Mental health isn’t an unfamiliar topic in Montana.

For years, the Treasure State has been at the top of lists for states with the most severe suicide rates.

Even under the best circumstances, mental health care providers are limited, if not scarce. And, a host of factors make mental health a difficult, persistent problem.

This year, journalism students at the University of Montana School of Journalism tackled the multi-faceted challenges of mental health under the Big Sky. The Daily Montanan, in collaboration with the students, will be publishing a series of articles from the students’ publication, Byline magazine, every Sunday through March, in an effort to highlight the important work of the journalists and the timely topic of mental health in Montana.

Daily Montanan editor Darrell Ehrlick sat down with Byline editor-in-chief McKenna Johnson for an interview about the reporting challenges and findings the team discovered while working intensively on the subject.

Please note this interview has been edited for length and clarity:

Daily Montanan: Tell me a little bit about the genesis. Where did you get the idea for this particular topic?

McKenna Johnson: I’m not entirely sure who came up with that idea. We ended up settling on mental health in Montana, specifically we wanted to focus on just stories in Montana. And we had thought, ‘You know, we could go broad; we could go more specific,’ but I think this is what is going to serve our audience best if we focus on mental health in Montana. We wanted to focus on stories that we didn’t see as much.

DM:  Did it take a lot of convincing the staff that this was a good topic, or was there a hunger for this topic? Because it’s sometimes a tough topic to report and cover.

Johnson: I don’t think it took much convincing at all. I think if there were any people who weren’t super convinced they didn’t show it, or it was really easy to find different niches within that topic. I think once people got into the process, they realized there are so many different ways you can go with this topic. There’s so much that we mentioned that we talked about that we didn’t get to put in the final magazine, and I think that’s really a testament to just how how eager everyone was to dive into these stories. Kind of the hard part was really picking and choosing where to focus our attention. You know, we have a classroom situation. We only have a semester. We had so much interest in so many specific topics to choose from within the realm of mental health and I think part of that, too, is our generation specifically. I think the conversations we’re having around mental health are becoming a little bit more free flowing, and people want to talk about these stories. And some of it was we maybe thought there was a story that was done on a topic that we thought was done really well and we wanted to dive deeper into it. And then there were stories that maybe we didn’t see published and so we wanted to go write those ourselves. You’re right: It can be a really hard topic to talk about. And so we decided we were going to break it down a little bit, have that experience of reporting on something hard that makes sense.

DM: It’s interesting to me that you would choose that topic because to me that’s a really hard topic. It can be nuanced. It’s not exactly always an uplifting topic. I mean, the first story you did was on isolation and suicide. Did you have any hesitation as the editor or did the staff have hesitation about covering a topic that, I think as you mentioned it in your column, has a taboo surrounding it?

Johnson: We had a lot of conversations on getting kind of the whole picture on mental health. This was the state of mental health in Montana. Like you said, that first story by a reporter was about isolation and suicide and all of the factors that you know, make Montana kind of a unique situation in that regard. We wanted to do those hard stories, but I think we talked a lot about balancing out with, like, for example, in the print edition right after that story is a little bit of a lighter piece about crisis line workers and one of the callers. We talk about what works for a crisis line and talk about methods that people are doing to uplift — maybe that wasn’t quite the right word — but like, combat some of the harder stuff with mental health. So we wanted that to be representative in our coverage.

DM: What were you most surprised to learn about mental health in Montana?

Johnson:  One of the facts that I was most surprised to learn in this came from a guest speaker that we had come into the class while we were kind of early on in our pitching stage of the magazine. It came in from NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Health, which talked about in Montana, how two of the most at-risk groups for mental health challenges are Indigenous men and then kind of middle-aged, most often, white ranchers. And so that was that was one of the statistics that kind of sparked that first story about what are all of these factors that go into mental health in Montana?  Those are two demographics that you might not know.

DM:  So after doing this and really studying the issue intensively, what do you think you can say definitively about mental health in Montana as it currently is?

Johnson: I think there’s always something we can do to provide more resources, more open conversations and reaching out to communities who don’t have those resources. People in general, they’re just so resilient. And you know, I think I mentioned it to in my editor’s column: Everyone can be susceptible to mental health challenges. We should have and be able to have these open conversations about it, while also recognizing like how hard it is to deal with it.  I think that was something that just from multiple sources in every story that kind of shines through is just the resiliency of people, especially here in Montana.

DM: Is there something about Montana that makes this series of stories different than what they would be in other states?

Johnson: We tried to choose stories that were very specific to people in Montana, and some of the stories might be a little bit more broad, but specific to a Montana angle. I think in some ways, yes. And in some ways, no, because I think Montana is such a special place. We have the great outdoors, and then with that comes some of the struggles. We keep coming back to isolation, for example, that you might not get if you’re going to do a mental health magazine in a state like New York.

DM: Was there anything the staff really wrestled with when it came to covering a particular topic or aspect of mental health in Montana?

Johnson: I think one thing that we wrestled with was we didn’t want to have the whole magazine be like: Oh my gosh, the state of mental health in Montana is horrible. And it’s never gonna get like we want it to be And one of the things that we kind of realized going into it is that not every story, but a couple of the stories, tended to center on suicide.  We kind of wrestled with whether that is  gonna be like a deterrent for some people because it is such a hard topic to cover and report. And we also really recognized it’s a hard topic to read about, too. Some of the stories maybe didn’t set out to be about something like that, but that’s where the source landed. And that’s where the stories ended up going. And so we wanted it to be honest.

DM: How did you overcome the kind of idea that talking about suicide, or mental health might be damaging to an audience? You know, there’s always been that, ‘If you mention it, it might happen?’ Or you might you might be giving suicide or mental health too much attention.

Johnson: I don’t think we spent too much time worrying about it because we had made the decision that we were going to tackle some of those hard topics. We brought in a couple of guest speakers. And we looked at how do you cover these while being sensitive? We sat down a lot with reporters and the faculty advisors when we were looking at some of those suicide stories. We really looked at, are we covering these in a sensitive way? Are we being respectful to the sources? Are we doing this in a way that is going to reduce harm and also tell the truth?  I feel like we talked about a lot of that in journalism school, and so we knew we wanted to cover those topics. And so we didn’t necessarily shy away from them. It was more of a question of: OK, how do you do this right?

DM: So, I mean, you you asked the question: How do you do it right?

Johnson: I mean, it’s hard. I don’t know if I have have a wonderful answer. And, you know, I still wake up and think about it sometimes. I really think it comes down to reading it and thinking, ‘OK, if I was the source, how would I take it,  reading this, or if I was someone coming at this like from a completely blank slate? How would I read this, and thinking about it from different angles, and  really having having empathy in your reporting — we talked about that a lot, too. So it’s hard and I don’t have an easy answer.

DM: How did you make sure that you were taking care of the staff’s mental health because reporting on mental health can be a challenge to your mental health?

Johnson: For me as a leader, I tried to check in with people and tried to have open lines of communication. I think one thing we tried to convey to our staff is like, ‘You guys, we are people first,  this is really hard to report on mental health.’ We brought in right at the beginning some guest speakers who had covered very mentally taxing topics, and they talked about their coping mechanisms and, and things like that, that we can use. We tried to have some open dialogue, open conversation about it, and recognize that this is gonna be a really hard thing we’re doing. Also, we were like, it’s fine not to be fine all the time, if that makes sense.

DM: Let’s talk for a moment about if you could have a magic wand or you could be a policy director, high up in the state, what would your recommendations be to improve mental health in Montana?

Johnson: One of the things is the Mental Health Commission (being led by Rep. Bob Keenan), being very aware of the power of this commission and using it correctly.  I really think another thing that is talked about is mental health in Montana is something that a lot of people struggle with, it’s just a stigma. And I think anything that people can do, to just bring about open conversations and try to decrease that level of stigma that people have is one thing that people can do to make the situation better because it’s really hard to offer resources and help people without breaking down that stigma.

DM: Did you find that it was as much of a stigma as you thought? In other words, was it hard to get people to share their stories?

Johnson: Depending on the story, some of them were a little bit harder. Some needed a little bit more time and being patient and letting people be comfortable with the idea of opening up. I think what a lot of people found is a lot of people want to talk about their story, right? And so when somebody comes and says: We want to hear your story, we want to tell it, what what can we do to help tell your story? I think people in general found that people were very open to talking about your story, and it can be hard sometimes to ask, especially when you’re talking about such a tough atopic, but I think sometimes we can, as reporters, get in our own head and believe they might not want to talk about it, but I think in our experience, people were very open to sharing their stories.

DM: What has been the reaction of people who have read the magazine?

Johnson: It’s still pretty fresh out there. But so far, it’s been pretty positive.

DM: So what do you hope for this publication? What do you hope people take from it?

Johnson: If we can bring a little bit of understanding of the state of mental health in Montana. If this magazine reaches someone who maybe is struggling but doesn’t have the resources or you know, the knowledge to maybe recognize they’re struggling or or reach out and talk. They might see story like this and maybe resonate with someone in the magazine and maybe that will help them in their situation. Or maybe they’ll give it to someone who will relate to it or get them someone to read and go, ‘Oh, I’m not alone in that situation.’ Like I said, there were so many things that we didn’t get to cover. But if we can bring a story to someone that might make them think a little bit more about mental health and how they think about mental health and how it plays a role in their lives, maybe they’ll want to read even more about it and educate themselves even more.

DM: Do you think just having the conversations, being out there having a publication, having photographers, having editors, having people research it, do you think that is beneficial in and of itself?

Johnson: It’s very beneficial having those conversations, I think, but coming back to stigma, hopefully this magazine we’re putting out does, just even if it’s just a little bit, chip away at that stigma. At least it’s something people can go to that will hopefully inspire people to have have conversations

DM: Do you think it is becoming easier for us to talk about mental health, mental illness?

Johnson: I think it’s definitely becoming easier. I definitely don’t think the work is totally done, and I don’t know if it will ever be done. I think it’s becoming easier to report and just easier to talk about. In general even, not in a journalistic sense, if I’m just talking with my friends. Especially after doing doing a project like this, I feel a lot more comfortable talking to people about mental health than I did when I started. Even if when I when I started this at the beginning of the semester I thought I felt really comfortable. Now, on the other side of it, I’m like, Oh my gosh, I feel so much more comfortable talking about mental health to people than I did before.