An outdoor paradise in California has a high suicide rate. Locals are determined to turn it around

 Every year, about 2 million people come to the outdoor paradise of Lake Tahoe, which offers snowy ski slopes in the winter and sunny lakeside activities in the summer. At more than 6,000ft in elevation, the alpine community centers on the stunningly blue lake, which spans the California-Nevada border and is often called “the jewel of the Sierra”.

But beneath this idyllic scenery lies something known as the “paradise paradox”. As in many US resort areas, the suicide rates in the Tahoe region, including the city of Truckee, are far higher than the state average – and these communities don’t have enough resources to deal with the issue.

Since 2022, there have been nearly 40 confirmed suicide deaths in Truckee, South Lake Tahoe and four lakeside counties, an area with a combined population of about 73,000, according to an analysis by the Tahoe Daily Tribune. Nearly one-quarter of these involved firearms. This puts the suicide rate at nearly double that of California’s 10.1 per 100,000 people.

The suicide rate in the Tahoe region is nearly double that of California’s 10.1 per 100,000 people. Photograph: Al Drago/Getty Images

“Tahoe is a place that presents itself as somewhere you want to be,” said Nathan Wheeler, a certified trainer at Soul Shop, a faith-based suicide-prevention program. “But beautiful places sometimes shadow these problems – a transient community, an economy that exists outside its residents, affordability issues. These kinds of things breed desperation and a lack of hope.”

In response, a growing network of residents, advocates and local health professionals have come together in recent years to try to bring more resources to the area. “Someone has to notice and start to care,” said Amy Machin-Ward, a South Lake Tahoe resident who helped form a local suicide-prevention group.

The paradise paradox

Experts say there are many factors behind the paradise paradox, including a lack of healthcare access in rural areas, and geographic isolation, which can lead to social isolation.

On the south shore of the lake, which is considered more urban and has a larger population, there are far fewer mental health providers than in the rest of the state: 153 per 100,000 people, according to a 2024 community health report from Barton Health, the only hospital in South Lake Tahoe. That’s 170 fewer than California’s 323.7 per 100,000.

Meanwhile, Tahoe’s north shore, which is more affluent and less densely populated, has a similar suicide rate as the rest of the state, according to a 2025 Tahoe Forest Health System report. But even across these disparities, both the north and south shore reported that up to 10% of adults, most of them low-income, were unable to access mental health services in the past year.

In addition to a lack of mental health care, the area has been without an official suicide-prevention network for more than three years, after funding for the existing one ended.

Debbie Posnien, executive director of the Suicide Prevention Network in Minden, Nevada, says that area residents often make a 40-minute drive to attend her organization’s support groups. This shows that there’s a clear need for local services, she says.

In addition to a lack of mental health care, the area has been without an official suicide-prevention network for more than three years. Photograph: Al Drago/Getty Images

“Those clients tell me they don’t have anyone at the lake to talk to,” she said. “They have issues with their insurance, places are booked up. And the community is so small there, they worry about being able to talk without being judged.”

Jody Wright, executive director of Nevada-based organization Tahoe Family Solutions, which offers low- to no-cost mental health programs, has had a similar experience. “Sixty-five per cent of our patients are from California,” she said. “The mental health crisis doesn’t stop at a border.”

The nature of work in resort towns can also play a role in high suicide rates. Residents rely on the tourism and ski industries, which means seasonal employment, higher safety risks and a high cost of living – all of which contribute to a less stable and more stressful way of life.

In addition, many resort towns have a reputation for a party culture and heavy drinking and substance use, which “can oftentimes mask or worsen underlying mental health conditions”, said Shannon Decker, founder of the program Zero Proof, For You, which aims to open conversations about drinking culture in the Tahoe region.

Firearms access

One factor sets Tahoe apart from other California resort areas: its proximity to Nevada, where gun laws are much less restrictive. Compared with California, gun purchases in Nevada are cheaper and don’t require state permits, licenses for open carry or firearm registration, though they do require background checks. Unlike California, there is no wait time after purchasing firearms to bring them home.

Douglas county, one of the five counties that extend into the Lake Tahoe basin, was one of four rural counties in Nevada that voted for second amendment sanctuaries in response to background checks for private sales. Sheriffs in at least seven Nevada counties said they wouldn’t enforce stricter background screening laws.

As long as the firearms are still legal in California, it’s an easy choice to purchase them across the border.

Research has shown that access to firearms increases the risk of suicide, not because the firearm increases thoughts of suicide, but because it provides access to a more lethal method. According to a landmark study, handgun owners had a rate of suicide much higher than people who did not own guns – three times as high among male handgun owners and seven times as high for female gun owners.

Community solutions

Things are starting to change. In 2013, the Truckee community rallied to form a suicide-prevention coalition after five young men died by suicide.

The Tahoe Truckee Suicide Prevention Coalition, which serves the north shore and brings together the county government, local non-profits, school districts, the police department and hospitals, now provides resources for prevention, and support for those who have lost people to suicide. It also occasionally provides services to the south shore, which does not have such an organization.

“There’s so much fear and stigma. In most ski communities, they do not have that level of mental health literacy to be able to talk about suicide,” said Decker, who helped create the coalition with Machin-Ward. “And the antidote is communication and support.”

‘The antidote is communication and support.’ Photograph: Al Drago/Getty Images

Other efforts are happening on the slopes. Kari Brandt, president of the Sierra Nevada Resiliency Team, which provides support and resources to ski employees, said that about eight years ago, the ski industry finally started addressing stress and mental health. One way they’re doing this is through resiliency teams made up of ski workers trained in peer support, stress injury frameworks and trauma identification. They can listen to and understand the challenges people in ski areas face, then connect them to the right resources or offer coping strategies for dealing with high-stress incidents.

“Suicidal ideation can happen as a result of overwhelming stress,” said Brandt. “We don’t have to shame that, but we can put these tools of prevention in place if it does happen.”

Brandt has helped to create these types of teams at several ski areas throughout the Sierra Nevada region, and by next year hopes to have every ski area be a part of the network.

Last year, the Sierra Nevada Resiliency Team held its first free, in-person regional training for people from 10 ski regions, and offered information about suicide prevention, incident support and peer support.

“It will always take grit to work in the ski industry, so being able to talk with someone who understands what you’re going through is pretty key,” said Brandt.

Other groups are tackling suicides by addressing firearm safety and access.

A suicide-prevention program in Washoe, Nevada, which borders Lake Tahoe, has put together firearm education and safety programs, which allow for temporary and voluntary surrender of firearms to trusted storage partners. “Whether you’re giving it to a retailer or to a trusted family member, we all become part of a secure storage network that helps prevent suicide,” said Joe Dibble, one of the co-founders of Washoe Suicide Prevention Alliance.

Cynthia Tate, another co-founder of Washoe Suicide Prevention Alliance, said this strategy is about putting time between suicidal thoughts and action. “Creating time and distance between a person in crisis and access to lethal means can save lives,” she said. “About 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide later.”

For others, suicide prevention is deeply intertwined with other systemic injustices, such as racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia – and the ways they affect mental health.

“It’s not the individual that’s the problem. There are barriers to accessing care, and life is much harder without privilege,” said Angie Reagan, founder of the community group Peace Love Tahoe, which advocates for mental health, connection and inclusivity. “Anybody can struggle, but it is a lot harder when you don’t have that privilege.”

“Tahoe is the most beautiful place in the world,” Reagan went on. “It was my dream to live here. But it’s also a beautiful little bubble, a place for escapism and people sometimes don’t want to talk about these hard issues.

“What we really need is consistent education, awareness and training.” Local government and healthcare systems, she added, “need to step up and offer something to the community. They need to try.”

We the People are on Native Land

 

A message from the Chair

Yesterday was, and has always been, a difficult day for me. Protected by my parents, and guided by a whitewashed history education, I always looked forward to the Fourth of July. I grew up with romantic visions of defiant colonists throwing tea into Boston Harbor, and hearing about the heroics of George Washington and Paul Revere. In primary school, we started each day with the Pledge of Allegiance and I sang the National Anthem in chorus and at ball games. As I got older, the Fourth of July became my favorite holiday because I lit off fireworks every year. Not the ones you bought at the little stands; we lit off big stuff that you see at shows, and at times, we even fired a cannon. It was exciting and dangerous, but most of all, it was fun. 

But over the years, as I have become more educated, the holiday has lost all meaning for me. I am no longer able to celebrate this nation, say the Pledge of Allegiance, or to sing or stand for the National Anthem, as I no longer have pride in our nation at all - not for its past, nor for its present. 

250 years ago, the 13 original colonies announced their intent to sever their ties with England when the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. History books teach us that the colonies were seeking reprieve from over taxation and policing. But the actual text of the declaration describes the true motivation. The signers decried that the king “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” 

The racist term “merciless Indian Savages” was used to dehumanize the Indigenous people and to provide justification for the colonies to expand westward, which wasn’t allowed by the treaties between England and the tribal nations.  

The colonies needed to expand westward so the ruling class could maintain their profits, fulfill their obligations to indentured servants, and to prevent further civil unrest from former indentured servants and their off-spring. The treaties between the crown and the tribes made this impossible.

Bacon’s 1676 rebellion is an example of the civil unrest the ruling class faced and served as a turning point in how white and black indentured servants were treated, with black servants subsequently becoming enslaved thereafter. The rebellion was made up of white and black formerly indentured servants, who were promised land in exchange for working that of another, but were given rugged terrain, inland towards the Appalachian mountains, instead of fertile farmland, as that was all that was available. The most fertile farmland had already been taken by the original colonists through force, deceit, or disease.

Since the founding of our Nation 250 years ago, the United States of America has never ceased its reign of terror and genocide of indigenous people across Turtle Island, with the genocide taking on new and less direct forms since the the time the entire continent was taken over. For example, police forces that grew out of militias continue to kill Native people at a disproportionately higher rate than any other race. According to the CDC, American Indian/Alaskan Native people are 6 times more likely to be killed by police than white people and 3 times more likely to be killed than black people. 

Over the last hundred years, the United States operated 526 Indian Boarding Schools across the country. By 1926, 83% of Native school-age children were attending boarding schools, where the goal was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” In these schools, children were forbidden from speaking their language, wearing traditional clothing, or engaging in cultural practices. They were also forced to cut their hair and convert to Christianity. Worst of all, these children were subjected to inhumane experiments and torture, and older children were also forced to harm younger children by inflicting punishments. 

The United States Government still behaves in a racist manor towards Native Nations by holding their land in trust and "managing" it. That land is regularly exploited by corporations, ranchers, and farmers who don't pay the fair value for the use of their land. Furthermore, our nation has not met all of its treaty obligations to First Nations and their people, and continues to deny treaty rights to other nations and their descendants. One of the consequences of these failures is the disproportionately high rate of homelessness amongst First Nations people.

It isn’t just our government that commits harm against Native people and their communities. Native communities are experiencing a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis, wherein First Nations people are disproportionately victims of physical and sexual violence, abduction, trafficking, and murder. According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, more than 95% of these crimes are unreported by the mainstream media. As a whole, such cases involving people of color are so under-reported compared to white victims that social scientists created a term for the phenomenon –  “Missing White Woman Syndrome.”

Sadly, even well meaning people commit harm. Native art and culture was and continues to be stolen and appropriated. Non-Natives, “inspired by” Native art, sell their wares, which takes away resources from Native artists, and non-Native corporations manufacture items with Native designs overseas. All of which takes money from native communities and artists and redirects wealth to non-Natives. Native movements are also co-opted and exploited by non-Natives, profiting off of Native efforts and values. Such appropriation hurts Natives financially and spiritually and is a part of the cultural genocide that persists today.  

I say this all from my personal perspective, as an enrolled member of an Alaskan Tribe. I acknowledge that similar atrocities were committed by our government against African Americans, Asian Americans, and other races and ethnic groups, and that our nation continues to colonize other nations and claim territories around the world. I did not attempt to speak from those perspectives, as I am unable to do so, but I do want to acknowledge our nation has and continues to cause disproportionate harm to people of color and those who are LGBTQIA+, compared to their cis, hetero, white, counterparts. 

In closing, I hope that you chose to celebrate what this nation could be, not what it is and has always been. I also hope that you used the day to recharge yourself, so you can take on the good work of moving our party and this nation to actually becoming great. An organization and nation where the most vulnerable are protected. A nation that takes care of its citizens and all people within its territories (or better yet, frees its territories or allows them to become states, with all the rights and privileges, if the people there so choose statehood). And that you work to move this nation to one of peace and prosperity, that ends all aid to war criminals and other nations committing genocide and stealing land, and that in turn, defends nations and people facing genocide and forced relocation. It is possible, but It will take all of us to get there.

Hunter Brown
Chair, 46th District Democrats
Kenaitze Tribal Member

The scourge of the death penalty hangs over America

"Thursday will mark the 50th anniversary of the rebirth of the death penalty in the United States. On 2 July 1976, the supreme court handed down decisions in five cases that laid out a formula for passing constitutional muster.

The formula the court devised and explained at length in one of those cases, Gregg v Georgia, was built on a wish and a prayer. It was a fantasy of fairness, powerful enough, its authors thought, to keep capital punishment alive and to lend it legitimacy, but it was a fantasy nonetheless.

What has happened since shows the hollowness of that hope. History has not and will not look kindly on the court’s misbegotten effort.

Four years before the 1976 quintet of court rulings, the court had halted capital punishment in a case called Furman v Georgia. It did so on the grounds that the sentencing discretion that state laws gave judges, and juries created an unacceptable risk that it would be used in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner.

Opponents of the death penalty celebrated, believing that it would not survive the setback the court delivered. One, Professor Hugo Adam Bedau, predicted: “We will not see another execution in this nation in this century.”

Another, Jack Greenberg, then a lawyer working for the Legal Defense Fund, the leading anti-death penalty group in the country, went further. After Furman, Greenberg observed: “There will no longer be any more capital punishment in the United States.”

But that celebration was both premature and unwarranted. Bedau, Greenberg and others should have known better.

As the historian David Oshinsky explained to an interviewer at the University of Texas, where he teaches: “The justices were so divided that each one wrote a different opinion.” In his view, “the two ‘pivotal’ opinions are those of Justices Potter and Bryon White. They concluded that the system of absolute jury discretion in sentencing had yielded death sentences with such infrequency and irrationality as to be cruel and unusual and therefore in violation of the eighth amendment.”

While abolitionists celebrated, Oshinsky observes: “Capital punishment advocates saw an opening in the decision. Furman … did not outlaw capital punishment. It said if ‘you want it, you have to rewrite your laws.’”

And 37 states took the opportunity to do so, trying as best they could to divine the right remedy for the problems highlighted in Furman. Some, such as North Carolina, thought that remedy would be eliminating all discretion and making a death sentence mandatory for people convicted of certain very serious offenses.

Others, Oshinsky suggests, took a middle ground, “providing a bifurcated trial, separating the guilt phase from the penalty phase, and allowing juries to hear aggravating and mitigating circumstances to determine if a convicted murderer should die”.

So the stage was set for an epic legal battle. Half a century ago, the question was whether the court would go further than it had in Furman and end the death penalty once and for all, or find one of the recently enacted sentencing schemes acceptable.

When the court announced its rulings, abolitionists’ hopes were dashed. As justice Potter Stewart, now writing for a seven-judge majority, argued: “It is now evident that a large proportion of American society continues to regard … [the death penalty] as an appropriate and necessary criminal sanction.

“We now hold,” Stewart added, “that the punishment of death does not invariably violate the Constitution.” That single sentence has stood as an ironclad barrier to judicial abolition, from then until now, and the court has turned a cold shoulder to wholesale challenges to that penalty.

In fact, as the Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig argued four years ago, the court’s interpretation of the eighth amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment has led to the amendment’s “disintegration” and “destruction”.

Meanwhile, what the supreme court decided 50 years ago remains the basis for dispensing death sentences today. It struck down mandatory death penalty laws, calling them “unduly harsh and unworkably rigid”.

At the same time, it ruled that statutes which provided what it called “guided discretion” were enough to mitigate the problems identified in Furman. Georgia, in Stewart’s view, now “suitably directed and limited” jury discretion “so as to minimize the risk of wholly arbitrary and capricious action”.

“It is possible,” Stewart confidently asserted, “to construct capital sentencing systems capable of meeting Furman’s constitutional concerns.” He and his colleagues imagined that a “bifurcated proceeding where the trial and sentencing are conducted separately”, while “specific jury findings as to the severity of the crime and the nature of the defendant, and a comparison of each capital sentence’s circumstances with other similar cases” would ensure that “the jury’s discretion is channeled. No longer can a jury wantonly and freakishly impose the death sentence.”

The court was satisfied that what they had approved would ensure the death penalty’s “judicious and careful use”.

Over the last five decades, we have learned a hard lesson: all that was pure fantasy.

We know that since 1973, “202 former death-row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to the wrongful convictions that had put them on death row,” per the Death Penalty Information Center. In addition, a study conducted in 2014 “estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent”, the DPIC reported.

It is also clear that the court’s “guided discretion” has not ended arbitrary and discriminatory treatment. People of color still fare badly at every stage in America’s post-Gregg death penalty system and are even more likely to have their executions botched than are white people.

Stewart and his colleagues thought that if they could find the right formula, the people who serve on capital juries could put aside their biases and rise to the occasion when they had someone’s life in their hands. It is a noble aspiration, but one that sadly can’t be realized in any human system of justice.

Writing in 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun exposed the myth that has sustained the US’s death penalty since Gregg. As he explained: “Once the pool of death eligible defendants has been reduced, the sentencer retains the discretion to consider whatever relevant mitigating evidence the defendant chooses to offer … Over time, I have come to conclude that even this approach is unacceptable: it simply reduces, rather than eliminates, the number of people subject to arbitrary sentencing.”

Blackmun went on to say: “The decision whether a human being should live or die is so inherently subjective – rife with all of life’s understandings, experiences, prejudices, and passions – that it inevitably defies the rationality and consistency required by the constitution.”

For him and for me, it is clear that no set of “procedural rules or verbal formulas” can ever “provide consistency, fairness, and reliability in a capital sentencing scheme”. The last half century has only proven that, in Blackmun’s words, the effort is “doomed to failure … and the death penalty – must be abandoned altogether”.

• Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty