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Substance abuse, mental health key risk factors for attempted suicide, experts say
BOARDMAN
Behavioral health, substance-abuse treatment and clinical health organizations working together is the best way to treat substance abuse and prevent suicide.
Behavioral health is essential to health in general, said Capt. Jeffrey Coady, PsyD, Region 5 administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Coady, a commissioned officer in the U. S. Public Health Service who oversees six states, including Ohio, for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, was a featured speaker at a Tuesday workshop titled “The Interconnectedness between Substance Abuse Disorders and Suicide, at The Embassy.
The purpose of SAMHSA is to improve the quality and availability of prevention, treatment and rehabilitative services in order to reduce illness, death, disability and cost to society resulting from substance abuse and mental illnesses.
Substance abuse is one of the key risk factors in attempted suicide because it causes impaired judgment leading to consideration of short-term rather than long-term consequences, Coady said.
“Substance abuse is a chronic illness, not a moral failure. Prevention works, treatment is effective, and people recover,” he said.
“By focusing on the risk and protective factors, which show us what to look for, we can leverage our combined resources and have a greater collective impact in prevention and treatment,” Coady said.
Risk factors can be childhood experiences such as illness, injury, poor physical health, bullying and/or victimization. Protective factors include high self-esteem and religiosity, Coady said.
Mental-health conditions and disease combined with substance abuse “definitely put individuals at increased risk of suicide,” said Dr. Theodore Parran of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, another featured speaker at the workshop.
“Individuals have more and more crises in their lives. It is hard to even conceive of them managing,” said Dr. Parran, certified by the American Society on Addiction Medicine and chief of Chemical Dependency Services at Windsor Laurelwood Center for Behavioral Medicine.
There are several times when substance abusers are particularly vulnerable to attempting suicide: just before they try to get sober; just after they get sober and are beginning to think clearly; and when they are beginning to relapse after they had started to hope and think about a future, they are “acutely susceptible,” Dr. Parran said.
The workshop was sponsored by the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation; Columbiana, Mahoning and Trumbull county suicide prevention coalitions; Mahoning and Trumbull county mental health and recovery boards; Columbiana County Mental Health and Recovery Services; and Help Hotline Crisis Center.