By Susan Greene, Colorado News Collaborative Summit County is hurting. The suicide rate in this mountain community of 31,000 is higher than Colorado’s, which is one of the highest in the nation. And locals say almost everyone here has known someone — or several someones — who ended their life: A beer brewer. A prominent businesswoman. […]
On Edge
Posted inHealth, News
Colorado has half a billion dollars to fix its mental health system. But it won’t work without workers.
In the spring of 2020, the community mental health center that serves Jefferson, Gilpin and Clear Creek counties had a completely manageable number of job openings — 11 therapists, counselors and other clinicians. But as the coronavirus pandemic gripped Colorado, the vacancies started to climb, first into the teens and then the 30s and then […]
Posted inColoradans, Education, Health, News
On Edge: After wanting to die, an Aurora teen is now learning to live
Navee Essien has grown up keenly aware of her gifts. More times than she can count, people have reminded the senior at Aurora’s Rangeview High how fortunate she is to have a close family and strong support system, academic and athletic talent, ease making friends, and the kind of smarts, beauty and confidence that make […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Health
On Edge: For Tylan Jones, anxiety is also a battle between optimism and pessimism
Tylan Jones is not naive. He is a 20-year-old Black man living in the United States. This reality does not easily accommodate naivete. When he was in middle school, he says, he and some Black friends got off the bus in their east Denver neighborhood and an “old white lady” came out of her house […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Health, Politics and Government
On Edge: In the wake of furloughs, closings, suicides, a Breckenridge businessman searches for balance
Dick Carleton came to Breckenridge from Virginia when he was 24. He had a business degree from Virginia Tech, a ‘69 Volkwagen bug, $100 and three friends willing to share a crappy two-bedroom condo with no insulation. It was awful. It was glorious. He was “full of rebel spirit” in a town of kindreds and […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Health
On Edge: With family missing in Ethiopia’s civil war, Denver woman says her “mind is the hardest place to be”
Millete Birhanemaskel, a refugee, long-time Denver resident and businesswoman, grappled with 2020 as many others have: She tried to protect her family, her employees, her tenants from COVID’s reach. She worried about the presidential election. And she managed to keep her coffee shop, the Whittier Cafe, from going under. She knew already what it was […]
Posted inHealth
On Edge: Colorado’s behavioral health chief opens up about his own severe depression
Some words fail us, and for Robert Werthwein, “depression” is one of them. The 41-year-old director of Colorado’s Behavioral Health Office prefers to say “everything turned to complete shit” when his identical twin, Ryan, died of a brain tumor a week before their 15th birthdays, and that his life pretty much sucked for the decade […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Health
On Edge: First, COVID took this Colorado man’s friends, then it took his health
Eddie Kemm found the pool table early in the pandemic. It was the second one he had scouted after the governor’s order shut down the bars — including Kemm’s favorite pool hall — in late March. When the halls went dark, so, too, did a significant part of the social life of an 81-year-old man […]