The view from the frontlines of Nevada’s youth suicide crisis, where resources are scarce and families bereft

I was about four hours away from home in a rural Nevada community in Elko County when a mother told me about her son, who died by suicide.

Her son, a high school junior, walked into his parents’ room, took a gun from the closet and shot himself in the head. 

The mom said there were no services to help her family clean up after the death, and no one could explain why there were high rates of suicide in central and northeastern Nevada, as well as other rural counties in the state, especially among youth. 

I thought about the mother and her son, wondering what policymakers and health professionals were failing to understand about rural communities’ mental health needs, especially among youth. I wanted to spend more time with the family, interview people living in the area and better explain the situation to people unfamiliar with the region.

The mother’s experience stuck with me when I applied to the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 National Fellowship.

Rural communities challenge reporters. They’re remote, tight-knit and costly to travel to. It's hard to build trusting relationships when you're an unfamiliar face. 

Growing up in rural Oregon, I witnessed the adverse effects of dwindling news coverage of rural areas by flagship news organizations, ranging from difficulties in communicating needs to a lack of understanding among policymakers. And the problems facing rural communities are often present in urban ones.

The fellowship provided me with funding to travel to Elko County, nearly 300 miles away from my home in Reno. I was able to speak with grieving families directly, hear from high students their perspectives on mental health, learn from experts who are working in the mental health care profession, and explore the intricacies of mental health needs in rural Nevada — a state that has ranked last in the nation for children’s behavioral health outcomes for the past seven years.

The funding also helped cover photography costs, allowing The Nevada Independent to visually document the piece, placing the people affected by the mental health crisis directly in front of readers and lending faces to a crisis that can feel distant if you’re not directly affected by it. 

Spending a week in Elko County wasn’t just beneficial for the story. It demonstrated our commitment to the community — our publication is statewide and strives to reach readers across Nevada, but we don’t have a reporter based full-time in this part of the state — and allowed us to develop sources organically. 

We spoke with grieving families, school resource officers and youth about mental health.

Their voices shaped this series. Their grief lent it gravity. And their resilience reminded me why journalism — when done with care, humility and respect — matters. They spoke to the barriers to care and what people outside their communities were failing to understand. Parents referred us to other community members, vouching for our work. 

We spoke to high school students who said they never had a media organization visit their school. They said having a photographer as part of the interviews meant people cared about their perspectives. They opened up about their challenges and the misconceptions adults have about their generation.

Along with the difficult conversations, we went to a local football game and county fair to meet people outside a formal setting and to get a fuller sense of the community.

In the articles, I layered the interviews and conversations I had with data to underscore the stories people shared with me and lend a perspective that the individuals were part of a broader narrative.

The four-part series showed that distance and workforce shortages complicate mental health access. Unstable funding sources and isolated efforts have made meeting young people’s mental and behavioral health needs challenging, leading to a fragmented mental and behavioral system that experts say is often difficult to navigate. 

Before the fellowship began, I covered a U.S. Department of Justice finding that Nevada was likely violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act because its network of supportive services — therapy, crisis support, and behavioral support programs — was so inadequate that children with behavioral health issues were often being institutionalized in facilities away from their families.

During my reporting, the state reached an agreement with the DOJ to comply with the law. The agreement primarily addressed youth receiving Medicaid, but the state is approaching the requirements as a wider effort to reform Nevada’s overall behavioral health care system for youth.

We detailed that commitment to overhaul the system and the work that lies ahead in the project’s final story through conversations with experts and officials, the work of a licensed clinical social worker in Elko and two college students pursuing master’s degrees in counseling. That helped me more fully understand a situation that can be difficult to capture because it affects youth and is subject to privacy restrictions.

In numerous emails from sources, people I interviewed, experts and other community members, I was told that laying out the bureaucratic problems in a digestible format allowed for people unfamiliar with mental health challenges to engage with a tricky subject matter on a more personal level. 

Following our reporting, lawmakers are considering creating an Office of Mental Health and improving care coordination for youth by restructuring state agencies. The series made room for dialogue about the need for proactive suicide prevention efforts and open conversations about mental health. It also spawned other reporting on the devastating effect that federal cuts could have on Nevada’s mental health system and increased attention on a vital issue.

What I think about the most, though, are the families who took the time to share about children who died. 

A key part of my reporting process was making sure that the parents I spoke with felt comfortable sharing details about the death of their children. I made them aware that the articles would be available on the internet. I didn’t want anyone to be caught off guard.

Before the formal interviews, I had conversations about the story, worked to build trust and checked in with families afterward. 

During a text message with a parent about some final details for one of the stories, he shared photos of his son who died. He discussed how his son’s death prioritized for him the need for more mental health awareness.

The conversations were emotional and often difficult to hear. But parents wanted to share stories about who their children were and the unimaginable loss they experienced.

As the mother who inspired the project, Louri Lesbo, said, suicide isn’t supposed to happen in a supportive, caring family.

“Suicide does not discriminate. I’m here to attest to that,” she said. “We’ve got to talk about this. I wish somebody had brought that to my attention.”