September is National Suicide Prevention Month, and Wyoming has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. It’s also home to one of the largest populations of veterans, who are at a higher risk of taking their own lives than those who haven’t served.
But a statewide program called Veterans Talking to Veterans is working to change that.
Gov. Mark Gordon spotlighted the program in a recent newsletter, writing that it “exemplifies the best of Wyoming values: service, resilience, and community.”
The program trains veterans and their spouses to be trauma-informed coaches, who then support their peers at weekly meetings around the state.
One of those coaches is Kris Searles.
On an August afternoon, he was getting things in order for the weekly meeting in Pinedale, which takes place in a church basement on the town’s main street.
“ We have this space that the local community can come in and be part of the organization,” he said.
This meeting is also hybrid, as are many others held around the state. Tonight there’s a big projector set up for the folks who’ll be attending virtually on Zoom, sometimes from all over the country.
“I 've had Alaska to Rhode Island to Texas call in,” said Searles. “That same day, I had Vietnam vets all the way down to a 25-year-old Marine.”
But the meetings aren’t about swapping war stories. They’re conversations guided by coaches like Searles, with questions based on things like movies or music.
“Your perspective from [the] Metallica [song], “The Day that Never Comes,” is going to be completely different from mine, and I'm going to now appreciate your perspective,” said Searles. “And I'm like, ‘I never would've thought of it that way. Wow, that's a great perspective, man. That really makes me think about how I could go home and maybe look at my wife and family in a different way that I might not be thinking about.’”
Searles joined the Army after 9/11 and is a fourth generation combat soldier. But on one of his deployments, almost everyone on his team was killed.
“ I was in a different truck. My truck got hit the day before we were going home, true story.” he said. “The driver lived. Everybody else was killed instantly.”
Searles came back from combat after that. He moved to Pinedale, built a house with his wife and even joined the local search and rescue team. But he had so much rage.
“I had to leave search and rescue because of it. I was so angry,” he said.
Searles felt like he wasn’t being a good dad to his young twin boys, so he went away, got himself “tuned up” and came back to Wyoming.
“ The Veterans Talking to Veterans program started coming around and I jumped on board, because I wanted to go help people and I was fed up with the suicide,” he said. “ I'm so tired of hearing about friends – doesn’t even have to be veterans – just random people taking their own lives. You can be part of the problem or part of the solution.”
Searles said we as a culture need to figure out how to process trauma and do it in community.
“That's our job as the coach, is to turn it from post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic growth,” he said. “How do you grow from that trauma? How do you take that unique experience that we've had as first responders and veterans and put it to work in a good way and grow from it? What comes from growth is healing.”
Julie Elledge is a trauma-informed therapist, coach and trainer based in Jackson, who founded Veterans Talking to Veterans in 2020.
“ Storytelling, in my opinion, is the answer of how we cope with trauma, how we unravel it and make meaning,” she said.
Elledge grew up in a military family and worked as a therapist with a lot of people who were impacted by the military’s downsizing following the end of the Cold War. She’d already started hosting trauma-informed trainings, but then the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan.
“By nine o'clock in the morning [that day], I had had three people I had trained call me to say that they had stopped a veteran from suicide,” she said.
Elledge immediately called up Tim Sheppaard, the director of the Wyoming Veterans Commission. He went to Gov. Mark Gordon, and together, the team got the ball rolling on the program.
“ Even our training is really transformational. When the coach gets out, they are just burning with desire to get out and engage with it and to share it,” she said.
The program has now graduated three cohorts since it launched its pilot program in December of 2020. Each year’s graduation is a full weekend get-together, with speakers, entertainment, exhibitors and plenty of opportunities for connection. The governor comes each year, handing out diplomas to the new class of coaches.
According to Elledge, there’s now about 50 coaches around the state. Meeting size can vary based on how new the group is, as well as location and time of year, but she estimates that each meeting draws somewhere around a dozen people.
“ We want at least one coach in every rural community,” said Elledge. “We don't want to ignore the cities, either.”
Seventy percent of people around the globe go through some sort of potentially traumatic experience, according to the World Health Organization. From Elledge’s perspective, there needs to be more non-clinical solutions to help process trauma.
“ As a coach, we’re not trying to replace therapy, we're in addition to. We walk alongside therapists,” she said.
Part of the training for Veterans Talking to Veterans is focused on making sure that coaches understand their scope of practice in their role, and how to properly refer people or connect them to other community-based resources.
Elledge said one of the big goals of the program is to help change the narrative around veterans and their families, and to help change how they see themselves.
“ If you put a broken mirror in front of people, they will believe that mirror,” she said. “I believe that we need to be focusing on veterans’ potential.”
George DeBono was working as a primary prevention specialist for the Wyoming Military Department in Cheyenne when he first heard about Veterans Talking to Veterans.
“ I sat in on the group meeting. I shared and then I kept coming back,” he said.
DeBono served in the military for 24 years and is a father of three. He said the meeting was about people working together, holding each other accountable and creating community.
“ Not someone telling me, ‘Well, you're messed up and you need to do this and this, X, Y, and Z.’ Wasn't nothing like that,” he said.
After sitting in on meetings for a handful of months, DeBono liked the program so much, he decided to become a coach, too. Now, he’s taking his training a step further by studying for an accreditation through the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaching.
“ I'm not going to fix you. I don't have the answers, but I can walk alongside you with it and see where we go,” he said.
Although Veterans Talking to Veterans got its start in Wyoming, it’s now expanded to Idaho. DeBono is helping mentor new coaches in Rhode Island and New Mexico as the platform expands more.
In 2024, Veterans Talking to Veterans received the Abraham Lincoln Pillars of Excellence Award for the Most Innovative State Program in Suicide Prevention from the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. The honor recognizes programs with best practices that can be replicated around the country.
DeBono’s dream is to someday get the program in all 50 states.
“ Trauma takes away your voice and choice,” he said. “And if we get a lot more people out there helping with that, we'll have a better thriving veteran community.”
