LA PLATA COUNTY – The river gallops past ghost towns and plunges through canyons of quiet before tumbling into the old mining town of Durango. Legend has it that the Spanish christened these waters more than 300 years ago to honor a small band of conquistadors who died on its banks without receiving the sacrament of last rites. They called it El Rio de las Animas Perdidas.
The River of Lost Souls.
Today, some 53,000 people live in Durango and the surrounding county of La Plata. And all along the Animas, people are still dying before their time, particularly women in midlife, succumbing not to diabetes or heart disease, but to suicide.
Two-and-a-half times as many people die by suicide as homicide in this country; among whites in 2014, it was nearly nine times as many, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although more men than women take their own lives, the rate of suicide has nearly doubled among middle-aged white women since 1999 – rising from 7 per 100,000 to 12.6 in 2014 – helping to explain a startling increase in their early mortality.
The numbers are even worse for middle-aged white women with a high school diploma or less. For them, the suicide rate has more than doubled over the past 15 years, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal health data. Most of the victims lived in small towns and rural areas, particularly in the Southeast and in mountain states, where social isolation can be acute.
Colorado has the fourth-highest suicide rate in the nation for white women ages 45 to 54. Among Colorado counties with a population of at least 30,000, La Plata has the highest.
Since 2007, 14 middle-aged white women have killed themselves here. The Post looked at half of those cases and found striking commonalities: Most worked physically demanding jobs. Most suffered from chronic pain. And most struggled with mental-health issues that, surviving friends and relatives say, were addressed through psychiatric medications that were ultimately ineffective.
The number of prescriptions written by non-psychiatrists also has risen. As many as 80 percent of all antidepressant prescriptions are written by physicians who are not psychiatrists, multiple studies have found, and doctors often give the drugs to people who have received no psychiatric diagnosis.
Women are far more likely than men to receive these prescriptions: In the United States today, nearly 1 in 4 white women ages 50 to 64 is taking an antidepressant, according to federal health officials.
“There’s all kinds of reasons to be depressed, and doctors are not attending to them anymore,” said Joel Paris, a professor of psychiatry at Canada’s McGill University.
H H H The western slope of the Rockies has always seen higher-than-average suicide rates, people venturing westward in search of excitement or escape and finding neither. For Pamela Beckert, Colorado was just another place to start over.
Born in Ohio, Beckert grew up in Arizona. She was married twice but largely raised her son on her own. After Beckert’s father died in the 1990s, and with her son grown, she became a nomad, moving first to Fort Worth, then to Durango. Nothing felt permanent, including her jobs. She had trouble paying rent, and sometimes her moods vacillated wildly. Through Medicaid, she received psychiatric medication from a Durango health clinic: Wellbutrin to raise her spirits; Lamictal to even out the mood swings; Klonopin for anxiety; Seroquel, an antipsychotic, to sleep.
No longer able to afford her apartment, Beckert bunked with a friend and worried about where she would go next. When she asked a caseworker at the clinic about temporary housing, the young woman suggested Beckert live out of her Jeep at the back of the vast Walmart parking lot. Surely no one would notice her there.
H H H Wendy Faye Miller passed that Walmart on U.S. Highway 550 nearly every day for decades. Most often, she was driving home from her bartending job at the Purgatory Mountain ski area, the road weaving around the Animas, where the outdoorswoman loved to raft and fish.
Miller couldn’t wait to move to Durango. She left Waterford, Michigan, at 17, missing her high school graduation to follow the man who would become her first husband. That was 42 years ago.
In addition to tending bar, Miller shoveled snow in the winter and sprayed mosquitoes for the county in the summer. Nearly all her life she also cleaned homes and businesses, including the office where her daughter, Autumn Concepcion, now works. It wasn’t easy: Miller had had two back surgeries for injuries suffered while breaking up a bar fight and falling down the stairs carrying a keg of beer.
Miller’s daughter suggested she see a mental-health counselor in Durango. In La Plata County, only one mental-health clinic accepted Medicaid. Miller, unfortunately, qualified for Medicaid only part of the year, when she wasn’t earning wages above the federal poverty limit. Otherwise, she would have to pay on a sliding scale, and the scale didn’t slide quite enough. Miller visited just once.
H H H Pamela Beckert, 54, died Sunday, Jan. 15, 2013, after telling a friend, with whom she was living, that she might be late.
“It’s going to get really, really cold. Don’t wait up for me,” Beckert told her. “I know my way home.”
A week later, friends found her body, clad in a white winter jacket and jeans, a pair of mittens and clogs beside her. Beckert had bought a light blanket at Walmart and a cup of tea at Starbucks, downed dozens of pills from six different bottles of psychiatric medication, then lay down in the back of her Jeep Wrangler – at the far end of the Walmart parking lot.
Wendy Miller, 59, died on Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. It snowed hard all day in La Plata County, and Miller fell while leaving a house she had cleaned that afternoon. She was scheduled that evening to clean her daughter’s workplace, but Concepcion called to tell her they’d closed early. Miller asked her daughter to let her know when she got home safely, and at about 6 p.m. she did. Her mother texted back: “good, thank you, xoxo.”
Miller was probably already home by then, after stopping to buy a fifth of McCormick vodka, which she nearly finished that night. About 9 p.m., she was on Facebook, making plans for her 60th birthday party in January. At one point she smoked a little pot, which usually helped her sleep. Then, sometime after 9:30 p.m., Wendy Miller crawled into bed, put a .38 special in her mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Dan Keating and Alice Crites reported from Washington.