Jefferson County has a suicide rate far above the state average. Port Townsend’s suicide rate is staggering. The Jefferson County Board of Health has spent more time on climate change, nuclear disarmament and wordsmithing a resolution on “systemic racism’ than it has on a real public health crisis that is killing people, young and old.
Clallam County’s Board of Health and the community as a whole have done a lot to address their suicide crisis. It has been front and center in local discussions and programs for years. Clallam’s suicide rate dropped a third from 2018 to 2019.
Jefferson County’s suicide rate has not budged. This year the funerals for two young men who killed themselves, one only 13 years old, were held on the same September weekend. In recent weeks, four young people attempted to kill themselves and required hospitalization to save their lives.
The alarm bells should have been ringing long ago. Jefferson County has a suicide rate of 44 per 100,000 population. The statewide figure is 15.9. Jefferson County’s suicide crisis is far worse than neighboring Clallam County, where the suicide rate per 100,000 population for last year was 27, still bad, but not nearly as bad as our situation.
Jefferson County’s suicide rate has increased 42% since 2011.
In Clallam County, the suicides have been geographically dispersed. In Jefferson County they are concentrated heavily in Port Townsend. Eight of the 14 suicides for 2019 were inside city limits. That gives Port Townsend a suicide rate greater than 82 per 100,000 population, more than six times above the state’s grim metric, and three times worse than the states with the highest suicide rates nationwide.
Better Things to Do
In the past two years, the Jefferson County Board of Health has never had the county’s suicide crisis as an agenda item for any of its meetings. Not once has time been set aside to address the tragic deaths that make Jefferson County, and Port Townsend in particular, a dark place where despair, the nightmare of addiction, mental illness, and loneliness kill people.
Cynics say that local leaders suppress discussion of our social ills and their cost in lives because it would be bad for real estate sales. Word cannot get out that things are worse here than in Clallam County, supposedly the poor, economically depressed, lower-class poster child for addiction and suicide epidemics against which Jefferson County is frequently measured, but not honestly.
The truth is that none of the members of the Board of Health have demonstrated any interest in confronting our suicide crisis. Judging by how they use their time and staff resources, they just don’t seem to care.
But they do care about pet social justice issues.
Much time has been devoted to discussing climate change and whether it should be declared a climate emergency. Several Board members are climate activists. It has been an agenda item at a number of meetings in the last two years and the Public Health Officer has been instructed to use his limited time and resources on the subject–but not the suicide crisis.
Several times the Board of Health has visited the subject of increasing public acceptance of psychedelic drugs.
At their July 2019 meeting they discussed, debated and individually signed onto a resolution calling for the United States to adopt the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
And, of course, hours have been consumed wrangling over the wording of a resolution declaring “systemic racism” to be a public health emergency in Jefferson County, though not one instance of racial discrimination has come before the Board.
After multiple redrafts and hours of debate, the resolution is still devoid of specifics. It fails to cite any measurable adverse health impact on even one individual of the “systemic racism” supposedly plaguing every aspect of our government, schools, and law enforcement agencies.
They actually started work on that resolution in February 2019, as young people were killing themselves or failing in their attempts all around them. They had previously tasked the Public Health Officer to do a literature search–not on preventing suicide–but on “looking at racism and bigotry as public health issues.” Quoting from the minutes of that meeting:
The Board had comments and questions on local actions to address bigotry, promoting community resilience through already established forums (such as the Community Health Improvement Plan), learning from the study of other detrimental conditions where abuse is passed from one generation to the next, exploring training programs offered by the Mandala Center for Change, mitigating risk factors, and moving towards a more compassionate society.
They’ve been on “systemic racism” for eighteen months.
An earlier draft of the “systemic racism” resolution contained the observation that Whites kill themselves at higher rates than other groups. Any mention of suicide was struck from the latest version.
Jim Scarantino was the editor and founder of Port Townsend Free Press. He is happy in his new role as just a contributor writing on topics of concern to him. He spent the first 25 years of his professional life as a trial attorney, then launched an online investigative news website that broke several national stories. He is also the author of three crime novels. He resides in Jefferson County. See our "About" page for more information.
With all the climate, covid virus and racism alarmism, it is no wonder our youth are depressed, despondent, hopeless and suicidal. Its time our teachers and leaders stopped using alarmism to promote political goals.