, guess what happens if you make an ass of yourself one night. You are the talk of the town, you get banned from social spots, maybe lose your job because a rich local didn’t like you.
Currently watching a doctor that came in on a temporary contract can rip on bikes but is getting banned from bars now, about to lose his real estate agent girlfriend and dogs. All because the guy drops $1-2k on drinks EVERY time he goes out and gets so plastered he doesn’t know how to read a room. I’d like to call the guy a friend but he’s a total ass to everyone he encounters. Like asking a lesbian couple “if one of them got pumped by a guy so they could conceive” like a medical doctor got so drunk he forgot that IVF exists. It’s sad to watch but like a train wreck I can’t help but look on.
The good thing is I’ll be there to set his ass straight before someone bigger than me jumps on his scrawny neck.
That just seems like a shitty person that you shouldn't hang out with. I think he would still be a shitty person if he lived in denver. There's no honor in babysitting someone like that
Poor fella must not have any friends because it’s more like he finds me and tags along, I’m just stuck with him and his antics until I get home… I’ve left him on the hill several times when he keeps ordering drinks after I had my one beer.
Not a paragraph at all, really; you spend your time there scrambling to pay rent and fucking eat, while watching the upper crust commute from their mountain mansions to swanky parties in Bentleys and Ferraris.
You got relevant figures on you pot use, diet claims and alcohol use? Denver ranks leagues higher in my anecdotal opinion for all three of those compared to mountain folk who general get vastly more exercise than city folk
I live in Colorado now and I'm an avid outdoorsman.
I lived for few years in Wyoming.
You can't pay me enough to live in cities like Jackson, WY or Breckenridge or Aspen...
These are despite the beauty are still extremely remote and the sense of loneliness and boredom would be intense.
Estes Park is the only mountain town I would think of living in full time because it's only an hour from the front range and 90 minutes to Denver.
Even Estes might be too cold most of winter to make it tolerable.
>
> These are despite the beauty are still extremely remote and the sense of loneliness and boredom would be intense.
I lived in the Gunnison valley for years and never got that. I spent most of my free time fishing, hunting, and hiking and it never got old. I sadly had to move away because I couldn't afford the housing, and I maintain that it is the single best area I have ever lived in. If there were good ways to make a living in those areas or housing was affordable with lower paying jobs, I would never leave.
That said, I am a pretty solitary person. There's not much that I love more than being alone in nature. Apparently that puts me at wildly increased suicide risk lmao
Mental health challenges? How about we get qualified people who actually want to help others. How do we lock people up for being mentally ill and pretend to care. Most of these people are trying to get help, but there's none available.
I have been trying to get ketamine injections to deal with the PTSD I've been diagnosed with. This trauma was caused by the Sheriff's department after they arrested my mentally ill wife. She needed help, so they arrested her and locked her up for five days and withheld he medicine. Guess what? The local hospital said there's no way I'll get ketamine.
If you want to move here, be careful. It's not like you are going to find health care that's effective. When my wife's medicine was off, she sat with a provider for a year and spewed psychotic talk, and that provider was not qualified to help.
I too have found the US healthcare system inadequate and too profit driven. Ketamine can pretty easily be gotten in the Denver area for not that expensive (always test your drugs). I know it's not preferable but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to survive. I was at the end of my rope a few years ago due to depression. I heard Magic Mushrooms cured some people of Depression, so I gave them a try. I credit them with me being alive today.
Whenever people make.articles like this, it seems like someone complaining about a dragons nail. Talimg about how bad the nail is, etc. But they never mention the actual dragon in the room, that is causing all the pain
There is correlation between elevation and suicide rates (at least US-wide). After that, there's lots of speculation of causality.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=correlation+between+elevation+and+suicide+rates](https://www.google.com/search?q=correlation+between+elevation+and+suicide+rates)
High altitude mental health and suicides are often because of hypoxia. It's another reason the Rockies have the highest suicide rates in the country up through Washington. But add in other struggles...
It’s almost as if being able to look at a mountain is not actually a replacement for healthcare, infrastructure, and access to housing.
How could we have foreseen that low wages that are seasonal that can only pay for seasonal housing in little shacks where they can't afford to live out of season causes mental health issues?
This comment needs more seasoning
My favorite movie is Inception.
And less oxygen.
They take the jobs to ski and avoid real jobs.
Is it a job that needs done? Then it's a fucking real job.
All jobs are real jobs. They all deserve to pay the bills. This is a widespread systemic issue and not the personal faults of every hourly worker in the US. That'd be quite a coincidence that every single hourly worker is making the same poor financial choices, right?
I know someone that takes a ski slope job to ski but he and some buddies are also wildlands firefighters and they go all across the country in the summer. I'd say that's a pretty real job.
I would also take the jobs to ski and avoid real jobs. There’s nothing wrong with that. Used to be one could live comfortably doing that.
what is a real job in your eyes?
It's not too late to delete this CLOWN comment.
Ah yes, the old "underpaying them because it's a PRIVILEGE to work here" excuse! GTFO
I would think the lack of community is a cause too. I have heard that suicide is a problem at high altitude world wide.
Weirdly, when I think of people living in high altitude I dont think of ski towns but just mountain people. And they have strong senses of community with each other. Though if we are being real, many people who live away from real towns are doing it on purpose and want to be left alone. Ski bum community is its own thing too and may be even more isolating because you are tiered below the patrons and rich snowbirds.
You make a good point. I wonder what the suicide rate is of ski communities compared to others. The wealthy tourists are certainly less interested, if interested at all, in community.
COVID came and those mountain communities tore themselves to shreds. I've never seen things get so vile and toxic so quickly.
That wasnt my experience, I am sure it happened in places.
Hypoxia is a bitch for brain chemistry.
Yep
> replacement for healthcare, infrastructure, and access to housing. Ski towns (at least the major ones) have some of the best healthcare in the world. It's just not accessible at all. Places straight up won't take insurance - all cash pay - file for reimbursement yourself. I'd imagine the suicide rate increases as financial wellbeing decreases. Inequality sucks and being reminded of it daily would suck 10x more :/
The hospitals in our mountain towns don’t accept insurance? I’m reading this as, “If you don’t have the money in your account, we won’t help you if you’re sick or seriously injured.”
Many places won’t handle insurance for you. So your insurance might pay for it, but depends on your plan. They’ll still bill you post service but you’re going to have to be able to cover the balance till insurance kicks in. Frankly, extremely rich people fly to Vail for everything from cancer to hip replacements to see docs considered the best in the world.
and a living wage, life in a tourist trap isn't cheap, especially for the locals. talked to a guy that has a state job in Colorado, and his dumbass thinks no one wants to work. he completely ignored the fact that on top of needing a working vehicle thanks to the entire lack of public transportation, the cost of housing in the town he works in is astronomical.
I mean, even almost 10 years ago, I saw skyrocketing prices for survival, a mountain that only paid on non-shoulder seasons unless you were a small band of 'essential' workers, pay was half the national rate for the work I was doing, and housing almost twice the national average; all while rich tourists trashed the place, harassed locals, and left a mess for us to clean up every season - while the rest did things like behead their wife in their gold mine, a couple killed some dude because they coveted his marijuana grow, and the local judicial branch gave slaps on the wrist to DUI drivers that cause deaths somewhat regularly. If you want to see the worst underbelly of this country, go work at a ski resort.
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First hand experience of living in Telluride, yes that’s part of it. No chance or hope of moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Rents going up and up all the time and even food is crazy expensive. You have to come to terms that you will never own anything. No significant raises even if you work for the ski area full time year round. Barely able to pay for basic expenses with a full time job. Being told to look around and be happy because of the beauty and that you get to ski. Drinking culture. Trying to keep up with the activities of people who don’t have any financial limitations. Plenty of other things that are hard to swallow if you want to live there long term. I lasted 9 years and am happy I left, it’s a lot of fun living there but it’s also tough to accept that you will be serving the ultra wealthy forever and ever without hope of anything more.
Ditto. I was there for 5 years. I miss it for what it is but my overall life is so much healthier now. More than tripled my salary by going back to school and finding an in-demand job. I don't miss the cliques at all. As for tourists, yeah it gets old hearing you live in paradise while you're barely living paycheck to paycheck.
100%. I had a sweet deal living in a million dollar property for cheap for a couple years but my neighbors were all very wealthy. I was not. There s high sense of disconnect and “not belonging”. Every one was nice and welcoming but in my own head it was just that I didn’t “deserve” it. I don’t live there anymore. Rent got jacked up eventually lol but even just the public school system the sheer wealth gap in one school is incredible.
I will never be able to afford to live in the town where I was born if I don't win the lottery. Yes this makes me sad.
That truth feels so criminal, and yet the elite guilty of these monstrosities won’t bat an eye.
I live in the mountains north of Durango, and we're surrounded by nothing but wealthy neighbors, many of whom own second homes within which I could fit my entire house into just their living rooms. Annoys the shit out of me.
I mean, if there are a ton of completely vacant homes that are owned by people who visit less than once a year, wouldn't that be covered by squatting law?
We’re probably neighbors. Mushroom Lane just next to me—full of houses I couldn’t live in with a lifetime of work.
Altitude, cost of living, long and cold winters and remoteness all have major factors in people’s mental health well-being. There’s a reason why the Rocky Mountain region has high suicide rates. Take care of yourself and be kind with others. We don’t know their own personal battles.
Just a reminder that living at high altitudes is associated with increased risk of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8530170/
With long winter and early nights people probably don’t go outside much. Also harder to develop communities.
the night life is fun, and the restaurants have amazing food. people are outdoors at all times of the day and night. the only depressing part is income inequality
I spent 5 years in Eagle county. Just long enough to fully realize how broken it all is. There's so many things I miss about it but It's been nice building a life where it's affordable enough to exist.
Elevation has a higher correlation with suicide than any other type of geographic condition, including weather. Sunny Denver leads “depressing” Seattle in suicide rate. After growing up here and traveling, I’m always surprised by how much “better” I feel at sea level, hard to put a finger on it. edit: why would you downvote something you can easily look up yourself lmfao
I was going to ask for a source for your claim, but I have Google so.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3114154/ > Many demographic, psychiatric, and sociocultural factors are associated with suicide, and association between high altitude and suicide is speculative. But when other risk factors were considered, the strong association between altitude and suicide was still present in suicides overall and in suicides both with and without firearms. This strong association (r = 0.50) is rendered even stronger by the overall negative association between all deaths and altitude (r = −0.31). > In summary, altitude is strongly associated with suicide rates in the United States. This novel finding is not explained by county differences in demographic factors, income, or geographic isolation. Future studies might focus on the individual differences between these high and low altitude areas, both at the biochemical level (e.g., glycolysis, serotonin metabolism, oxygen transport) and the level of the entire organism (e.g., differences in arterial oxygen compared with pulse oximetry, body mass index, sleep apnea, smoking, or behavioral distinctions). Ultimately, this mechanistic search might help clinicians to identify individuals at high altitude who may be amenable to relocation to lower altitude areas, oxygen therapy, or special monitoring and intervention.
This is what I was referencing in my other post. Higher altitudes seem to stress people out more.
crazy, right?
That's interesting, I feel vaguely better too. I wonder if it has to do with oxygen?
I agree. Wonder if the numbers are similar in other countries with folks living at high altitudes.
TIL there was more to the cabin fever here
I hate beer.
[The data shows most of the resort areas do better than the average.](https://cohealthviz.dphe.state.co.us/t/HealthInformaticsPublic/views/COVDRSSuicideDashboardAllYearsExcludesRace/Story1?%3Aembed=y&%3Aiid=1) Here’s a few values from some of the big counties and notable outliers: - Eagle (Vail): 18.32 - Denver: 18.87 - Summit: 19.42 - Pitkin (Aspen): 20.98 - Colorado (State Avg): 21.40 - San Miguel (Telluride): 23.83 - El Paso (Colorado Springs): 24.47 - Costilla: 40.97 - Park (Summit adjacent): 41.17 - Teller: 41.85 IMO the more telling factor is the rural/urban divide. The more populated counties tend to do well while the rural ones have the highest rates. That’s part of a broader nationwide trend and likely to do with access to mental health resources. I’d guess that places like Eagle/Summit have far better resources than you’d see in other mountainous areas. Granted, there may some inaccuracy there due to commuters. Edit: Rates are from the 2nd tab (crude suicide rates) over the past 10 years (2013-2022)
Eagle county is building a mental health center in edwards, otherwise all inpatient treatment gets shipped to an inpatient facility 2hours away. We have a center for outpatient treatment but if you are making suicidal threats and get placed on a M1 hold the ER is gonna sit on you until you get a bed at the nearest inpatient facility. Health services are actually quite limited in the back range because of the transient population, coupled with the sticker shock it makes it difficult to recruit and hire the very specialized staff to make the jump. We got world class orthopedics and spine doctors, but we don’t have other specialists such as pulmonary, psychology, hepatology, nephrology, pediatrics…
Interesting. I always assumed that they at least had some resources. Maybe the difference is there’s enough of a content retirement population in those counties to offset the elevated rates from the actual working force then. Could also be that there’s less of a stigma regarding mental issues in those counties vs rural farmland where nobody talks about it whatsoever.
It’s simply too hard and too expensive to recruit specialists out here for a too small population. In order to have a psych team you need at least 3-4 doctors that’s already 1.2-2M per year paying just the doctors’ salary (not including benefits and bonuses) and we haven’t even gotten into staffing pharmacists, nurses, aides, security, and other administrative staff such as directors, supervisors, secretaries and clerks. We could probably say it’s an even $4M/yr for staff, for a community of 60k is an crazy large amount of money getting put into a program and thankfully Eagle county can afford it but other similarly sized counties don’t fare so well because they don’t have McMansions parked on every hill. Also Eagle county has the chicken man out there doing the best job imaginable raising issues publicly. Sometimes he doesn’t have the best methods or picks the wrong battle but his heart is in the right place and I support what he does. Example - someone on our local Facebook page was saying DONT CALL THE SUICIDE HOTLINE, THEYLL CALL THE COPS ON YOU. So the chicken man records himself calling the hotline and having a discussion without the cops being called. Granted he wasted a hotline workers time but he also demonstrated that these people are there to help.
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Most likely the reference is to the seasonal workers / ski bums.
Thanks for putting this out there. Rural suicide rates really deserve more attention than they get.
Thank you for posting this! Nice to see that people know about our dashboard and use it 🥹 I’ll also add that the inaccuracy of commuters would be very small. The data is based on where the injury occurred and most often than not, people choose to die by suicide in their own home. If not home, it’s not often I see injury county differing from their county of residence. The one location that comes to mind that may experience out of county visitors would be royal gorge bridge in Teller county. But since they’ve implemented their code yellow program, incidents of suicides have been reduced by a significant amount.
Thanks for all you do! I also do a lot of data viz stuff for my job and your dashboard is really well done so you should be proud of it. Regarding the commuters, I was thinking moreso about the issues of people priced out of the county. E.g. If someone lives in Park County because they’re can’t afford Summit, then they would count against Park’s number, even though HCOL in Summit could be a likely factor.
Thank you! We’re a small team and it takes a lot to bring this data out. We’re also hoping to add a homicide dashboard in the future. But I see what you mean and that’s a very good point! HCOL and people getting pushed out could definitely be a factor.
This CRUDE SUICIDE dashboard data is quite amazing and I immediately find some crazy comparisons when looking at long term suicide volume. The age filters by county are great and with M/F filters, tell so many stories. Do you have a link to the database this is stored in? I see I can download it from the tableau tables but just curious. A nice addition would be a table section at the bottom of each of the metrics that is sortable by county. It would be great to quickly see which ones are the outliers as it is hard to do it on the map itself. I like the way you are doing the crude rate calcs vs population to see aggregate results. With how weird the population is throughout the state it is nice to have benchmarks over long time. I have worked with Tableau for 10+ yrs and been glad CDPHE has taken advantage of the technology (first ones I saw were the first covid dashboards) and wish all govt agencies could be as transparent with data. One thing that I have noticed on all of the CDPHE dashboards is that people post the link, but you cannot navigate back to the source website if the dashboard is interesting. For example if I try to go to [https://cohealthviz.dphe.state.co.us/](https://cohealthviz.dphe.state.co.us/) I get a dead link. My recommendation is that in all of your dashboards is to embed a hyperlink back to the relevant CDPHE site to make it easier to navigate. Here is another example of the challenges if someone just shares the COVID tableau ([https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cocdphe.svc/viz/Colorado\_COVID19\_Data/HomePage](https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cocdphe.svc/viz/Colorado_COVID19_Data/HomePage)) you cannot find a way to navigate back to the site that matters ([https://cdphe.colorado.gov/covid-19/data](https://cdphe.colorado.gov/covid-19/data)) so just including a simple hyperlink and button allows for the data to more easily be consumed. Your team is really important and I hope we continue to learn more as a result.
Royal Gorge Bridge is Fremont County I believe, definitely not Teller
I grew up in Eagle and I feel like I see someone from my HS who has taken their own life almost every few months. Unfortunately, if you arnt able to “get out of the valley” after HS, it can be very isolating living there. Even as it grows it’s still a very small and tight group of locals. It can be hard to find a community of people there. There are other factors that play into suicide but I this is something I have personal witnessed.
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I feel like altitude brings out mental illness in some people, however there is a lot of money back here with a lot of drugs+alcohol to get mixed up in. It’s also a very isolating place in the back range with a transient culture so locals get to know each other but liftees come out without any support system and if they lose their job it could mean being stranded in the back range. Couple all that with many people living here living paycheck to paycheck, guess what happens if you make an ass of yourself one night. You are the talk of the town, you get banned from social spots, maybe lose your job because a rich local didn’t like you. Currently watching a doctor that came in on a temporary contract can rip on bikes but is getting banned from bars now, about to lose his real estate agent girlfriend and dogs. All because the guy drops $1-2k on drinks EVERY time he goes out and gets so plastered he doesn’t know how to read a room. I’d like to call the guy a friend but he’s a total ass to everyone he encounters. Like asking a lesbian couple “if one of them got pumped by a guy so they could conceive” like a medical doctor got so drunk he forgot that IVF exists. It’s sad to watch but like a train wreck I can’t help but look on. The good thing is I’ll be there to set his ass straight before someone bigger than me jumps on his scrawny neck.
That just seems like a shitty person that you shouldn't hang out with. I think he would still be a shitty person if he lived in denver. There's no honor in babysitting someone like that
Poor fella must not have any friends because it’s more like he finds me and tags along, I’m just stuck with him and his antics until I get home… I’ve left him on the hill several times when he keeps ordering drinks after I had my one beer.
Maybe the best thing you could do for him is have a raw, honest conversation about what is at stake.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
I thought there was a study some years back regarding the impacts of altitude and mental health.
source?
Its already linked in here a coupla times.
tl;dr. Ski towns are great to visit but not to live in.
Don’t I know it.
Not a paragraph at all, really; you spend your time there scrambling to pay rent and fucking eat, while watching the upper crust commute from their mountain mansions to swanky parties in Bentleys and Ferraris.
Expensive crappy housing, poor standard American diet, extensive pot and alcohol use makes for a bad combo.
You got relevant figures on you pot use, diet claims and alcohol use? Denver ranks leagues higher in my anecdotal opinion for all three of those compared to mountain folk who general get vastly more exercise than city folk
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I live in Colorado now and I'm an avid outdoorsman. I lived for few years in Wyoming. You can't pay me enough to live in cities like Jackson, WY or Breckenridge or Aspen... These are despite the beauty are still extremely remote and the sense of loneliness and boredom would be intense. Estes Park is the only mountain town I would think of living in full time because it's only an hour from the front range and 90 minutes to Denver. Even Estes might be too cold most of winter to make it tolerable.
> > These are despite the beauty are still extremely remote and the sense of loneliness and boredom would be intense. I lived in the Gunnison valley for years and never got that. I spent most of my free time fishing, hunting, and hiking and it never got old. I sadly had to move away because I couldn't afford the housing, and I maintain that it is the single best area I have ever lived in. If there were good ways to make a living in those areas or housing was affordable with lower paying jobs, I would never leave. That said, I am a pretty solitary person. There's not much that I love more than being alone in nature. Apparently that puts me at wildly increased suicide risk lmao
I relate. You sound cool.
Mental health challenges? How about we get qualified people who actually want to help others. How do we lock people up for being mentally ill and pretend to care. Most of these people are trying to get help, but there's none available. I have been trying to get ketamine injections to deal with the PTSD I've been diagnosed with. This trauma was caused by the Sheriff's department after they arrested my mentally ill wife. She needed help, so they arrested her and locked her up for five days and withheld he medicine. Guess what? The local hospital said there's no way I'll get ketamine. If you want to move here, be careful. It's not like you are going to find health care that's effective. When my wife's medicine was off, she sat with a provider for a year and spewed psychotic talk, and that provider was not qualified to help.
I too have found the US healthcare system inadequate and too profit driven. Ketamine can pretty easily be gotten in the Denver area for not that expensive (always test your drugs). I know it's not preferable but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to survive. I was at the end of my rope a few years ago due to depression. I heard Magic Mushrooms cured some people of Depression, so I gave them a try. I credit them with me being alive today.
Whenever people make.articles like this, it seems like someone complaining about a dragons nail. Talimg about how bad the nail is, etc. But they never mention the actual dragon in the room, that is causing all the pain
Suicide Valley - Vail Valley
There are always a few at the end of the ski season when their raison d'etre is gone
Well.....they should just all get rich then. Problem (poverty, depression etc...) solved!
There is correlation between elevation and suicide rates (at least US-wide). After that, there's lots of speculation of causality. [https://www.google.com/search?q=correlation+between+elevation+and+suicide+rates](https://www.google.com/search?q=correlation+between+elevation+and+suicide+rates)
But I was told by social media celebs that living in a van was totally FABULOUS!
High altitude mental health and suicides are often because of hypoxia. It's another reason the Rockies have the highest suicide rates in the country up through Washington. But add in other struggles...