For the first time in years, Utah is not in the top 10 states for the highest suicide rate. While some may be quick to applaud, Utah's experts share why they remain concerned.
"We were really kind of bracing ourselves amidst a pandemic for what could happen, but Utah seems to have fared quite well in 2021," said Michael Staley, Suicide Prevention Research coordinator at Utah's Office of the Medical Examiner. "We actually saw one of our biggest single-year decreases in a long time, taking us to roughly the rate that we had last in 2014."
Staley said Utah's drop in rank actually indicates other states' suicide rates growing worse. "It's significant that we saw improvement, but that also means that things got worse somewhere else and I'm not going to celebrate tragedy somewhere else," he said. "I'm happy to see that what we're doing appears to be working, but we've got a lot more to do," Eliason said. "I'm nowhere near satisfied because we still lose far too many citizens and young people to suicide, so it's an issue that we can't take our foot off the gas."
Michael Staley, Suicide Prevention Research coordinator at the Office of the Medical Examiner, talks to KSL.
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