Mental Health and Substance Misuse

     Alcoholism. Drugs. Depression. Suicide. The days of thinking that these are issues our urban cousins deal with and we are exempt from are over. Research shows that mental health issues often lead to substance misuse and that as many as 85% of the people in our jails and prisons have some kind of mental or behavioral problems. The judicial system is not the place for them to get the help that they need! Alcohol and drug abuse and misuse are major problems in rural communities. Depression, though often undiagnosed, affects many individuals and families that we all live with or work with every day. Farmers in America are committing suicide at alarming rates (five times the rate of the rest of the nation), and farmers in the west have the highest rate of all. What can we do? One of the problems is that there are not enough professionals in this field to address the need that is out there, and it’s even worse in rural Colorado. We need to find a way to incentivize more people to go into this field, and especially to incentivize them to bring their expertise to rural Colorado.