State of Suffering: 
Curbing the Rise of Utah Suicides

As a child, loneliness dogged Julia Ludlow like an unwanted shadow. After years of struggling to make friends, she had resigned herself to a life of solitude: quiet rides home on the school bus and nights cooped up in her bedroom, hermit-like, with no one to talk to.

Despite book smarts and a gentle demeanor, Julia struggled to connect. She felt invisible, suffocating under the isolation, until one fall day like any other in 2015, when she packed a dusty Altoid mint tin with as many Tylenol pills as she could fit. Later that afternoon, she would retreat into a quiet alcove near her school cafeteria in northern Utah and attempt to end her life. She was 13.

Luckily, fate intervened. While collecting water to wash down the rest of her pills, Julia ran into a classmate and shared her secret in between sobs. Something broke inside of her, and she agreed to meet with the school counselor and complete a mental evaluation form. “When I checked the box that said I wanted to kill myself, the fear on my parents’ faces was something I’ve never seen before,” she says.

While Julia felt utterly alone, there are many more like her. An unrelenting stigma and limited access to mental health care has been linked to a disturbing rise in suicides across the state, with some victims as young as nine.

There’s Lilith Shlosman, who first attempted suicide as a freshman due to bullying and other factors. In January 2013, 12-year-old Dylan Aranda died of suicide. By December, 30 other teens would do the same.

In 2017, Herriman High School student Chandler Voutaz died by suicide using a firearm. (Firearms are involved in about half of all teen suicide deaths.) Less than a year later, six more students from Chandler’s school had joined him.

In the four years since its creation, the number of tips and chats submitted through the app has soared by more than 600 percent. That surge is one of many reasons why nearly 1,000 schools have enrolled in the SafeUT app, at all levels of education.

For Lori Thorn, director of student services at Alpine School District, enrolling 76 of her schools in SafeUT has given students a safe space at their fingertips and identified at-risk youth who may otherwise fall under the radar.

SafeUT has further expansions in the works, including one for the Utah National Guard that extends mental health support to more than 7,000 service members and their families. In its first six months alone, the SafeUT National Guard app was downloaded by 1,000 members. And this year, SafeUT received the 2020 Best of State Award for Best Web-based Community Resource.

The moments preceding suicide are an opportunity to understand those populations vulnerable to suicide. Scott A. Langenecker, PhD (below) is one of several U of U researchers committed to studying the link between mental illness, suicide, and the brain.

And when we understand those vulnerable to suicide, we can better support them before it’s too late. Douglas D. Gray, MD, professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah, has been doing just that.

He first started studying the social and cultural factors behind Utah’s rising youth suicides in the late 1990s. At the time, Gray was one of only two people studying suicide in the state. “To help educate people, I used to fill my old Honda Civic with training pamphlets and hand them out on the weekends,” he says. “It was the loneliest job in town.”

Now, 20 years later, Gray is astounded by how far Utah has come in researching and understanding suicide. A team of legislative champions, state coordinators, medical examiners, and student mobile crisis team members now meet struggling Utahns early on to provide support and solutions.

Thanks to researchers like Gray, in the past three years alone, the University of Utah has secured funding of more than $125 million to conduct 131 research projects on mental illness and suicide prevention. “Eight years ago, I thought I would retire and nothing for suicide would have been done,” Gray says.

Utah’s rising rates point to a larger issue—a troubling deficit in health care access. A third of Utah adults suffer from depression, and more than half of those lack access to treatment. Utah ranks last in the United States for mental health care resources.

To address this deficit, UNI helps hedge against access issues by offering resources on depression, mood disorders, and substance abuse. And just this year, the Huntsman Foundation committed $150 million to establishing a robust response to this crisis: the Huntsman Mental Health Institute.

“The first Huntsman generation made remarkable advancements in cancer research,” Gray says. “The second generation is focusing on the next important issue: mental health care and the stigma that comes with it.”