Mental Health

More Alaskans killed themselves in 2015 than in any previous year since at least 1978. Two hundred people died by suicide in the state, 28 more than the previous record set in 2013.

Experts said it’s difficult to determine the causes for the high number of suicides.

Kate Burkhart, the executive director of the Statewide Suicide Prevention Council, said inconsistent access to behavioral health care contributes to the state’s high suicide level.

“We have very high incidences of adverse childhood experiences, interpersonal violence and domestic violence, substance abuse, and depression and other mental-health disorders,” she said. “And so we have that constellation of risk factors present pretty much throughout the state. Access to health care though, is not consistent throughout the state.”

Burkhart said one factor that may have increased the number of suicides in 2015 was two events that gained a high profile. A cluster of suicides in the Southwest Alaska village of Hooper Bay and a suicide at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention may have prompted other deaths.

“Suicides that receive a great deal of coverage in the media, for someone who’s already at risk, it can increase that risk,” she said.

The suicide prevention council worked with AFN on prevention programs at this year’s convention.

The suicide total includes 67 deaths of Alaska Natives. Among Alaska Native men, the age-adjusted rate was 80 suicides per 100,000, more than six times the rate for all American adults.

Barbara Franks is a board member of the Statewide Suicide Prevention Council. Her son Ron died by suicide in 1997 when he was 23. Franks, who is Tlingit, said focusing on ethnicity can detract from understanding the individual causes of suicide.

“I stopped the categorizing when they say a young male from Alaska,” she said. “You get to find that people will become more sensitive of how they’re categorized than to (finding) out why or what happened.”

Franks said the downturn in the state’s economy likely contributed to the high number of suicides last year. It’s too early to say whether the number has dropped this year, since 2016 statistics aren’t compiled until next year.

The Statewide Suicide Prevention Council, schools and other suicide prevention programs receive $1.6 million annually.

Burkhart said it’s difficult to compare the 2015 suicide total to past data. That’s because the stigma surrounding suicide discourages reporting, and that stigma has changed over time.

“As we get better and better at tracking the data, and as people are less reluctant to say, ‘Yes, my loved one died by suicide,’ we are going to see an increase in the numbers,” Burkhart said. “It happens with other things like domestic violence and other issues where stigma has prevented a good picture being painted.”

Public health experts say that if people notice warning signs of suicidal behavior, such as talking about it or ways to do it, they should seek advice on treatment. The volume of calls to the state’s suicide prevention careline have increased more than 60 percent in the last two years.

Gov. Bill Walker’s new budget proposal increases funding for a programs that include suicide prevention.

At about 3:15 p.m. this afternoon, heavily armed police officers blocked off Whittier Street downtown.

Just before 3 p.m., I happened upon a police officer crouched behind the wheel well of a gray SUV blocking an access point to the Driftwood Hotel parking lot downtown.

I asked if everything was under control.

“No. I would definitely go back behind the building for now,” the officer said.

The officer had an assault rifle and was facing the Driftwood lobby about 75 feet away.

The Juneau Police Department tweeted that officers were at the Driftwood Hotel “for a suicidal male with a firearm. Stay out of the area until everything is safely resolved.”

JPD Officers are at the Driftwood Hotel for a suicidal male with a firearm.  Stay out of the area until everything is safely resolved.

— Juneau Police Dept. (@JuneauPD) December 17, 2016

At least a half-dozen marked and unmarked police cars were blocking off the entire parking lot, and officers were clearing the area.

Joe Manning is the kitchen manager at the Sandpiper Café, next door to the lodge. The café closes up at 2 p.m. He said he was finishing up his shift and then, “All of a sudden at the end of my day, I was surrounded.”

Later, the police department tweeted that the man was taken into custody.

At 3:35 PM, the male was taken into custody. Thank you for staying out of the area until the situation was resolved.

— Juneau Police Dept. (@JuneauPD) December 17, 2016

In a press release, the police department said negotiators talked with the man, then he was Tasered, taken into custody, and then to Bartlett Regional Hospital.

Shortly before 4 p.m., Whittier was reopened.

Congress set up the Alaska Mental Health Trust in 1956 to make sure the state could provide mental health care programs to its residents far into the future.

But the trust has had a tumultuous history, and now, some state leaders fear it could be in danger once more.

Legislators are considering a special audit of the trust and how the trustees are investing its money.

William Foster stood in Bean’s Cafe late last week sifting through a pile of ceramic ornaments he helped design, then pulled one out of his pocket. It was an image of a raven pressed into clay and painted a deep grey. He carries it with him everywhere, he said, because it reminds him of his late mother.

Foster was participating in the Healing Faces Project, a program focused on art and healing circles for clients of Bean’s that was funded in part by the Alaska Mental Health Trust.

“It calms us down. Relaxes us,” Foster said of the project. “Keeps our mind off a lot of stuff.”

Healing Faces is just one of hundreds of projects made possible by the Trust.

Programs range from job training for young people with disabilities to detox centers to criminal justice reform.

There are tens of thousands of people in Alaska who rely on trust funds.

Now, some of the people involved in creating the public entity think the trust may be at risk.

Alaska statute reads “the mental health trust fund shall be managed by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation.”

Phillip Volland, one of the lawyers who helped create the trust, said that law is really straightforward.

“That’s where you put the money. It’s just, that’s what it says. It says all the money goes there,” Volland said in a phone interview.

But since October 2008, that is not where the money has gone.

For eight years, members of the Board of Trustees have voted to suspend transfers of the principal to the Permanent Fund and instead are investing and managing it themselves. That includes buying $39 million worth of real estate.

Trust Authority corporate financial officer Kevin Buckland said $17 million was spent on an office building in Washington state in 2014. Another $9 million went to property in Texas this past summer. The board also passed a resolution to spend $2 million to try to develop a mine at Icy Cape, near Yakutat in Southeast Alaska.

Volland said that’s exactly what he and other state leaders were trying to prevent.

The Mental Health Trust has a complicated history.

When it was first established in 1956 by Congress, 1 million acres were set aside to be used by the Alaska Legislature to fund a comprehensive mental health care system.

By 1982, most of that land trust was whittled away – given to municipalities and individuals – and little money was being spent on mental health. So a group of people sued the state.

Volland represented one of the plaintiffs.

“The original rulings by the state Superior Court declared that the state had mismanaged and destroyed the Trust and had to go about re-establishing it,” Volland said.

It took more than a decade for the plaintiffs and the state to agree on how to do that.

Volland said the plaintiffs wanted two main things: “Sufficient funds to provide for mental health programs” as well as “all kinds of assurances to make sure that there wouldn’t be another dissipation of the trust in the future.”

In the 1994 settlement, the state re-constituted the original 1 million acres with mostly new land and added $200 million to re-establish the trust.

They installed a board of trustees to oversee it.

The cash principal was invested by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation. The land was managed by the Trust Land Office at the Department of Natural Resources.

Money generated by the investments and the land went into two different pots – some to be used for mental health programs, and the rest to be added to the principal and re-invested by the Permanent Fund.

Volland said splitting the responsibilities and asset management was intentional “to prevent any sort of rogue action by the trustees. It was just, what I would say was a prophylactic measure.”

Greg Jones is the new CEO of the Mental Health Trust Authority and a former executive director of the Trust Land Office. He said the Trust Land Office is “more nimble” than the Permanent Fund and can bring in more money for the Trust.

“We believe that we can add to what the Permanent Fund does and diversify and perhaps add a little more with a carefully managed real estate program,” Jones said.

The way the trust is laid out in state code, revenues from things like mineral sales goes to the principal, but rent money – that all goes toward programs that help people.

“What we’ve done with the real estate program is create an investment that creates income,” Jones said. “That pays millions of dollars in income that goes straight to programs.”

Jones and board chair Russ Webb both said they are legally allowed to use the principal to buy land and invest it as they choose.

However, they would not provide copies of written legal counsel explaining their authority, could not cite specific statutes or regulations and would not allow their attorney to speak on the matter.

Volland is not the only person concerned about the legality of the trust’s investments.

Bruce Botelho was the Attorney General back in 1994 and was sitting on the opposite side of the table from Volland, looking out for the state’s interests.

Botelho said they purposely separated the trust’s money management from their land management during the settlement, in part because the Permanent Fund was already managing money and doing it well.

“And we saw little reason to duplicate that effort,” he said.

Botelho would not comment on how well the trust is managing its assets, and he said that’s the point.

“We saw a check and balance in trying to separate those functions out,” Botelho said. “And to me, that is the underlying concern.”

Botelho, Volland and others want a special legislative audit of the Trust Authority, the Land Office and the board of trustees. They say it’s up to legislature to decide if the board’s actions are legal.

Representative Mike Hawker is requesting an audit, and the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee will make a decision at its December 13 meeting.

If lawmakers act, then auditors will look into everything from the legality of the trust’s financial management, to potential open meetings act violations.

Editor’s note: KTOO’s building sits on land leased from the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority. KTOO has also applied for and received occasional grants for special reporting projects from the authority.

The change in leadership at the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority was made official on Thursday. Many trust advisory boards and beneficiaries expressed concerns about the Board of Trustees’ unexpected October decision to hire retired Trust Land Office Director Greg Jones as the interim CEO.

Former long-time CEO Jeff Jessee officially resigned his position and will take a new post as a program officer.

The governor’s office signed an official memorandum on Tuesday allowing for the change, though Jones may only be hired on an interim basis.

In an email to concerned advisory board members and citizens, Deputy Chief of Staff John F. Hozey III wrote the changes were approved “on the condition that final decisions regarding a permanent CEO require consultation with the supporting boards.”

He also wrote that the governor will consider the concerns when deciding who to appoint to the board in the coming weeks. Trustee Larry Norene’s term expires March 1, 2017. He is eligible for reappointment.

“It is through the appointment process that the Governor can affect the direction of any board,” Hozey wrote. “It is not appropriate for the Governor’s office to micro-manage individual actions that are within the legal responsibility of any board.”

During Thursday’s Trust board meeting, Trustee Jerome Selby asked the board to reconsider the decision.

“I’m gravely concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I think we heard some good input yesterday from a number of folks [during public comment] that maybe we need to step back, slow down a little bit,” he said. “We’re moving too fast. Our house is not in order.”

The seven-member board voted along the same 4-3 split as the original decision to replace Jessee.

Jones, the new CEO, was not present at the meeting because of a previously planned trip.

During an interview, board chair Russ Webb said shifts in leadership are normal and often make people feel anxious and uncertain, but things will quickly smooth over. He said they listened to the community’s comments with interest.

“I think unfortunately there’s much of the issues related to this are not a matter that can be made of public record,” Webb said.

Other board members, during and after the October 26 meeting, said they thought the decision-making process to change the CEO indicated potential violations of the Open Meetings Act.

Webb said those allegations “are neither true nor correct.”

“I won’t further address allegations made by anyone,” he said. “I think it’s frankly beneath me to do so.”

The Board of Trustees has authorized up to $35,000 to be spent on a facilitated training session on the Ethics Act and the Open Meetings Act, and a discussion of the reorganization of the Trust Authority. It will be led by the Trust’s independent counsel, Nelson Page, through a separate contract.

Juneau is getting a new kind of apartment building. The Housing First Project in Lemon Creek is built to provide safe, affordable housing to the city’s most vulnerable homeless individuals.

The outside of the building looks mostly finished, but inside the apartments are still bare plywood and studs. Each of the 32 efficiency apartments is small – about as big as a row of three parking spaces. Each one will have its own private bathroom and a small kitchen area.

Workers broke ground for the facility in May, but the concept has been in progress for over four years.  Almost a dozen organizations and agencies have been involved. The Glory Hole, Juneau’s downtown homeless shelter, is managing the project. Mariya Lovishchuk is the executive director of the Glory Hole.

“I am just so excited to be standing in this building right now and, like, actually have a floor and walls and windows and not just, like, an idea in my head,” said Lovishchuk. “That’s really, really awesome. And also I can’t wait — like, I can’t wait to see people in here.”

Lovishchuk said the future residents will be the most at-risk chronically homeless individuals in Juneau, as measured by a vulnerability survey. Lovishchuk said this building will be a place for people to live who have had trouble with other housing programs.

“They end up getting evicted because there are rules about drinking,” she said, “And people are not able to follow those rules and so they get evicted because of that, or people have to participate in treatment and people fail out of that housing because treatment has not worked for them even though they’ve tried, like many of our clients have been to treatment programs, you know 20 times in their lives with no success.”

The Housing First approach does not require treatment or sobriety as a condition of housing. Services and treatment for residents will be available in the building, and will include medical exam rooms and a space for mental health counseling.

Supporters of housing first say that having a stable place to live makes it easier to address the underlying causes of homelessness.

The transition to housing can be rocky for people who have been homeless for a long time. The Housing First facility in Anchorage, Karluk Manor, has found it challenging to track down people on the waiting list and help them adjust to the housing facility. They have placed restrictions on visitors and certain types of alcohol.

The Juneau Housing First Project still needs about a million dollars, which it plans to raise with capital grants and local support through the Juneau Community Foundation.

Lovishchuk expects that facility will be completed in May and the first residents will be able to move in by early summer.

A police officer’s affidavit identifies the man accused of dangerously driving across Juneau on Saturday and swerving at police officers as the same man involved in a machete incident last week.

The affidavit was submitted during grand jury proceedings on Wednesday.

Officer Lee Phelps writes that Cecil Trent Yeisley’s mother had brought her 23-year-old son to Bartlett Regional Hospital for a mental health evaluation.

The mother also told Phelps that Yeisley was the one who “tossed” a machete at officers during an earlier domestic disturbance.

Yeisley was indicted by the grand jury on four felony charges of third-degree assault and one felony charge of second-degree assault. He was also charged for failing to stop for a peace officer.

Police say Yeisley was the man behind the wheel of a 2010 Dodge sport utility vehicle involved in a high-speed pursuit Saturday that began on Hospital Drive.

According to a JPD news release, he had been fighting with his mother who was trying to get him to accept medical help.

According to Phelps’ affidavit, the incident started Saturday before noon with a struggle between a man and a woman over control of a vehicle near Bartlett House. The man was identified as Yeisley and the woman was identified as his mother.

A witness reported the vehicle driving down Hospital Drive with a screaming woman hanging off of it. It’s unclear from Phelps’ affidavit whether the woman was inside the vehicle or on the exterior.

She fought for control of the vehicle by trying to shift it into park or engaging the parking brake, according to the affidavit. Both the man and woman got out and physically fought, then the vehicle continued down Hospital Drive and on the sidewalk with the woman hanging on.

The woman was eventually thrown from the car at slow speed, and then the male driver went in reverse at high speed back toward the hospital, according to the affidavit.

The witness helped the woman out of the road and took her behind a light pole so she wouldn’t get run over. Then the male driver went forward again at high speed and the witness believed the driver was trying to run them down, according to the affidavit.

Other officers told Phelps about their encounters with Yeisley’s vehicle.

Sgt. Jeremy Weske reported his patrol cruiser was rear-ended at the McNugget intersection before he followed Yeisley inbound on Egan Drive.

Officer Alexander Smith reported heading outbound on Egan Drive when Yeisley crossed the median at 60 to 70 mph in an alleged attempt to hit him. Smith reported taking evasive action to avoid being rammed.

Phelps writes that Yeisley then nearly hit several vehicles when he drove against traffic inbound on Egan Drive.

Police say Yeisley also nearly injured an officer attempting to deploy “stop sticks,” a device that deflates tires when someone drives over them. Phelps setup the sticks near Egan and Channel drives. He was in the median on foot when Yeisley’s vehicle swerved at him.

Phelps writes he “heard the engine rev to redline” and that he had to run out of the way to avoid being struck. The encounter appears to have been captured in video shared by Facebook user Richard Koddi Moe.

Police say Yeisley returned to the Hospital Drive area and fled on foot inside SEARHC’s Ethel Lund Medical Center. He surrendered at Taser-point.

The five assault charges filed against Yeisley are related to placing three officers and two witnesses in fear of imminent, serious injury during the vehicle pursuit.

The two witnesses include the man who helped Yeisley’s mother to safety near the hospital and a fire department official who allegedly was nearly struck by Yeisley while driving a Capital City Fire/Rescue vehicle on Fritz Cove Road.

In another incident two days before Yeisley’s arrest, police responded to a domestic disturbance reported in the 2200 block of Muir Street.

A Juneau police department news release said the caller had locked his stepson, now confirmed as Yeisley, out of the home. Yeisley was having a fight with his mother in the area of Radcliffe Road and Berners Avenue, according to the release.

Wielding a machete, he left the area but neighbors later reported he was threatening to damage property in the 9300 block of Glacier Highway, including two cars parked at a business.

According to the release, when police confronted him, the man ran and at one point “tossed” the machete toward police officers.

An officer shot Yeisley with a Taser and he was taken into custody.

Yeisley was checked into Bartlett for minor injuries and placed in protective custody for treatment of a mental health emergency. Police were seeking charges for assault and criminal mischief.