Not long after 72-year-old Anne Beale Golsan had retired on disability from her job as a librarian, she put a stack of paid bills out for the mail, hung up a freshly pressed outfit and taped a note to the front of the house.
“Don’t come in by yourself. Get somebody to come with you. Sorry, Love Beale.”
Her niece arrived at the house they shared in Baton Rouge, La., to find police already there. Golsan had killed herself with a gunshot to the head.
“Every single day it makes me feel like I wish I could have done something,” Jane Golsan Ray said, recalling her aunt’s death eight years ago. “I wish I could turn back the clock and prevent it. It doesn’t get any better. It hurts every day.”
The elderly are the highest- risk population in the country for suicide. But few suicide-prevention programs target them – a result, advocates say, of scarce funding and lack of concern for older Americans.
And mental heath experts say the number of elderly suicides is likely to climb as baby boomers enter their twilight years.
The overall U.S. suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 people. But for those 65 and older, that figure rises to 14 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which based its findings on 2004 data, the most recent available.
Older adults are less likely to seek help and are more lethal in their suicide attempts. So experts say special care is needed to reach out.
Many seniors have fewer options for treatment than younger people. “It’s a not-so-subtle social-political assignment of resources,” said Donna Cohen, a professor in the Department of Aging and Mental Health at the University of South Florida.
