Suicide Rates in Brown County

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Last updated: July 21, 2025  16:23

“County health officials are prioritizing suicide prevention after recent state data reported Brown County had the highest suicide rate in the state for the years 2018-2022.”   (Determined by the crude rate)

IDoH calculates suicide rates using two different calculations.

1. The Crude Rate is used for a total count over five years.  Using the crude rate, Brown County had the highest rate in Indiana (2018-2022).  The rate is determined by dividing the number of suicide deaths for Brown County residents by the population size and then multiplying by 100,000. Age-adjusted rates take into account the variability of ages across counties.

2. A stable/reliable rate is calculated IF the count of suicides in a year is greater than 20.  (The Brown County count per year has been under 20).   In 2023, the five counties with the highest stable rate of suicide were Grant (35.2), LaPorte (27.3), Howard (26.4), Madison (24.9), and Vanderburgh (23.6)

  • The “Count” for 2019-2023: “50%” drop from 2022-2023 – See below – Test your knowledge of variation.
    • 2019: 6
    • 2020: 4
    • 2021: 4
    • 2022: 10
    • 2023: 5 

 Suicide prevention takes on urgency, By Staff Reports –Brown County Democrat, April 15, 2025

    • “County health officials are prioritizing suicide prevention after recent state data reported Brown County had the highest suicide rate in the state for the years 2018-2022. “
    • “Brown County. Suicide Rate. 5 Year Rate (per 100,000 persons): 35.2
      County Ranking: #92,  *5-year crude rate (per 100,000 persons). This metric is calculated by dividing the number of deaths attributed to the act or instance of taking ones own life voluntarily and intentionally (suicide) divided by the number of residents in the county.”
      Ref: in.gov/healthfirstindiana/county-health-scorecard/
    • “The county now has a suicide and fatality overdose review team that studies cases with the intent of reducing future preventable deaths. Additionally, the county has been distributing suicide prevention kits.”

Statistical Methods. Regarding statistics and methodologies, the intent is to transform data into actionable information that supports better decision-making.  One of the seven basic tools in quality that is used to determine if a change is resulting in improvement is a Run Chart. Generally, you need about 20-25 data points. Indications of a change would include 7 consecutive data points in a row going up or down, or seven consecutive data points above or below the median. 

Variation – Statistical Literacy. Test your knowledge of variation?  Most everyone gets the wrong answer.  It took me a few years to fully understand the theory. Kids have a faster learning curve.   It has also been estimated that a lack of understanding of common and special causes of variation results in a situation where 94%  of improvement actions yield no improvement. (For example, how many New Year’s Resolutions result in a permanent and fundamental change?)

Crude Rate Calculation

County Health Scorecard – Brown County –  Suicide 5-Year Rate (per 100,000 persons) County Ranking: 35.2 – Highest of the 92 counties 

    • The Health First Indiana Scorecard online shows crude rates, which means age distribution in counties (see below)  is not taken into account.   Crude rate is chosen because all other measures on the scorecard are crude rates and cannot take age into consideration. The scorecard currently displays data for the years 2018-2022. Brown County had more than 20 deaths in that 5-year timespan, therefore the rate is stable (reliable).
    •  *5 year “crude rate” (per 100,000 persons). This metric is calculated by dividing the number of deaths attributed to the act or instance of taking ones own life voluntarily and intentionally (suicide) divided by the number of residents in the county.
One-Year Rate

IDoH:  Fatal Overdose and Suicide Report, 2023.  When using the oneyear rate calculation, Brown County does not have the highest rate in the state.

    • “Age-Adjusted Rate:”  Suicide Fatalities by County of Residence•
      • In 2023, the five counties with the highest stable rate of suicide were Grant (35.2),
        LaPorte (27.3), Howard (26.4), Madison (24.9), and Vanderburgh (23.6)
      •  Between 2022 and 2023, the number of suicide deaths increased in 44 counties and
        decreased in 35 counties. Fifteen counties had no change (See Appendix E  below).

        The Indiana Suicide and Overdose Report, where Brown County isn’t identified as having one of the highest rates,  is because it is only looking at the year 2023 (not a combined year like the county scorecard)  and is also age-adjusted. This provides a more accurate comparison between counties since rural counties tend to have a higher proportion of older populations.  Brown County saw 5 deaths in 2023 which is below 20, therefore considering it unstable/unreliable and why the “U” is in the Table E.1 below. 

“Can America Survive Without Christianity?”

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Can America Survive Without Christianity? Bari Weiss, The Free Press.  Author Jonathan Rauch joins Bari on Honestly to discuss how the success of liberal democracy depends on a healthy Christianity to support it—and if Christianity falters, America will falter too.

    • On where the church fell short: …  JR: The biggest gap—and I say this as a secular person who cares about governability—is that while the church has done a decent job of forming people in the image of Jesus in private life—family, community, disaster relief—it has failed to teach how to be like Jesus in public life.

There’s been almost no “discipling” around politics and social media. 

  • Christianity, Citizenship, Quality Management. Raising awareness on the interrelationship between Christianity, Citizenship, and Quality Management.
    • Genesis 1:  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And there was variation.  Successfully reducing variation results in more needs being met and less harm being caused to individuals as a result of unmet needs. 

Catholics and Patriotism. Can people devoted to a perfect God also be devoted to an imperfect country?  

    • During the Cold War, the Knights of Columbus and veterans’ organizations called on Congress to add “under God” to the Pledge. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended a service in honor of Lincoln’s birthday, he heard the Presbyterian Rev. George Docherty sermonize: “To omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life.” He added, “An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms. If you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.” On Flag Day in 1954, Congress—with Eisenhower’s signature—added the words “under God” to the Pledge.

Gary Varvel: Independence Day 2025

    • Unfortunately America today is not what the Founding Father’s envisioned. We are the home to a great number of people who hate the red, white and blue. They proudly wave the flag of their home country in their mostly “peaceful protests” of our country.

      I recently asked the question, how did this happen to our country? How did our house get so divided?

      The answer is: We slowly destroyed the Spiritual foundation of our house.

The Face of Battle: Some things never change

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Excerpts: Things Worth Remembering: How Warriors Prepare, H.L. McMaster, The Free Press

Yet the person from whom I gained the most insight into battle never served a day in the military. John Keegan was born in London in 1934, meaning he was too young to fight in the Second World War. He was then afflicted with orthopedic tuberculosis at the age of 13, which left him unable to join the British Army, despite his deep interest in military service from a young age. Instead, he became a military historian, delving deeply into the human and psychological dimensions of combat. My copy of his 1976 book, The Face of Battle, is replete with underlined passages and marginal notes.

It was my impending responsibilities as an officer that led me to study more purposefully, knowing that the seriousness with which I studied might save lives.

I read the book in 1984, just before graduating from West Point. It is a study of three pivotal battles that occurred centuries apart in the same patch of land in Europe: the battles of Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). Keegan reveals how technology, from the longbow to gunpowder to the machine gun, changed the face of battle. But what struck me the most was Keegan’s observation about what did not change across those five centuries. I memorized the following passage from the book’s conclusion:

What battles have in common is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage, always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration—for it is toward the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.

The technology of battle has changed a great deal in the last hundred years, yet Keegan’s description of close combat would resonate with Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches of Pokrovsk, Israeli soldiers hunting Hamas in the rubbled neighborhoods of Gaza, and U.S. Special Operations forces raiding the remnants of ISIS in the rugged hills of northeastern Syria.

I read it just prior to becoming a young officer, and it convinced me that soldiers’ confidence—in their skills, in their leaders, and especially in one another—was the essential bulwark against fear and that emotion’s debilitating effects.

 

Government and the Private Sector: Trump vs Musk

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The Trump and Musk Drama. – Government does not operate like the private sector

The Trump v. Musk Feud, Patriots Are the Losers in the Trump v. Musk Feud, Kurt Schlichter
Jun 06, 2025

    • Here’s the problem that’s probably the root of Elon Musk‘s disenchantment. Elon Musk is, at heart, a visionary and an engineer. He envisions a result, then he creates processes to achieve it. It’s very binary. Either you succeed or you don’t. Something either works or it doesn’t.
    • But that’s not how politics functions. Politics is all about process; the outcome is often secondary. Now, that is suboptimal in an objective world where your only goal is the best-engineered result possible.
    • Politics is not about obtaining the best-engineered result possible. It is not about enacting a perfect policy, program, or paradigm. It is about getting the very best result you can get through the process that exists, a process that must incorporate people whose objectives are not yours.
    • In politics, people are not looking for the best possible result but the best possible result for themselves. That means to build a coalition, you have to compromise.

Clark responds to the article, “Tilton property back on docket.”

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LETTER – My letter was published in the June 11, 2025, issue of the Democrat with the title: “Commissioner addresses Tilton Property.”    

This letter is in response to the article by Dakota Bruton, “Tilton property back on docket,” Wed, May 21, 2025. This rezoning issue involves decisions on the type of development that citizens want to support in their respective areas and the process they expect to be followed to ensure the best decisions for the county.

In this case, the initial zoning change of the property was from Secondary Residential (R2), Floodplain, and Floodway to General Business (GB), Floodplain, and Floodway. The change was opposed by surrounding property owners and residents, leading to legal action to stop the change. The case has been delayed pending the decision by the commissioners to reverse the change.

Typically, for many land transactions, before an owner purchases a property with the intent to change the zoning, they can choose to make the purchase subject to pre-approval of the change. This helps reduce financial risk, validates the desirability of the change by citizens, and helps to establish a fair market value for the land. This practice (pre-approval) was not followed in this case, as it was a private transaction. The estimated increase in the value of the change to GB by Tilton is speculative.

A decision not to obtain preapproval before purchase can also reinforce the perception that a change is expected to be approved if it is favored by two commissioners, despite any negative recommendations from the Area Plan Commission (APC) and Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA).

In this case, Commissioner Wolpert spoke on behalf of the change and projects at the November 19, 2024, APC meeting. It was later confirmed that his vote to approve the zoning did not represent a conflict of interest. Commissioner Pittman typically justified changes to GB if the property was accessible from a state highway. This was not a credible justification in this case.

Pittman and Wolpert refused to delay the vote at the Dec 4, 2024, commissioner meeting to allow consideration of the changes being made to the Nashville and Brown County Comprehensive Plans. Comprehensive Plans provide guidance on zoning. Once the property was rezoned, the BZA was required to review the proposed projects – a private recreational development and an RV travel trailer park. At their meeting on January 29, 2025, the BZA did not approve either project. These projects provided justification for the change in zoning.

On the issues that Tilton raised in public meetings, which were also referenced in the article, a mistake was made on the APC application form, where I signed as an owner as opposed to the petitioner. This error was acknowledged as a mistake. The error was not considered relevant by the Planning Director, the APC, the APC attorney, and the County Attorney. Other comments Tilton made regarding notification were also determined not to be relevant since he was present at the APC meetings on the proposed changes. He also acknowledges attending the March 5 commissioner meeting, where the commissioners voted 2 to 1 for the petition to reverse the zoning change.

Regarding the change in commissioner meeting dates to decide on the rezoning, there was some misunderstanding regarding legal requirements, and commissioners were informed that there is a 10-day public notification requirement.

A question for citizens is, when a justification for zoning is based on a change that the APC did not recommend, had significant community opposition, and the BZA did not approve either of the proposed projects, what is the appropriate course of action? In this case, options included a petition submitted by the commissioners to reverse the change back to its original version.

At the commissioner meeting on June 18, 2025, citizens will be provided with the opportunity to briefly share their comments. Commissioners and the owner, Jimmy Tilton, representing William Jacob Capital, LLC, will have more time to present their arguments.

You can also share your opinion with the commissioners via email at commissioners@browncounty-in.gov

Tim Clark

Legal Notice – Published June 4, 2025 edition rezone legal notice june 4 2025 edition

ChatGPT – Brown County Economy – Notes May 26, 2025

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It’s interesting to challenge the responses provided by ChatGPT, read the response, and then ask later to see if the changes are consistent.   The AI tools were helpful with the overall context and reinforced the importance of including footnotes to reference the supporting data.

Note: The GDP of the five surrounding counties is 29.5 billion.  The GDP of Brown County is 362 million. Reference: Regional Economic Analysis Project

ChatGPT does include the disclaimer: “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.”

What are Brown County’s Economic Drivers?

    • In this dialogue, ChatGPT concluded that “Tourism is the most significant economic driver” and then adjusted its conclusion when presented with new information.

    • Ball State economists have identified Brown County, Indiana, as best positioned to grow economically by serving as a “bedroom community” — that is, a residential area where people live but commute elsewhere for work. This recommendation is based on several key economic and geographic factors:

    • How do you explain that AGI of 550 million and only about 10 million in wages from tourism? ChatGPT said:

      Great question — and you’re right to notice the mismatch. If Brown County’s total adjusted gross income (AGI) is around $550 million, and tourism wages contribute only about $10 million, that suggests that tourism is not the primary driver of resident income. Here’s how we can explain that:

I asked similar questions from Grok and experimented with different estimates on the numbers. Interesting comparisons between the two AIs.  Grok- Brown County Economypdf