Planning Suicide Prevention In Schools

The most effective efforts when it comes to suicide prevention is when they come from a place of strategic planning and knowing the fact. By using strategic planning in schools when you want to tackle the issue of suicide in teens, you can learn the specific problems in different populations. You can focus resources like a mental health toolkit, and learning and activities to help prioritize and prevent suicide.

What does this kind of approach look like?

When you are planning this approach for your school the steps should include the following;

1. Collect data and look at resources to better understand how suicide impacts the community and the school and describe what the problem is.
2. Identify some realistic long-term goals that are possible for you and your school to achieve, for example, perhaps to lower the rate of suicide in one specific group.
3. Identify and then prioritize the main risk factors and what protective factors can help with your prevention approach.
4. Find and develop interventions that will address the problem, looking at resources like a behavioral health toolkit, different activities, different education opportunities and so on.
5. Then you should develop an evaluation plan to look at the efforts made and see what kind of progress is made in achieving those long-term goals. Look at what needs expanding, and what needs refining, and then think about the next steps to take.
6. Finally, it is time to implement the activities and actions you are taking to achieve those goals. Then evaluate that to monitor the process, solve any issues that might come up and improve the efforts towards suicide prevention that are made.

These steps should be followed in the order above but it is completely normal to move back and forth between them as you change your strategy, choose different approaches, achieve certain goals and want to set new ones and so on. You might find after some time that there is a new group that is more at risk, or that you need a certain different approach. Flexibility and staying educated and ready to act are important qualities.

Make use of the resources you can find

There are different resources out there, but something worth looking into for parents, teachers, and even healthcare people are both the SPTS behavioral health toolkit and mental health toolkit. The behavioral kit helps families and teachers in identifying worrying behaviors in the teens they know that might mean they are suicidal. Identifying warning signs is important and having the right knowledge means you can better guide them and keep them safe. It also means you know when to seek help from mental health professionals. As well as being found in schools it can also be found in doctor’s offices as it focuses on prevention after identification so the teen does not reach that crisis point. The mental kit is guidance for parents who are concerned about the mental health of their teen and need guidance with things like how to speak to them, what to look for and how to deal with a teen in an emotional breakdown.