Adam Miller was the type of Montana youth who spent more time outside on a mountain than he ever spent in the house. “He was always very outdoorsy,” said his sister Emily Miller, 17. Adam hunted big game and was rarely without a gun.
“He was a very gun-oriented, gun-safe person,” she said. “He grew up shooting.” But when Adam’s readily available firearms triangulated with mental illness and substance use, he succumbed to suicidal impulses.
He died of a self-inflicted gunshot in April 2024. “He struggled through middle school, through high school, all the way up until he was 21 [when he died],” said Miller, whose family lives in a rural area about 40 minutes from Anaconda. “He had guns completely accessible to him.
” Adam Miller died by suicide earlier this year. He was an avid outdoorsman, his sister said, but suffered from depression and had easy access to guns. Beneath Montana’s grand aesthetic is a bleak statistic: It’s one of the deadliest states in the nation for suicide.
The picture is grimmest in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County. “We have the highest rate in the state of Montana, which is terrifying,” said Kelly Irons, a local pediatric psychiatrist. Irons is Montana’s suicide prevention ambassador for the American Association of Pediatrics.
She recently received a $10,000 grant from the association to advocate across the state for safe gun storage to prevent suicide, particularly in youth. “The statistics speak for themselves,” she said. �.