Molly Bohannon | Fort Collins Coloradoan

Editor’s note: This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, please consult the video at the top of this story or the information on resources at the bottom.

To the outside world, Grace Wankelman was a friendly, outgoing and academically focused high school student. She loved fashion and makeup, and she worried about getting good grades. She knew she wasn’t the type of kid who “would slip through the cracks.”

But when she looked at herself, Wankelman saw a girl filled with self-doubt and sadness, one who just didn’t understand how she could be so sad.

For at least six months, between the end of her freshman year and the start of her sophomore year at Fort Collins’ Poudre High School, Wankelman thought about suicide almost daily. Feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness occupied her mind, and she kept it all to herself so as not to be even more of a burden than she felt she already was.

She had been on medication for depression after her family noticed self-harm two years prior, but it seemed she was doing better now.

In reality, she had stopped taking her pills, out of frustration. School was becoming overwhelming, and she couldn’t kick the feeling that something was wrong with her or the fear that it couldn’t be fixed.

So on a September day in 2015 when too many things had built up and Wankelman realized she wasn’t on bad terms with anyone — this was important so no one would blame themselves for her decision — Wankelman tried to end her life.

But she survived.

“When I woke up in the hospital for the first time … I was terrified,” she said. “But then I think it ended up being one of the best things because I think I needed to recognize how many people were there to support me, how many people have been through different things like that.”

The year Wankelman attempted suicide, she was not alone. In 2015, 90 kids between the ages of 10 and 19 died by suicide in Colorado, compared with 63 the year before. And while the rates have recently remained steady, around 100 kids have died by suicide each year since 2017.

Pediatric mental health was recently declared a crisis by leadership at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Experts, emergency room doctors and psychiatrists gathered on a call on May 25 to discuss how the state got to this point and ask questions about why nearly half of youth emergency room intakes in any given week are related to a suicide attempt or mental crisis: Why has demand for mental health services skyrocketed in the past 15 months, and even more so in the last three or four?

But to those who work in the field of youth mental health and suicide prevention, Colorado’s youth wellness crisis isn’t new. Rather, it’s finally getting the attention — and potentially the resources — it deserves.