Climate change, extreme weather and suicide : NPR

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Tony Calhoun was unique. Anyone who knew him would tell you that.

On one hand, there was his artistic life. Calhoun was an actor and a screenwriter who was drawn to stories of mystery, horror and redemption. He wrote screenplays about cursed artifacts and murderous guns for hire. He dreamed of someday playing a notorious Kentucky outlaw, Bad Tom Smith, and even maintained Smith’s handlebar mustache for years in preparation.

“He didn’t like to be like anybody else,” remembers Edith Lisk, his fiancee. “He wanted to be his own person.”

And the person that Tony Calhoun wanted to be could only exist in his hometown. Calhoun was raised in Jackson, Ky., a small community in the rural eastern part of the state. He was an only child, raised by his parents and grandfather in a house that went back three generations, and that was tucked in a quiet neighborhood that, like most places in that part of Appalachia, had a creek running through it.

The effects of climate change on that creek – which sat largely out of sight and out of mind for decades – would become the catalyst that would lead Calhoun to take his own life.

Drawn back to a beloved hometown

“Tony was highly intelligent,” says Lisk, who originally met Calhoun when they both attended Union College in Kentucky. Calhoun had always excelled in school, and his grandfather encouraged him to leave Jackson to attend college. He was the first in his family to get a bachelor’s degree.

But Jackson drew him back, Lisk says. The two dated in college, but broke up in part because Calhoun didn’t want to live anywhere else. “He wasn’t a big city boy,” she remembers. “That wasn’t his thing. He had an opportunity to audition for a role in Days of Our Lives and he didn’t do it, because it would have required him moving out of Kentucky. This was his home.”

After college, Calhoun settled two doors down from his parents. He married, had a child and got divorced. He worked a day job doing outreach to local families with young children, and poured himself into local film and theater projects, which he financed in an unconventional way.

For years, Calhoun had been investing his savings in memorabilia: boxes and boxes of comic books, baseball cards, figurines and other valuable collectibles that filled Calhoun’s home to the brim. He had started collecting and selling such items in college, as a hobby, but by middle age that hobby had morphed into something more akin to a retirement strategy.

“He had a Michael Jordan rookie card,” Lisk says. “He didn’t even open the comic books because once you open them that can decrease the value.”

Calhoun invested basically everything he had in collectibles. He studied the market for rare comics and amassed a collection of items that he believed would gain value over time, and which he could sell when he needed money. That allowed him to stop working and spend his time caring for his aging parents and working on film projects instead.

By 2022, his life was stable, if a little stressful. Calhoun’s parents were aging, and needed more help. He worried about them getting COVID. On the bright side, he and Lisk had recently reconnected, decades after breaking off their college relationship, and were engaged to be married. “We picked up where we left off,” she says.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth”

The rain started falling in Eastern Kentucky in mid-July, 2022. At first, it was just thunderstorms, dumping heavy – but still normal – amounts of rain. But as the storms kept coming, and the ground became saturated, the situation turned dangerous. On July 27, 2022, a series of storms set off deadly flash flooding. Creeks jumped their banks and swept away entire neighborhoods in a matter of hours.

The water was five feet deep in Calhoun’s house. Virtually everything he owned was destroyed. “It was very traumatic,” Lisk says. Calhoun waded through water that was up to his neck, and made it to his parents’ home, which was on slightly higher ground. When he walked through the door, the first thing he said to his mother was a Bible verse: Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth. “He realized,” Lisk says, sighing. “He knew it was all gone.”

Lisk pauses before continuing. “You know,” she says, “they call this a thousand year flood.”

Experts called it a thousand year flood because, historically, such intense rain had only a one-in-a-thousand chance of happening in any given year. In other words, it was the kind of extremely rare disaster that you could be forgiven for assuming would never happen to you.

But, as the Earth heats up, disasters that used to be rare are getting more common. The amount of rain falling in the heaviest storms has increased by about a third in parts of Appalachia since the mid-1900s, and is expected to keep rising. The region has some of the fastest-growing flood risk in the country.

In the week and a half after the flood, Tony struggled with the realization that the place he felt safest – the only place he could even imagine living – was no longer safe.

“This has been his home his entire life,” Lisk says. “Everything he’d invested in that was his financial security was gone. His land, his home, everything he knew.”

At first, Calhoun went through the motions of moving forward. He’d spend the day removing his wrecked belongings from his home, and then spend the night with his parents. But 10 days after the flood, he gave up and locked the door to his waterlogged house.

He’d stopped sleeping since the flood, Edie says. He worried about looters, and about his parents, whose home had also been damaged. When he went into town to get food or clothing, it looked like a war zone. Mangled homes and cars were everywhere. Dozens of bodies were still being collected by search and rescue teams in the area.

“He just could not handle it,” Lisk says. “It was too overwhelming, the magnitude of it.”

Two weeks after the flood, on August 8th, 2022, Tony Calhoun took his own life. Text messages that he sent shortly beforehand make it clear that the shock and loss of the flood was the trigger for his despair. He was 52 years old.

The profound mental health toll of extreme weather

Lisk has spent the last two years trying to make sense of what happened. “I could not wrap my mind around that,” she says. “It just did not seem real.”

She says she’s come to understand that, although Calhoun survived the water, he wasn’t able to survive the stress of the flood’s aftermath. “This flood was the catalyst,” she says. “This was it. This was the end of everything. And, in his mind, there was no rebuilding. There was no, ‘Where do we go from here?’ It was done.”

She wishes Calhoun had asked for help. “I think a lot of it is there’s a certain stigma about it. Tony was a very strong person,” she says.

Since the flood, Lisk has worked with local survivors. She says a lot of people approach their recovery with a lot of pride, which can make it hard to seek help, especially for mental health. “[People feel like] ‘I don’t need to ask for help. I’ve always done everything on my own, I can do this on my own,’” she says. But “you can be the strongest of people, and still need help. And that’s ok.”

Today, Lisk lives in Jackson, not far from Calhoun’s parents. She’s trying to move on, and grieve. She doesn’t talk about what happened to Calhoun as much as she used to, but if someone asks her about it, she’s very open, because she hopes talking about his suicide can prevent future suicides after major disasters.

One lesson she takes away from Calhoun’s story is that mental health professionals need to be on-site after floods, fires and hurricanes, so they can proactively check-in with people who are struggling.

“Water, food, clothing, those are all needs,” Lisk says. But mental health support “ranks right there with it. It’s just equally as important, in my opinion.”

And, she says, it’s important that deaths like Calhoun’s be officially counted as disaster-related. The state of Kentucky acknowledged Calhoun among the 45 people who died as a result of the 2022 floods, which Lisk says was helpful for his family because it made them eligible for assistance to pay for Calhoun’s funeral. And, emotionally, it felt like their grief was being acknowledged, and that they could grieve with their neighbors who had lost friends and family in more direct ways.

But most disaster-related suicides are not counted as such, even though journalists and researchers have found widespread evidence of suicidal thoughts among those who survivor major disasters. For example, the official death toll from the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, Calif., does not include dozens of suicide deaths that have been linked to the fire.

And national mortality figures kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) do not track post-disaster suicides. That means there is no reliable way to monitor the problem nationally, despite the fact that local journalists and researchers have both found evidence that despair and suicide spike after major disasters.

“I hope this can raise awareness,” Lisk says. “Until you go through it, you can’t fathom what people are dealing with.”

If You Need Help: Resources

If you or someone you know is in crisis and need immediate help, call, text or chat the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 9-8-8.

• Find 5 Action Steps for helping someone who may be suicidal, from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.