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Baxter Health will host a free public talk on suicide next month at the Vada Sheid Community Development Center, bringing a national speaker to a county that has fought the problem harder than most.
The event, “It’s a Tough Subject: A Conversation About Suicide,” runs from 6 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12, at 1600 S. College St. on the ASU-Mountain Home campus. It is open to the public, and no registration is required.
The speaker is Dennis Gillan, founder and executive director of the Half a Sorrow Foundation. Gillan lost two brothers to suicide 11 years apart and stayed silent about it for years before deciding to speak publicly. He now travels the country talking about mental health.
His presentation covers how to recognize when someone is in distress, how to start a conversation about it, and how communities can chip away at the stigma that keeps people from asking for help. Suicide ranks as the 11th leading cause of death nationally, according to figures the hospital cited. Gillan’s stated goal is to leave people with the confidence to say something.
“This is exactly the kind of conversation our community needs to be having,” said Jamie Leach, a licensed clinical social worker who serves as behavioral health and community relations specialist at Baxter Health. “Mental health is something that touches every family, and we want people to feel equipped to support the people they love.”
The talk arrives in a place where those numbers have never been abstract. A Baxter Health community needs assessment put the county’s suicide death rate at 29.8 per 100,000 residents, far above the Arkansas rate of 18.8 and the national rate of 13.8.
Baxter County has also become a case study in what steady local work can do. In February, Dan Hall, commander of Disabled American Veterans Twin Lakes Chapter 30, told the Baxter County Quorum Court that the county recorded zero veteran suicides in 2025, a first in local memory.
“What we’ve done is change the way we think about suicide,” Hall told justices of the peace. “We think of it as a public health issue, not an individual problem.”
When the DAV chapter started its prevention work about a decade ago, the county was losing roughly a dozen residents a year, about half of them veterans. One year it recorded 27. Baxter County carried the highest suicide rate in Arkansas, in a state that ranked eighth nationally.
Two years into the community-wide effort, the overall rate had dropped 35%. By the third year, veteran deaths were down 75%. Last year the veteran number reached zero.
Hall credits a network of about 30 partners that meets quarterly and has folded prevention into everyday work. That includes the sheriff’s office, which runs daily wellness checks aimed at people who have become isolated, and the Care Center at Redeemer Church, which coordinates outreach through 29 member churches.
The late Baxter County Coroner Brad Hays supplied much of the data behind the effort, training his staff to separate veteran and non-veteran deaths. It made Baxter County the only county in Arkansas tracking that at the local level. Coroner Sam Elmore has continued the practice.
The gains are real, and they are also incomplete. The county still recorded 11 suicides among non-veterans in 2025.
“For every suicide, there’s 134 people that are impacted,” Hall said. “We’re just getting started.”
The gap that worries people most is the one involving young people. In June 2025, registered nurse Corrine Hiser told the Mountain Home Public School Board that Baxter County has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the state, and that suicide is the second leading cause of death for Arkansans ages 10 to 34.
“I never want to stand in front of a casket of an 18-year-old ever again,” Hiser said, describing the death of a local student weeks before graduation.
Summer Sasser told the same board about losing her fiance, the father of her two oldest children, in 2018. She built the Run for Tomorrow 5K out of that loss, raising money to bring the Project Renew prevention program into local schools.
“I wish I would have known what to say,” Sasser told board members.
That is close to the reason Baxter Health says it booked Gillan. Board member Scott Booth made a version of the same point at that 2025 meeting, arguing that asking someone directly whether they are thinking of hurting themselves can change the direction of a conversation.
“By even talking to somebody, asking them, you kind of remove that avenue,” Booth said.
Gillan’s presentation runs about an hour, with time for questions afterward. For more information, contact Leach at (870) 508-6465 or [email protected]. Details on the Half a Sorrow Foundation are available at halfasorrow.org.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock by call or text. Veterans can reach the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.
