Paducah Sun, Dec. 1, 2017
Speaker urges teen focus on awareness of suicides
By DAVID B. SNOW
When Drew Bergman asked students at a packed Graves County Middle School assembly on Thursday how many of them knew someone who had attempted or died from suicide, half of them raised their hands.
That stark reality demonstrates how prevalent suicide is in Graves and several area counties.
According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, based on information gathered from 1999 to 2014, Graves ranked 25th among Kentucky's 120 counites with a suicide rate of 17.88 per 100,000 people. Carlisle led the state with 28.46, Hickman ranked fifth at 23.4, Marshall was sixth at 23.28, Ballard was 13th at 20.26, Fulton was 14th at 20, McCracken was 15th at 19.61 and Calloway was 81st at 13.94. Livingston County is 56th at 15.23 suicides per 100,000 people.
Kentucky Health News reported in November that 1 in 12 of Kentucky's high school sophomores said they had attempted suicide within the previous year. It also reported that teen suicides went from 19 in 2014 to 44 in 2016, more than doubling in a two-year period.
With seven of the eight Purchase counties among the state's top 25 in suicide rate, Lourdes hospital called on Minding Your Mind, an organization promoting mental health education, to send a speaker to the area last year. Bergman, a native of Philadelphia, came to McCracken and Marshall schools last year, and was invited back Thursday to speak to Graves County and Mayfield high and middle schools.
Bergman told GCMS students about his own background. Coming from a good family, he and his two siblings were very good students, but underneath what he called the "country club" facade were things kept out of the public eye.
Bergman said his seemingly successful father was an alcoholic and his parents slept apart for most of his youth because of that. He said his father's addiction was hidden from the children until his father got in a drunken driving wreck when Bergman was in the seventh grade.
That was when his parents divorced, and Bergman said "this perfect childhood that I grew up living came crashing down."
"And this is when my entire family began to deal with their own mental health issues for the first time," he said. "My sister ... turned to anorexia and bulimia. ... And my brother, he turned to drugs and alcohol as a way of coping with his depression. And for the first time, I began to exhibit some symptoms of depression."
Bergman talked about negative coping mechanisms and suicide warning signs, including self-harm, alcohol, and withdrawing from friends and activities. He said he started cutting himself as something he could control in a world where everything else seemed out of control.
Bergman attempted suicide for the first time when he was 12 during that turbulent seventh-grade year and again on New Year's Day when he was 16.
He encouraged the students to talk about how they feel with parents, teachers or trusted adults. He said that people need to talk about mental health issues to help remove the stigma associated with them and to help those going through them.
Bergman also encouraged the students who knew someone going through problems to tell an adult, saying he would rather lose that friendship than lose that friend to suicide.
He talked about treatments for mental illness and how he is able to treat his own depression through medication and positive coping mechanisms, like listening to music, getting outside, relaxation, and preparing for things like tests or events to remove stress and maintain some control.
When he was a senior, Bergman told the students at his high school about his depression.
"The day that I started to talk about what I had gone through is the day that I began to feel better," he said.
He encouraged the students not to let the topic end with the assembly, to talk about mental illness with their peers, their parents and their teachers.