People aged 85 and older had the highest rate of suicide death in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The 75 to 84-year-old population had the second-highest rate of suicide death.
Notably, the 2024 Mesa County Health Needs Assessment reported the region’s older adult population has seen significant, consistent increases over the last decade.
In 2013, adults 65 years or older accounted for 15.4% of the county’s population; in 2022, that age group comprised 20% (one in five) of Mesa’s residents.
According to Family Health West Mental Health Director Glenda Hamer-Garlitz, there was historically a lack of local mental health resources for older adults. That disparity led to the creation of Senior Life Solutions in 2022, an intensive outpatient therapy program for adults 65 years and older.
“If you look around Grand Junction and Palisade, there’s really not a lot of choices for seniors,” Hamer-Garlitz said. “Mindsprings does what they can, but their focus certainly isn’t seniors. There’s no other program in this area that focuses on (people) 65 and over.”
Mental health for older adults
It may come as a surprise that suicide deaths are so high among older adults, but Hamer-Garlitz said there are many risk factors for mental health challenges that could be responsible for the disparity.
She said the stigma around mental health and asking others for help is especially pertinent among older generations, so asking for help might feel more like “airing dirty laundry” to older adults taught to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
Additionally, Hamer-Garlitz said she has seen a sentiment among seniors that depression is simply a normal part of aging they expect to occur.
The introduction of new mental health risk factors can often reinforce that notion of inevitability, as older adults can be forced into retirement, live on a fixed income, lose the lives of loved ones, develop new health conditions and forfeit their driver’s license.
She added that older adults are more likely to possess and use lethal methods of suicide.
“They’ve lived long enough that they’ve really thought this through, and they truly believe that society, family, whomever would better off without them, so they use more lethal methods,” Hamer-Garlitz said. “A lot of suicide attempts in our younger age brackets are more impulse, and they may not have access to the lethality that some of our seniors have.”
Enter Senior Life Solutions
Senior Life Solutions is a program partnership between FHW and Psychiatric Medical Care, a behavioral healthcare management company partnered with more than 300 other hospitals and health systems.
The voluntary program involves a multi-faceted approach to identify and reconcile factors affecting an older adult’s mental health: a comprehensive health assessment, psychiatric evaluation, group therapy, individual therapy and follow-ups for at least a year after a client ‘graduates’ from the program.
Hamer-Garlitz said the comprehensive health assessment is a useful place to start because a new client’s concerns could be more connected to prescription interactions than a chronic condition or trauma.
Once they have determined challenges and goals through a psychiatric evaluation, clients participate in routine, outpatient therapy in a one-on-one and group setting.
Group therapy sessions include seven to 10 participants and are led by a licensed psychiatric counselor. Those meetings occur three times a week, but attendance at all of them is not mandatory.
According to Hamer-Garlitz, the group setting is not as personal or intense as the individual sessions are; but, they provide clients the opportunity to build camaraderie with their peers and see that their mental health does not mean they are alone or ‘crazy.’
Those group sessions center around learning tools and strategies to cope with common roadblocks and mental health conditions. She added that despite the usual hesitance of new clients to participate, the social setting helps them to open up within just a few sessions.
“We’ve had patients before that parked over at the hospital, so nobody knew that they were coming for mental health…eventually, they’re parking in our designated spots and they’re not walking four blocks to get here.”
The individual therapy sessions are where participants get into the ‘nitty-gritty’ with the program’s psychiatrist. Hamer-Garlitz said those individual sessions enable clients to work through personal events and problems in their lives so that they can process them and cope with similar roadblocks in the future.
She added that the program’s LPC can also facilitate family counseling, so children, partners and other relatives of the client can be included in the conversation when appropriate.
The long-haul solution
Once participants begin to see a reduction in symptoms, improvements in life and an ability to implement coping strategies, their number of scheduled sessions is decreased, and they eventually graduate.
Graduation isn’t the end of Senior Life Solutions, however. Hamer-Garlitz said that graduates receive check-ins throughout the following year to ensure they are doing well and have not experienced any major disruptions.
Quarterly after-care meetings are also scheduled for the graduates to attend and share their success stories.
“We’ve gotten comments back from patients who have graduated that the program was life-changing for them,” Hamer-Garlitz said. “That’s one of those phrases that you hear, and that’s really impactful. We changed their life, so I have to take satisfaction in that.”
In the two years since Senior Life Solutions launched, Hamer-Garlitz said 30 participants have already graduated from the program.
She added that there is a potential to expand the initiative with a second cohort, but the program’s capacity is currently comparable to the demand.
While intensive outpatient therapy might not be a perfect fit for everyone, general mental health care is available in many different capacities. The most important step in reconciling a mental health challenge is to identify it and engage whichever service seems to be the best fit.
“If you feel like a friend or a family member is off, is not the bubbly person they used to be, making negative comments about themselves or their contribution to life and society, ask the questions,” Hamer-Garlitz said. “You’re not going to give them any thoughts that aren’t already there, so ask. ‘Have you thought about harming yourself? Are you thinking about suicide?’ It needs to be something we’re talking about.”
Copyright 2024 The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colorado.
This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico including Aspen Public Radio.