Over the past five years, Wyoming has averaged the highest suicide rate in the nation. Montana is a near second, and both are more than 8 percent higher than the third ranking state, Alaska. More than 24 people per 100,000 commit suicide in Wyoming. That translates to almost 142 of our youth and peers who die by their own hand each year.

For Wyoming, suicide prevention is an urgent concern.

To make matters worse, these numbers are on the rise. Wyoming’s suicide rate has increased 15 percent over the last five years. This increase outpaces the 11.8 percent increase nationwide. 

Suicide prevention, more than any other safety concern, is a battle for the mind. By making people mindful of their health and safety, we can reduce accidents and diseases by percentage points but cannot stop them entirely. On the other hand, when you change the mind of someone considering suicide, it is 100 percent effective.

For this reason, suicide rates are the most direct barometer of our culture’s attitude toward life. The fact that we have seen a steady increase in suicide rates over the past 30 years tells us that something sinister is afoot. The additional fact that this national increase has doubled since 2005 should be reason enough to look to the past decade for clues.

It should be no surprise to anyone that our current surge in suicide rates roughly corresponds to nationwide efforts to promote suicide. In 1980, the Hemlock Society was founded to promote the “right to die.” Then “Dr. Death,” Jack Kevorkian, wrote a series of articles promoting physician-assisted suicide. 

By 1990, he performed his first public-assisted suicide of a 54-year-old woman. Over the next eight years, he terminated 130 people, most after his medical license was revoked. Finally, he was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 10-25 years. But this did not stop the death march.

In 1997, the Hemlock Society scored its first major victory when an Oregon ballot initiative was allowed to become law. For the first time in U.S. history, physicians were legally permitted to violate the Hippocratic Oath and prescribe lethal drugs for the express purpose of suicide. 

Efforts to duplicate such laws in other states met defeat after defeat. This caused the Hemlock Society to develop a new marketing campaign and change its name to Compassion and Choices in 2003. Even after this, legislative victories eluded them, so they turned to the courts.

In 2008, a doctor, backed by the former Hemlock Society, sought to overturn Montana law by arguing a constitutional “right to die.” A district judge ruled in favor of the doctor’s argument, although it was overturned by the state supreme court. Nevertheless, that same ruling declared that state laws forbidding physician-assisted suicide only applied if the suicide attempt failed. As long as the victim/patient actually dies, Montana doctors are immune from prosecution. Talk about an incentive factor!

About the same time, Washington passed a ballot initiative similar to Oregon’s. Vermont in 2013 and California in 2016 passed physician-assisted suicide legislatively, while Colorado passed it through Proposition 106 on last November’s ballot.

Vermont followed suit and passed physician-assisted suicide in 2013. Most recently, California passed it legislatively in 2016, while Colorado passed it through Proposition 106 on last November’s ballot. 

A review of this history demonstrates that the gradual increase in suicide rates, which began in the 1980s, coincides with the activities of Dr. Death and the Hemlock society. It further shows that the recent surge in suicide rates coincides with the formal legalization of physician-assisted suicide in six states.

Of course, coincidence and correlation do not prove causation. Social science is never that neat and tidy. But we would be foolish to ignore the coincidence of these trends and claim that our overall problem with suicide is unrelated to any of these developments.

Even the Oregon Health Authority in a September 2010 news release noted that, “after decreasing in the 1990s, suicide rates have been increasing significantly since 2000.” They also admitted that by 2007 Oregon’s suicide rate was 35 percent more than the national average. Today it remains 37 percent higher than average. This in spite of the fact that physician-assisted suicides, by law, are not counted as suicides!

That being said, Wyoming makes it clear that there is no one-to-one correspondence between state laws and suicide rates. Attitudes toward suicide do not respect lines on a map. What happens in Oregon does not stay in Oregon. It not only creeps like gangrene from state to state, but through social media and the national conversation in general, it infects the minds of all people, young and old alike.

The fact of the matter is that laws teach. Good laws teach good things; bad laws, bad things. Physician-assisted suicide laws teach that one legitimate answer to suffering is self-inflicted death. They teach that some human lives are, in the eyes of the state, pointless and unworthy of suicide prevention efforts. They teach that there is nothing beyond this life which makes any amount of suffering worth enduring.

In 2014, Michelle Carter acted on the lessons taught by these laws. She texted encouragements to her boyfriend who was wanting to commit suicide and told her boyfriend to carry it out when he had second thoughts. Now he is dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, and last Friday, June 6, she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Did we somehow expect this wouldn’t happen?

We may try to quarantine that teaching and tell young people a different story. But youth are not stupid. They are not known for accepting the line, “Do as I say, not as I do.” In fact, young people especially are more apt to imitate their elders than to abide by empty distinctions.

Since 2005, the suicide rate for those 75-84 has only risen 5.9 percent, but during the same period, the suicide rate of those 55-64 rose 36 percent. Worse, the suicide rate of 10- to 14-year-olds jumped 51 percent! The Hemlock Society wanted the elderly to have “the right to die.” They inflicted it, instead, upon their grandchildren.

Neither can you put the genie back in the bottle by restricting it to “terminal illness.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that we are all terminally ill. Not a single one of us is going to make it out of this life alive. For any person in the midst of suffering and depression, there is no magical line between “six months to live” and “six years to live.” 

As anyone knows who works to help people out of depression and suicidal thoughts, it is not suffering which drives suicide, but purposeless suffering. For those who have hope and purpose, no amount of suffering can quench the desire for life. 

If you want proof of that last statement, read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl. This brilliant psychologist didn’t just theorize about suffering and survival, but he was tested in the greatest hell ever inflicted upon humankind and lived to tell what he learned.

Suicide concerns us all for two reasons. First, entire families and communities are hurt by the suicide of even one person. Out of love for those with suicidal thoughts, and care for all their loved ones, it is all of our business to encourage and support life in difficult times. 

Second, suicide prevention concerns us because we all live on the knife’s edge. None of us are strangers to suffering and sorrow. None of us are immune from terrible thoughts. We hang by a thread called “hope.” Hope is true; hope will not disappoint. But hope is a thin lifeline, and easily cut. 

It is possible either to encourage hope and prevent suicide, or to whack away at hope’s thread and promote suicide. We cannot do both. I know what my purpose will be. Will you join me?

Jonathan Lange has a heart for our state and community. Locally, he has raised his family and served as pastor of Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Evanston and St. Paul’s in Kemmerer for two decades. Statewide, he leads the Wyoming Pastors Network in advocating for the traditional church in the public square.