For more information, go to: http://www.facebook.com/IdahoSuicidePrevention

Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline
Thanks to widespread collaboration through the Treasure Valley and beyond, Idaho has secured its own Suicide Prevention Hotline. It will be operational this fall.

Bringing the Hotline to Idaho
The 2011 Community Assessment, spearheaded by United Way of Treasure Valley, shined a bright light on some startling data.

Idaho’s suicide rate is fourth highest in the U.S..
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults in Idaho.
After reviewing these statistics, we realized collaborative action was imperative. We joined existing efforts by The Speedy Foundation and the Idaho Council on Suicide Prevention, then we engaged and mobilized many other nonprofits and businesses throughout the state. We aligned available resources, including funding and manpower.

Local groups committed more than $200,000 during the past year ― enough to start up and sustain the Hotline for two years. Mountain States Group leads structural oversight of the program.

Did you know … ?
The Hotline was just one goal from The Idaho Council on Suicide Prevention’s “Action Guide.”
More Idaho suicide statistics are available online from the Suicide Prevention Action Network of Idaho

Every journey begins with that first step! As NAMIWalks celebrates our 10th Anniversary in 2012, we are proud to support the largest and most successful mental illness awareness event in America! Through NAMIWalks’ public, active display of support for people affected by mental illness, we are changing our American communities and ensuring that help and hope are available for those in need.

Team Speedy is a huge supporter of NAMI and will once again have a presence at NAMIWalk in Salt Lake City and in Idaho.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Click below for more details:

NAMIWalk Utah: Liberty Park

NAMIWalk Boise: Parkcenter Park

Depression. Alcoholism. Despair. A surprising number of former Olympians find grim fates waiting after the Games go dark. Tony Dokoupil on how new research explains athletes’ post-Games psychological meltdowns.

“He’s pretty athletic,” I said, watching my 3-year-old son crisscross a playground recently. My wife agreed. “But who cares if he’s sporty?” she wondered. “What’s it good for?”

French Olympians high-jumper Melanie Skotnik, left, and Marlene Harnois who won a bronze medal in the Taekwondo women’s -57kg category, push luggage as they leave the athlete’s village to board a train after the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Monday, Aug. 13, 2012. (Matt Dunham / AP Photo)

That’s precisely the concern likely to bridle the minds of returning Olympians, now that the torch of the 2012 Games has expired, ending the world’s greatest ego-dream: 16-days of rapturous crowd-waving, flag-draping fluid loss.

After the buzz of Sunday’s send-off party, and the liquid lobotomy that is night life in London, Monday was a time for dry-swallowing hangover cures and packing up the Olympic village.

That makes today, Tuesday, the true start of the post-Olympic period: the athletes’ first morning in Smallville, with the time to think about their next acts. A select few (Usain Bolt, Lebron James) can expect lucrative endorsement deals and no end to the cheering crowds. But if researchers and past performers are right, most of London’s stars, whether they are retiring or just rebooting for Rio, are in for a grueling experience—a battle with the black dog likely to test them even more than their sporting rivals.

“Ordinary life is a lot different than viewing the world from the lofty vantage point of Mount Olympus,” two-time U.S. Olympian Taraje Murray-Williams wrote on his personal blog, after coming home from the judo competition in Beijing. “Nothing feels like it can ‘go back to normal.’” The Bronx native’s life in New York City was “sickeningly mundane” next to the “superhero status” of the games, “the sense of fate, destiny—[of] being part of something so big, [so] universal. You are on stage and the whole world is watching you!”

When the world moves on, Olympians come down with a condition that Murray-Williams and his former coach Rhadi Ferguson dubbed: Post-Olympic Stress Disorder, or POSD. The affliction is a given, Murray-Williams argues. “Interview Michael Phelps in a few and even he’ll have his own story to share.”

That’s a grand prediction but not an unsupported one. The afterlife of Olympic medal-winners bears out the maxim that the higher you fly, the harder you fall. After his 1976 decathlon triumph in Montreal, Bruce Jenner told a reporter that he felt “devastated by the finality of it all,” unmoored, with “no plans, nothing,” And he got off easy.

Tony Dokoupil talks with the New York Observer’s Foster Kamer and the New York Times’ Tanzina Vega about boring Olympians.
The diver Greg Louganis went from the “super-high high” of his first Olympics to an inexplicable “low low” that culminated in a suicide attempt. The Australian Shane Gould, who was also a teenager, won five swimming medals in Munich in 1972 and then suffered through two decades of depression back home. But the U.S. diver Mark Lenzi came down with perhaps the worst case of POSD. After he won gold in Barcelona in 1992, he expected to inherit Louganis’ fame only to belly-flop into a self-described diet of “burgers, burritos, and beers.” Finally, somewhere near bottom, he told a reporter he planned to sell his medal.

Leane Shapton didn’t even make the Olympics—she finished 8th in the breast stroke at the 1988 Canadian trials—and yet, as she recounts in a new memoir, she remains haunted by the sport. “I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors,” she writes. “I step into the water as though absent-mindedly touching a scar.” Even F. Scott Fitzgerald knew something of POSD in the 1920s when, in writing The Great Gatsby, he described a former elite athlete as “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.”

“Ordinary life is a lot different than viewing the world from the lofty vantage point of Mount Olympus,” one athlete wrote.

The further one looks back, the more the POSD case studies pile up. It’s not a diagnosis found in any academic study, but related research is out there, and has been for a long time. A 1982 study of Czech Olympians found that more than 8 in 10 suffered serious substance abuse and emotional problems on the road back to regular life. By comparison American Olympians are positively stoic: only 40 percent suffer serious problems after retiring, according to a 1997 study that looked at 57 athletes across a dozen sports. A string of studies have found that former athletes in general are at greater risk of succumbing to a life of drink, drugs, blue moods, and self-harm than the population at large.

It’s easy to appreciate what’s happening here. Olympic athletes start young, giving everything to their sport, and getting everything they need in return. When that sport is gone, so is the athletes’ world. Sports psychologists describe a “mourning period.” The athletes themselves speak in terms of a void, an absence. “The air has come out of the tires,” the Canadian rower Iain Brambell said in 2008. “Without fear of being politically incorrect,” his countrymen Curt Harnett, a three-time medal-winning cyclist, added, “I would liken it to postpartum depression.”

The latest research suggests that POSD, or whatever one wants to call it, is not just an emotional change. It’s a biological one. Exercise can create a chemical high much like a drug, according to recent work by scientists at Tufts University, and when it’s removed depression and anxiety may crowd the mind.

Whatever the explanation, many countries are beginning to recognize the perils of peak athletic performance—and launching programs to help their athletes rejoin the world of couch potatoes. The British, Australian, and American Olympic committees are providing post-Games counseling to all athletes, in addition to career training—help with résumés, interview skills, applications. Nonprofit organizations and sports therapy centers, some launched by ex-Olympians themselves, provide similar services.

Which is all for the good, of course. But if given the option, I think I’d rather my son skip any chance at Olympic glory. He can end up more like Eric Idle, who, shot from a canon at Sunday’s closing ceremony, landed with his simple solution to the post-Olympic blues: “Always look on the bright side of life.”