A Conversation With ... Jon Mooney

A recent Health Department survey found among respondents, 53% of Greene County men between the ages of 25 and 65 had suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months. Tell me about the campaign the department developed in this area to reach men who are struggling, and what are some of the outcomes that you’ve seen so far?
When we start to look at who dies by suicide, so who is mental health affecting the most when it comes to loss of life, the numbers are pretty staggering. It’s roughly 75% or 3 out of 4 people that die to suicide are male. On that 53% figure, I think it’s important to remember that sometimes the surveys have smaller numbers of responses, so those numbers might be somewhat inflated, but even if you cut that in half, to even think a quarter of people are thinking about taking their own life is concerning. All of that sort of led us to, we need to be more proactive, we need to start trying to shift the conversation around mental health and specifically with men. Too often men keep it inside. We don’t share. We think that we have to be the strong person that doesn’t talk about their feelings, doesn’t talk about what’s going on, and unfortunately, it’s killing us. That’s where the drive for, “Hey man, you good?” came from. The idea is just creating the opportunity for men to have more conversations around mental health, to help normalize the conversations. The number that we can’t see in this is a change in suicide because there’s just a lag in data. It’ll be a few years before we know, are we starting to turn the tide with suicide? But that survey you referenced also showed some things that are encouraging: More men were seeking care, and so it wasn’t just suffering alone. And more men were doing activities to take care of their own mental health.

You touched on this, but why are men more predisposed to suicide?
When we think about why more men are affected by suicide, some that the data shows and just experience that we’ve seen, men are oftentimes more stoic, tend to think that they have to bear the burdens. It feels like it’s a sign of weakness that they talk about struggles in their life, especially when it comes to mental health. So, there’s certainly some stigma and some norms that need to shift, and I think we’re certainly seeing those shifts. But then also suicide attempts by men are more likely to be completed than women, and sometimes it’s the method. Using a firearm is the most likely way that men die. It has a higher percentage of people dying by suicide than other methods. Men also aren’t great about interpreting what’s going on inside their own heads, and so it comes out sometimes as anger. They don’t understand that there might be an underlying cause of mental illness going on.

Springfield has higher rates of suicide among men than the state or even the national average. What about our community might lead to that?
We don’t have anything really conclusive on environmental factors. It is certainly alarming. One thing that encourages me about the community is when we see that we’re not doing well with something, we don’t want to necessarily shy away from it, but we want to tackle it. And I think that’s what you’re seeing with mental health right now. There’s a lot of communities that are still struggling with how do we tackle mental health as a community health issue rather than just a provider/patient issue. We were surprised that as we started to look for other best practices, evidence-based approaches, there weren’t a whole lot out there that we felt really fit. In that essence, I think we’re ahead of the curve and doing a pretty good job of that. And that’s actually part of this project as well is we’ve got a partnership with Burrell, trying to see can we build a model for how communities can work on mental health as a community health issue.

Do you see a public health role as educational? Would public health get into more service offerings?
As far as our Health Department, we don’t have any plans to step into direct service. We’ve got health care providers, we’ve got Burrell, and that’s really their space. Where we do have an opportunity with public health is to be conveners. We’ve seen some of that come to light with “Hey, man, you good?” We have the opportunity to help connect individuals and businesses with other organizations that have great resources. Community Partnership of the Ozarks has Mental Health First Aid training. Burrell has a similar training on suicide prevention. What we’re missing a little bit in the community is helping to connect organizations to some of those opportunities because over the last almost two years as we’ve worked with businesses or other organizations, there’s an interest, but it’s not quite sure what the next step is on how do we help our employees.

Do you have examples of best practices that you’ve seen over the last couple years with workplaces embracing these conversations?
A lot of organizations have employee assistance programs. A lot of times those are underutilized. We’ve seen some organizations do really good jobs with helping to promote those and really normalize that behavior. We’ve seen organizations that have encouraged more of their workforce or had more of their workforce trained in one of those tools. That’s part of what helps make the conversation more accessible and more normalized is when you’ve got tools in your tool belt. You think about first aid, if you came upon somebody that had had a heart attack, would you know what to do? Well, there’s AEDs or there’s chest compressions. But too many times with mental health, people have no idea what to do. It’s just helping to give people some more tools. MentalHealth417.com, that is our landing page. We’re trying to create more of that connection point. As a business leader, as a business organization, how do I sort of join this network of people or organizations that are trying to do more to improve community mental health? What are the resources for me as an individual, but what are the resources for me as an organization? So, we’re working on over the next couple of months on a redesign and trying to launch more of this network idea.