“Struggle, it’s a human thing,” Bode Miller, the famed alpine ski racer told the audience at the Fort Lewis Community Concert Hall on Wednesday in introducing “The Paradise Paradox,” a film about the mental health crisis sweeping mountain towns.
Miller, retired and executive producer of the film, understands the highs and lows, the dark side of mountain communities that attract people to snowy playgrounds, single tracks and illustrious rivers to live lives centered around their passions.
Although resort towns such as Telluride, Aspen and Vail land on the brutal list of iconic ski towns with highly disproportionate suicide rates, Durango shares the stressors.
These places come with brutal realities, including financial and housing challenges, isolation, lack of mental health care, and easy access to firearms. University of Colorado’s Helen and Arthur E. Johnson Depression Center has done relevant work to understand why the Rocky Mountains are part of what’s called a suicide belt, with resort ski towns having two to three times as many suicides as the national average of 14 per 100,000. Stack this next to the National Institute of Mental Health’s stats that one in five adults suffers from a serious mental issue.
Durango is not Telluride or Aspen or Vail with a community at the base of a chairlift. But based on CU’s science, we are equally vulnerable.
Look at our own numbers, provided by Axis Health System. In 2022 in La Plata County, 22 overdose deaths, 16 suicides with 13 from firearms, up eight from the previous year. Same year in Eagle County, five overdose deaths, 17 suicide deaths with 12 from firearms, five more than in 2021. Most who took their lives were white males.
Pain compounds in communities with each person lost, reverberating through each one of us.
In Durango, our highly transient, seasonal workforce – those who make the wheels turn – suffers hardships. Workers without longtime local relationships or social attachments are forced to regularly rebuild support systems, as they come and go between jobs and living situations.
Take a look around our workplaces. How many faces are relatively new? How many have moved on? Being disconnected is terrible for health.
Match this with our rugged individualism, love for wild fun, and much drinking and substance use. It makes for behavioral health issues. A cocktail to feel lousy.
Housing inflation and instability comes with the territory in Colorado’s most beautiful places.With this is the humiliation of putting up with landlords who don’t make repairs or respect privacy, or the moving as rentals become properties for sale. This wears on a person. It’s embarrassing to not feel successful.
Safety nets for our workforce have big holes. Yet, it’s a tangible thing we can improve on, such as up-skilling workers so they have more incentive to stick around and dig into this community.
We can also learn how to ask for help, as well as listen for it.
Vail Health has made great gains in mental health services, raising $68 million toward its goal of $100 million by 2023. In Durango, we have disparities between the ultrawealthy and service workers, but not like Vail. So we’ll need to find our own homegrown scalable solutions. This includes small person-to-person actions, recognizing when a coworker or neighbor or someone outside our inner circle is struggling.
In our remote area, we’re well aware of our lack of mental health and drug rehabilitation facilities. But good things are happening, starting with investing in children’s health.
Durango-based Pediatric Partners of the Southwest and 4 Corners Children’s Clinic, have been awarded grants for their broad, integrated behavioral health care services.
Pediatric Partners will receive $366,000 over the three-year grant period and the 4 Corners clinic will receive $115,000. The money comes from $29 million of the state’s American Rescue Plan Act funds.
Behavioral health care is health care, whether for our kids or seasonal workers. We can take this seriously. We can all relate to struggle.
