Hancock County has state’s highest suicide rate

The Coast’s least-populated county has the highest suicide rate of any county in the state.

When the Mississippi Health Department examined records on suicides from 1999 to 2014, Hancock County came out on top in number per 100,000 in population. The number of people who live in the county is less than half that — 45,600 — but the rate is accurate.

“That doesn’t mean they were the top county every year,” said Liz Sharlot of the state Department of Health, which keeps vital statistics. “The numbers bounced all over the place, from year to year” and different counties came out on top in any given year.

“And we didn’t see any trends,” Sharlot said.

But when the state used Centers for Disease Control and Prevention age-adjusted rates for suicides, the statistic proved to be accurate.

People in Hancock County didn’t call the suicide hotline more than Harrison or Jackson counties last year. But counselors are hard to come by, transportation options make counselors hard to visit and an influx of low-income homes and drug use could come into play.

“We were ground zero for Katrina,” said therapist Vickie Taylor, director of Hancock County services for the Gulf Coast Mental Health Center.

Taylor worked in Harrison County for 14 years before coming to Hancock County six years ago.

“We have a lot of people who make part of their living fishing,” she said, “and the BP oil spill, five years after Katrina, devastated that economy.”

People who had gone to the beach or out boating to cope couldn’t do that anymore, she said, and in between the two disasters, the national economy tanked. Even without those added stressers, a 2014 CDC study lists fisherman as one of the top jobs at risk for suicide.

“It’s not inconceivable that our suicide rate would go up,” Taylor said.

But Taylor said she wasn’t aware of the statistic until she looked it up. She said her clients in Hancock County don’t talk about suicide any more than do those she had in Harrison County.

There is another factor, she said.

After Katrina, a lot of money funneled into Hancock County to develop low-income housing and there weren’t enough people to fill them, she said. Units were advertised, and people from outside the county with low incomes came and stayed.

“They came with disabilities, mental-health issues, substance-abuse issues, minimal resources, that sort of thing,” she said. “You have to think that that could also be a contributing factor.”

Low income, high insurance

There are external factors that make life difficult in Hancock County and considerably fewer counselors per capita than in the other Coast counties to help people.

Transportation is a huge issue in getting clients to mental-health appointments, Taylor said. Medicaid transport is not reliable. Clients complain of late pickups and delayed returns home. Public transportation is practically nonexistent.

“There’s nothing (available) for people to get from one part of Hancock County to another easily,” Taylor said.

And on top of that, Hancock has had the most people in the state buying into Affordable Care Act health insurance.

There is an economic resurgence in the cities along the water, with restaurants and businesses coming back, Taylor acknowledged.

“That’s great for the middle class,” she said, but people who are struggling still have financial issues and difficulty getting around.

Running out of room

The Mental Health Center at 819 Central Ave. in Bay St. Louis is bursting at the seams.

“We don’t have room for one more person or one more car in the driveway,” Taylor said.

The center has four therapists for adults, four for children and nine therapists housed in schools.

It has added five school-based counselors in the past two years and is adding an adolescent substance-abuse counselor affiliated with Hancock County Youth Court. It is considering a substance-abuse counselor to provide group therapy for adults, and in the next six months, the building will be renovated to add room for three new therapists.

Substance abuse vs. suicide

Coast mental health expert Sherman Blackwell said suicides aren’t always called suicides. Hancock County Coroner Jim Faulk agreed.

Blackwell believes when the numbers shake out there really are twice as many suicides as homicides nationally.

Faulk, who sees the suicides up close, says there are more than people realize statistically.

“You can just tell, if it’s huge amounts of drugs in the system from specific groups of drugs, amounts too much to be accidental,” he said. “There may be empty bottles lying by the person, but without a (suicide) note, it’s not listed.”

“This county has something all the time — overdose with drugs as suicide, suicide with guns, with hanging, a guy diving off one of these houses on stilts,” he said.

An overdose without a note or a confession he will write up as “accidental intake of drugs, toxicity” and let it go.

He blames Katrina. The storm depressed people to the point they started taking medication, he said.

“Taking Xanax was almost normal,” he said. “Once that starts, I don’t know. If they could just stay off it and deal with the pain and the reality, it might be better.”

He can also see the long-term cumulative effects.

A suicide he was working on last month involved a man who “went to pieces after Katrina” and had been seeking help since 2006.

He said that one left a distraught family and a distraught mental health professional who had worked with him for years.

This story was originally published July 10, 2016 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Hancock County has state’s highest suicide rate."