This month’s Do 1 Thing asks you to be informed. Getting correct information during an emergency is the key to taking safe action. Someone in your household may not be able to receive, understand, or act on emergency information. Think about what special needs your household may have. Take action now to make sure everyone in your family will be safe in an emergency.

Things to consider:

• Emergency news or weather broadcasts may not be closed captioned.

• Information that is shown on screen may not be spoken aloud.

• Automated voices and voices over loud speakers may be hard to understand.

• Information comes quickly and the stress of a disaster may make it hard to understand or remember instructions.

• Words moving across the bottom of a television screen may move very quickly.

• The screen color or color of the text might make some information on television hard to read

September is Suicide Prevention Month. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I recently attended Mental Health First Aid for Youth and Adult. These two classes were very insightful on mental health issues, specifically suicide. Suicide falls under the classification of depression. The main crises associated with depression are suicidal thoughts and behaviors and non-suicidal self-injury. Suicide is the 11th most common cause of death. In 2005, suicide took the lives of 32,637 people. I have recently read that Army soldier suicides dropped from 325 in 2012 to 313 in 2013. It is the second leading cause of death among 25 to 34 year olds and the third leading cause of death among 15 to 24 year olds.

Having depression increases the risk of suicide. Of the people who complete suicide, 43 percent had a mood disorder. A person may live with a mood disorder for ten years without being diagnosed. This means that there could be a possibility that someone could be saved within that ten year period. On the other side, someone may have taken their life and didn’t need to. A person may feel so overwhelmed and helpless about life events that the future appears hopeless.

However, not every person who is depressed is at risk for suicide, nor is everyone who is at risk for suicide necessarily depressed. Encourage people to talk about their feelings, symptoms, and what is going on in their mind. Be alert for any of the warning signs of suicide.

Next week I will continue this line of discussion about the warning signs and how to talk to someone you know with these thoughts. You don’t need to be a certified counselor to ask certain questions to help someone.

 

Trooper Rob Herbstreith is a trooper with the Michigan State Police in Niles. Any questions of comments, contact me at TrooperRob53@yahoo.com or (269) 683-4411.