Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department announcement.
Stress, the amount you exercise, who you surround yourself with. How you deal with previous trauma. You juggle these things daily. They make up a large part of your behavioral health picture.
They are part of what make you, you.
We talked about behavioral health often during the pandemic. COVID-19 has been hard on everyone. It’s taken a tragic toll in Pierce County, where we saw a jump in so-called deaths of despair.
If you have good behavioral health, you can navigate life, have positive relationships and adapt to change. But poor behavioral health— or mental health — can lead to Substance Use Disorder and other challenges.
Disturbing numbers from the pandemic.
Early data from the pandemic paints a stark picture. Our recent report, Pierce County Mental Health: A data-informed perspective, details what we’ve found. We compared pre-pandemic mental health data with trends from January 2020- April 2021. We saw increases in:
- Rates of primary care visits for depression and anxiety.
- Drug poisoning deaths and hospitalizations.
- Rates of primary care visits for eating disorders.
- Calls to regional crisis lines for concerns of suicide.
- Incidents of self-harm.
We also saw an alarming trend in deaths of despair in 2020. People who the Pierce County Medical Examiner said died of:
- Suicide.
- Alcohol misuse.
- Drug misuse.
In 2019, Pierce County had 351 such deaths. In 2020, we had 423. We had more deaths of despair in 2020 than our 350 COVID-19 deaths that year.
The deeper we dig into the data, the worse the numbers look. From 2019 to 2020:
- Drug poisonings increased from 149 to 262.
- The median age of people who died from suicide and drug poisonings went down.
- The number of Black people who died from suicide or drug poisonings increased.
- The number of Hispanic people who died from drug poisonings increased.
What we’re doing to help.
Our goal with looking at these numbers is not a simple tally of issues. While many of you resumed aspects of your pre-pandemic life, we know some will experience lasting mental health concerns for years to come. These numbers represent us. They are our family, our friends and our neighbors down the street.
Big, complicated problems require a thoughtful approach.
Part of our job is to bring helpers across Pierce County together. We do this to buck these disturbing trends.
We — along with many behavioral health supporters — work with Pierce County to make sure people have access to care for their behavioral health needs. Pierce County’s 0.1% behavioral health tax that took effect last July helps to pay for behavioral health programs for residents. Staff at the Health Department help develop screening tools that healthcare providers can use to assess early mental health symptoms. These tools can help refer people to appropriate services. Increasing preventative screenings at doctor visits, schools and in the community can help people get the right help fast.
If you struggle with behavioral health, you’re not alone. Things like social connections, your stress level, your environment and health equity all contribute to your mental health.
If you need help now, you can get it quickly.
- Have suicidal thoughts? Lots of great resources are available.
- Do you have a child or know a young person who is also struggling? They’re not alone.
- Only 1 in 9 people who need treatment for Opioid Misuse Disorder get it. We offer a number of medication-assisted treatment programs. You can choose a program that suits your needs.
- The younger we intervene with alcohol use disorder, the better. Parents, schools and communities work together to help keep youth safe.
You’ll hear more from us in the coming months about the critical importance of good behavioral health. Sign up to the Your Reliable Source blog to get the latest information.
Not one mention of God or a higher power of any sort….
That means you see yourselves as the higher power.
All the agnostic planning and policy and programs you ever create, will fall flat and continue to muddle in despair.
If you do have a spiritual connection to the higher power, you should not be ashamed to share that connection.
Reaching out with the power of prayer causes one to look inward, and in doing so, recieve answers to the problems one seeks to solve.
A little humility and faith goes a long way in this world.
No surprise, those are two words that are absent in the discussion of mental health these days, unless they are being mocked.
No surprise also, that we can’t get to words like self-worth, self-reliance, and self-respect.
You use race, gender, sexual orientation, and fluidity to drive division amongst us while claiming to be the champion of equity and inclusion.
Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows that substance abuse is a key driver of mental illness, yet the push around here is to legalize/normalize such things.
That being the case, it would appear you’re the ones who are mentally unstable and in need of guidance.
“In 2019, Pierce County had 351 such deaths. In 2020, we had 423. We had more deaths of despair in 2020 than our 350 COVID-19 deaths that year. ”
The question now is: whom do we hold accountable for such unscientific, cruel measures? I can name a few people who belong behind bars:
Jay Inslee, all public health officials who forbade treatment (ivermectin for example), county and city officials who echoed shrill panic porn from Olympia. Medical boards, hospital administrators, and others who promoted a vaccine over treatment. What happened was evil. We cannot ‘forget and move on’.
This is not about ‘not having the appropriate mental health measures available’, it is about illogical tyranny that stole our greatest strength: connection.
This does not even begin to question how COVID-19 was over diagnosed as reason for death. COVID attacked the vulnerable. Full stop. We should have protected the vulnerable, and lived our lives. Instead, we still have clowns running around outside wearing masks.
Government needs to be stripped of resources, not given more money. Did any of these government experts take a cut in pay while the world shutdown? We should cut their pay permanently by firing appointed personnel, voting out the clowns, and creating citizen oversight boards to hold public employees/officials accountable.
The crimes our governments (local, county, state, federal) committed to the American people are as criminal as any in the history of mankind.
And I also echo what Brian Borgelt writes above. The ills of this country are spiritual and cultural–not a single thing the government can do. We need to become active citizens again. We outsourced our decisions to elected and appointed ‘experts’ to our own detriment.
bsn