A total of 6,146 U.S. veterans took their own lives in 2020, the latest year for which data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was available, and analysis of that data shows that veterans in rural areas take their lives at a rate 6 percent higher than those living in urban areas.
That fact led the VA in 2015 to form Together with Veterans, a rural veteran suicide prevention program, and the first chapter in New Mexico was formed last April here in Taos County, sponsored by local nonprofit Veterans Off Grid.
The new chapter of Together with Veterans will convene for its next meeting on Saturday (March 11) at 2 p.m. in Coronado Hall on Civic Plaza Drive in Taos to discuss the results of a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis that examined how to build a support network for veterans living in Taos County who are struggling with mental health problems, including suicidal ideations.
"We’re really excited to be sponsoring this organization from Veterans Off Grid to really address the topic of suicide," said Ryan Timmermans, a US Army veteran who served in Afghanistan. Timmermans founded Veterans Off Grid in 2017 to bring veterans together to work on innovative, sustainable building projects on Taos Mesa as a form of therapy.
Town of Taos Mayor Pascual Maestas, himself a veteran, holds a military branch and associated groups insignia wristband made by a Together With Veterans group in Florida.
Timmermans and a cohort of local and county government representatives, behavioral health experts and fellow veterans held their first meeting for the new initiative nearly one year ago after the Department of Veterans Affairs identified Taos County as meeting the criteria to open the first chapter in the state, according to Jennifer Ammann, director of operations for Veterans Off Grid.
"Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) approached us through another organization that was in Albuquerque ... and asked if we would want to work with them to bring the program to Taos. It’s a three-year program," she said. "It’s funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, but we do all our work with Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
There’s a step-by-step program that we’re using with WICHE," she added, "and the first part of that was in October, when we did the SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. We had over 50 people at the meeting. It was actually very well represented from a lot of different stakeholders."
That group included not only veterans, but also people with loved ones who served who had taken their own lives.
"The first community meeting had a great turnout. I was happily surprised," said AnJanette Brush, District 4 Taos County commissioner and the commission's chair. "The last meeting in October just really talked about the problem, talking about the numbers behind rural veteran suicide, especially in our state."
Representatives from the Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center for Suicide Prevention helped to collect information from the analysis, which Ammann said showed "that as a community Taos County's strengths to address veteran issues and suicide prevention include a strong military/veteran presence, community connections, veteran programs and nonprofits, support from other nonprofits and elected officials.
"The weaknesses include inadequate resources connected with rurality (funding, transportation, technology, internet), lack of awareness of services or how to access them, language barriers, and younger veterans not as connected/involved as older veterans," she added.
Timmermans and the group of veterans who work alongside him through Veterans Off Grid have been working to address those issues for several years now, finding strength in each other through shared trauma from exposure to combat.
Wayne Rivali, commander of the local American Legion Post #16, attends Taos’ Together With Veterans meeting.
Timmermans credits peer support and contractor work with helping him to stabilize his mental health after he returned to civilian life in the 2010s.
"When I came back from Afghanistan, I wasn’t well," he said. "And I went back to Afghanistan to try and fix myself. I just couldn’t be a civilian for some reason. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and it was a long wait for a doctor at the VA. When I got there, he said he was just a volunteer, that he was really sorry, that he was late for a golf tournament and to give him my top two problems and he’d give me referrals, which were three months away. I realized that I just wasn’t going to get help that way."
Timmermans said he created Veterans Off Grid "to be part of my own solution," creating an organization that helps veterans to heal from their traumas through camaraderie and a shared sense of purpose. Recently, veterans in the program built the first walipini in Taos County, an underground greenhouse that allows crops to be grown through wintertime without the use of electricity or gas.
He sees Together with Veterans as a natural extension of the mission work he is already involved in, a way of empowering veterans struggling with mental health to generate the solutions that will help steer them away from suicide, back toward healthy lives.
"Together with Veterans is a step in the right direction," he said.