'It's overwhelming': Rural Texas county grapples with high suicide rate

Christopher Anderson, the son of Jana Anderson, took his life 21 years ago in San Angelo, Texas. He was 22 years old.

“My son’s girlfriend was the one who found him and, of course, she was devastated. She took her life exactly like he did six years later ... and she left a 2-year-old that her parents have been raising. She never got over it and the guilt and just the trauma, and the trauma of finding him,” Anderson told Yahoo News.

Secluded deep in West Central Texas, Tom Green County has an average suicide rate of 19.3 per 100,000 people, according to data from the past 23 years provided by San Angelo-based West Texas Counseling & Guidance . By comparison, the state of Texas has a rate of 13.2 per 100,000 people, and in the U.S., the rate is 13.5, according to 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.As of November, 21 people in Tom Green County have taken their own lives in 2022.

San Angelo is described as a frontier town turned booming community that represents about 100,000 people within the county. McCoy describes it as a city that’s hard to find unless you’re looking, with no major highway nearby and the closest major city, Abilene, being about 87 miles away. “I’m painting kind of a broad brushstroke picture here, certainly there’s exceptions to this, but we do see on average, that our rural communities have higher suicide rates than our non-rural communities,” Shawna Hite-Jones, a public health professional who specializes in mental health and suicide prevention, told Yahoo News.

Because of her experience and after meeting others who had lost loved ones to suicide, Anderson helped create the support group Survivors of Suicide for people who have lost a loved one to suicide.

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