Kansas Mental Health Professionals Prepare Listening Session While Working to Enhance Services

By AJ Dome

GARDEN CITY — Kansas mental health experts want rural residents to be aware of available resources as they work to enhance mental health services across more of the state.

NAMI Kansas executive director Sherrie Vaughn said she and her staff are preparing for a rural mental health summit on April 9 in Kiowa, a community of about 900 people in south-central Kansas, to bring the conversation about mental health care to more rural and frontier areas.

The summit is a continuation of the nonprofit agency’s Standing in the Gap series that began in 2023 in Dodge City. NAMI Kansas southwest steering committee chairwoman Itzel Moya said the initial event and four subsequent sessions have been “a great way for rural and frontier communities to bring light to mental health topics and resources.”

At that initial event, mental health experts and agricultural producers shared stories about their own mental health struggles and vocalized a need for more widespread mental health care services, particularly in the western half of the state.

The April 9 event is set to take place at the Kiowa Community Building from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Registration is required. The event will focus on how local faith leaders and church members can “stand in the gap” as links to mental health care for their communities, Vaughn said.

“Standing in the Gap presentations help to equip our local community leaders and members to start the conversation, learn about mental health conditions and statistical information, access its local resources, and seek solutions and opportunities to serve each other well,” Vaughn said.

Religious officials are often the first person to respond to a mental health crisis because of the lack of mental health care providers across the state, and because of preexisting trusting relationships formed within the community. At another Standing in the Gap event in November in Plainville, NAMI Kansas volunteer Tara Gwynn said Kansas has an average of one mental health care provider for every 450 residents.

In areas like Plainville, which is in Rooks County in north-central Kansas, Gwynn said the figure is closer to one provider per 4,000 people. But smaller communities often have multiple churches, all of which can have mental health information and support pamphlets available in view of their congregations.

Officials with the Kansas Department of Agriculture also are attempting to close the mental health care gap by partnering with Kansas Corn to offer the Kansas Ag Stress program. Created in 2019, the program website features a list of mental health care providers who offer telehealth services or specialize in mental health needs related to the ag industry.

Additionally, Kansas Farm Bureau has the Rural Minds Matter program that includes training materials, links to mental health support guides, and the Advocate of the Year awards that were created in 2024. The inaugural Advocate of the Year award winner was Fort Hays State University professor and therapist Will Stutterheim. The first Young Advocate of the Year award recipient was Destiny Johnson, a pre-K through 12th-grade social worker for Stafford Unified School District 349.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate agricultural producers have a higher suicide rate than other professions. The CDC report, published in 2020 with data sourced in 2016, found that men who worked in agriculture were at a greater risk, with a ratio of 43 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people. Statewide, the suicide rate for men is 19 per 100,000 people. According to data from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, more than 500 Kansans died by suicide in 2023.

Kansas Reflector is part of the States Newsroom, a network of similar news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.