The Montana Suicide Rate Reduction Council.

Founded in Missoula, Montana. August 06, 2021. 

Hate the fate. Reduce the rate.

Karl Rosston
Text book bureaucrat.

If ever there was the wrong man to try and look tough, it's this guy. Truth being what it is, he's nothing but a pencil pushing pie chart desk hugger with super soft hands. His very work defies the traditional idea of what a real man from Montana does for work, and he can wear all the Montana paraphernalia he wants to. That makes no difference, Karl. You are not from here.  

Works frozen in bureaucracy, does whatever he can to make it look like a tough guy but actually works 9-5 an office, pulls in a decent taxpayer funded salary, and remains the polar opposite to what really means to be a real Montanan.

The horror of losing a child to suicide is profound. Montana's official suicide expert refers to the suicide of an adult member somewhere in his family as a credential to his so called knowledge about all that suicide can do. Exploiting that single event as means to act like he knows all about suicide. What the hell does this man know about losing a child to suicide? And yet, the one man most responsible for managing suicide in Montana is allowing our children to die by suicide mare frequently then kids are dying by suicide in any other state. 

A young Montana girl.
Havre, MT. 2019.

• The suicide rate among Montana youth (ages 15-24) increased more than 200% from the 1950’s to the mid 1990’s. The rates dropped in the 1990’s but went up again in the early 2000’s. These numbers are provided by the same state agency that is allowing this and the only agency directly responsible for ensuring that our children are safe, the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. And the one man, Mr Karl Rosston, "What is it you do, precisely?" is a question of remarkable verity. Because he sure isn't preventing suicide in Montana, not among kids nor adults nor specific to any one age group.  

The father of our founder died by suicide when he was 10 years old, the youngest of four kids. Less than 22 months later, our founder's oldest died in an equally tragic way, complications of drug overdose directly associated with his father's suicide. Our founder's mother, thus, was overcome by anguish and traumatized by losing first her husband, and then her son, and this contributed to our founder being emotionally and psychologically abused for the whole of his adolescence, again as a direct result of the suicide of our founder's father. The direct impacts associated with that abuse had immediately harmful results, diminishing our founder's ability to graduate high school, and this too began with the suicide death of our founder's death. In more recent years, our founder was diagnosed with major depression disorder, including suicidal ideation and several attempts, and extensive hospitalization at the cost of the taxpayers,  all of which was grounded in a suicide that happened over 59 years prior. 

None of this is inaccurate, is public record, in fact. And 100% consistent with what most families have to deal with when they lose a member to suicide. And, therein, this is just what families in Montana are having to deal with, too. The children in Montana face an inevitable fate. Whether it's the suicide death of another child or the suicide death or one our own children. This is the reality at stake, and in this, we are referring to the kids more so than even affected adults. Children, for god's sake. 

For all intensive purposes, Montana’s place in the contemporary fabric of American society and culture today is best described by American Indians past and present, colonization and environmental degradation yesterday and still today, half baked hollow ass themes of cowboy tradition that are founded in racist ideologies and a contemporary overlay of rabid gentrification and the privileges therein that are increasingly limited to a lesser few. And feeding right into it are people who come from places so not Montana that they reek of it, elected officials and other power mongers including lawyers and judges, kids with just enough spare cash to somehow miss the fact that the banking industry is an evil in and of itself, real estate and land ownership greediness in attendance to conservationists who make private property safe haven for an equally select few other species, the whole commercial space angle on life in the trenches, and it is all of it sure the fuck nothing new in the evolution of western America for the last 400 give or take a few years.

I am passionate, in the adjective; as in pissed the hell off, furious, all shook up, gravely disturbed, mean, peppery, frantic, steamed, irritable, tempestuous, and outright vehement for one simple reason: Montana citizens are dying by suicide at an unabated and ever increasing rate, the highest rate in the nation more years than not for at least a long as public health statistics have been compiled in the interest of the greater publics health and wellbeing. Thus, I am passionate, again in the adjective; DPHHS so passive, as in lifeless, apathetic, indifferent, motionless, inert, without form, never changing. 

Bureaucratic dysfunction is a primary known cause of many health care crises. While, if any one thing more defies all notions of rugged individually in Montana it is bureaucratic dysfunction, while bureaucracy in general is the polar opposite to independence, freedom and all other like features to what life in Montana was once known for.

           Kyrie Stephens. July, 2021. Missoula, MT.  

Children, that is, die by suicide in Montana more frequently than do kids in any other state in the nation. The love of parents for their children is something highly precious in the lives of people everywhere. Love of any kind is so removed so removed from bureaucratic function that it shocks the conscience. And as with far too many other circumstances, in Montana it’s our children who are suffering the most from bureaucratic dysfunction in our public health care system. To the extent that the ones at fault in this matter or sick, the idea of sociopathic behavior is simply not our task to determine. Rather, that is, what we are looking at is point specific, very much that and leaving little room for error. The problem is clear and the ones behind it are pretty fucking obvious.  

As to kids, then. ”It’s so frustrating as a medical provider because we obviously pride ourselves on taking amazing care of our kids and saving and fixing loves, but these injuries are preventable. There’s nothing that compares with have to tell a parent that their child passed away from a completely preventable thing.” 

    Dr. Lindsay Clukies. St. Louis, MO, Emergency room doctor. October 04, 2021.

This is what we’re talking about in Montana, kids dying from something completely preventable. Children, for the love of God, and while the above statement has to do with kids in St. Louis matters not one bit. The graphic nature of what’s killing kids in St. Louis is certainly not anything less graphic than a suicide rate that is killing our children at a rate higher than kids anywhere in the nation are dying by suicide. And at its root is a violation of human rights. Access to health care, that is, is a fundamental human right, and that most definitely carries to our kids. 

The suicide crisis in Montana blew well beyond suicide prevention measures many, many years ago. You cannot prevent something already broken from breaking, that is, and this is first grade level common sense. While in grown up terms, talking about suicide prevention in Montana is like talking about poverty prevention in Haiti. Or perhaps easier for the idiots who run Montana’s suicide prevention program and IQs right in the middle, you wouldn’t want- much less ever pay- Smokey the Bear to run around the edges of full on wildfire and passing out pamphlets about fire prevention. 

We have selfish ass adults overseeing the operation of our public health care system are dismal in every way, they sit in their Helena offices and ignore the suffering of Montana citizens as a whole, but very particularly as applies to the suicide crisis.

Havre, MT, is a suicide hot spot and has been for many, many decades. To think that this child (photo above) is being forced to live in the most dangerous state in the nation if suicide is the issue most at stake. 

The first Montana citizen to provide her testimony is named Miriam R,, from Havre, a grandmother who lost two sons to suicide some 30 years ago, first the older one upon retiring from military service, and then the next youngest son one year later. Miriam told us how it felt to be left out in the wind after losing these kids, that law enforcement was the primary reporting agency, and that no person from MT DHPPS has ever talked to her or her other loved ones. 

This is what we are seeing in Montana. People in Montana are living real lives and have bureaucrats entrusted to oversee our safety. 

Our Founder.