YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning County commissioners on Thursday appointed Ryan Tekac, Mahoning County health commissioner, to establish a suicide fatality review committee for Mahoning County.

Audrey Tillis, Mahoning County administrator, said Tekac will be working with the Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board and the city of Youngstown to establish the committee.

Duane Piccirilli, executive director of the mental health and recovery board, who will help lead the committee as a “joint venture,” said the group will “review any suicide, working with the coroner’s office, that may have been preventable and look at some of the situations and see how maybe we can provide some support so something like this doesn’t happen again.”

He said he foresees having additional participants being involved in certain deaths, such as the Veterans Service Commission if the person who died was a veteran.

Piccirilli said the COVID-19 pandemic has “shown an increase in anxiety and depression,” but not suicides. He said he believes it is because there was “a lot of support out there. People were home. They were together. And you saw more people reaching out to each other during the pandemic.” At the same time, a “pandemic isolates you,” he said.

The most recent data on suicides in Mahoning County indicates that the county’s suicide rate per 100,000 people peaked in 2009 at 12.5 but dropped to 6.6 in 2010 and has steadily risen since then to 11.2 in 2018.

The more current statistic Piccirilli could cite was the number of calls to the Help Network of Northeast Ohio in Youngstown, which handles suicide-related calls.

He said it took 1,527 suicide-related calls from July of 2020 to June of 2021. There were 1,791 the previous year.

Piccirilli said regardless of statistics, “Suicide is a serious public health problem, and that is why we are working closely with the Mahoning County Health Department” on the new committee.

The phone numbers for someone needing assistance is 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and 330-747-2696 for the local Help Network.

Tekac said new Ohio legislation approved last year gives a county the opportunity to establish a child-fatality review committee, similar to drug overdose review committees, child-fatality review committees and fetal-infant mortality review committees.

They are all operated through Ohio health departments, Tekac said

“Duane and I have agreed we would both co-lead this committee, and then we would form it based off of the requirements under” state law, Tekac said.

“It really gives us the opportunity to look at a number of cases and give an in-depth review the unfortunate suicides that are occurring,” Tekac said. “By looking into some of these cases, we will try to determine if they were preventable. Is there something that we may be missing that we can prevent in the future?”

He said it’s great that the county commissioners are supporting the creation of the committee by having he and Piccirilli lead it.