Grantee Types: Garrett Lee Smith Campus

California State University Monterey Bay

The California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) GLS Campus Suicide Prevention Project aligns with the Higher Education Mental Health Alliance’s belief that campuses can create a culture of caring through specific and continuous outreach and education. Establishing an infrastructure of prevention, identification, and risk reduction – through gatekeeper training, educational seminars, and materials – encourages shared responsibility to support students. This project serves all members of the campus community: students, staff, faculty, administrators, and family/supporters. This is done through collaboration with on- and off-campus stakeholders. All activities address the needs of the diverse and multicultural population at one of the youngest campuses in the California State University system. The current CSUMB student population identifies as 63% (4781) female and 37% (2835) male, with 6% self-identifying as African American, 7% as Asian American, 39% as Latino, 1% as Native American, 1% as Pacific Islander, 8% as two or more races, 32% as White, and 6% as other/decline.

Of the 918 undergraduate students participating in the Spring 2015 administration of the National College Health Assessment, 11.7% indicated that they had seriously considered suicide at least once in the previous 12 months (up from 8.6% in 2013) and 2.7% self-reported having made a suicide attempt (up from 2.3%). Fall 2015 data from the CSUMB Personal Growth and Counseling Center indicated 10 students were involuntarily hospitalized for suicidal ideation, while five made an actual suicide attempt within the previous year.

Throughout the lifetime of the project, 63 CSUMB community members will complete gatekeeper training: 18 in year one, 21 in year two, and 24 in year three. These individuals will serve as members of the Otter Support Network. By the end of the project, an additional 1920 individuals will participate in suicide prevention educational seminars – 320 per semester, 640 per academic year. Educational seminars will help break down negative attitudes, stigma, and barriers to help seeking for individuals in mental health crises. Suicide prevention and educational materials for family members and supporters will be developed and provided through a variety of methods, including supporter orientation, parent newsletters, websites, and social media.

California State University – Long Beach

California State University, Long Beach has established Project OCEAN (On Campus Emergency Assistance Network). The overall goal of Project OCEAN is to prevent suicide by promoting a campus climate that honors the lives of all students while encouraging and allowing them to seek support when needed. The project targets “high-risk” students (e.g. students with disabilities, first generation students, low-income students, and graduate students from the Schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering) and provides them with increased education, screening, and support services.

Project OCEAN promotes access to existing campus mental health services by training a cadre of faculty, staff, and students in appropriate referral strategies using the QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) program. Project staff members also work with student focus groups to formulate and produce a social marketing campaign. Additionally, clinical staff members work to increase screenings for depression, substance abuse, and other mental disorders that put students at higher risk for suicide. Project materials are distributed to parents through parent orientation programs and the University Parents’ Council. Evaluation strategies include a student survey designed to measure two outcomes: 1) Targeted students will report decreases in measures of poor mental health/depression; and 2) Students will report increased awareness and regard for campus mental health services.

California State University – Fullerton

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among college students. While attending college is a protective factor against suicide compared to non-school attending 18-24 year old category, transitioning to a college campus can be an overwhelming experience. California State University, Fullerton is the largest state university among the twenty three California State University campuses, with a rich and diverse student demographic. With 4% of CSUF students participating in the International Education Program, and most CSUF students working at least 10 hours per week, CSUF students are under tremendous amounts of stress. The Campus Suicide Prevention Project at CSUF will focus on establishing a Crisis Response Team and protocol to better assist the campus community to respond to a suicide or suicide attempt. Other goals of the project include enhanced faculty, staff and student training to better recognize signs of at risk students in order to refer for mental health treatment. The project will focus on reducing the stigma to receiving treatment for mental health conditions. This will be accomplished by conducting a social marketing campaign, targeting multicultural and ethnic populations, as these student groups are less likely to seek treatment for mental health conditions. This project will implement a tracking system to better quantify mental health issues of CSUF students so as to prioritize services and programming to address this public health concern.

Buffalo State College

Buffalo State Cares will be a comprehensive campus suicide prevention program that builds on Buffalo State College (BSC) current efforts by enhancing campus and community outreach about suicide in order to create a social climate that encourages detection of suicidal ideation/ behavior, promotes referrals to mental health services, and results in increased help-seeking behavior by students. A variety of outreach activities to students and faculty are proposed: a PSA campaign to increase awareness of the National Suicide Prevention LifeLine, a project website, and new informational materials. Outreach to neighborhoods surrounding the campus where students and their families live and work will be undertaken, as well as the creation of innovative and culturally competent online and in-person training for students, faculty, families, and community partners about suicide prevention, using the QPR model as its basis. Special attention will be paid to high-risk groups on campus. Since the clinicians currently conducting this training are also experiencing a high demand for their counseling services, thereby limiting outreach and education efforts, funding for an outreach worker will help alleviate the burden on them, allowing more training to occur. Additionally, Buffalo State Cares will increase collaboration among stakeholders to better support crisis management procedures for students with mental and behavioral health problems. Finally, a symposium will be planned at the end of the funding period to reflect upon program successes, to share information with campus/community partners and SUNY affiliates, and to plan for sustainability. Buffalo State Cares will support SAMHSAs first strategic initiative and the JED Foundations/Suicide Prevention Resource Center Comprehensive Approach to Campus Suicide Prevention.

BSC has undertaken a strategic plan to strengthen the campus community through a focus on caring and civility, which requires students to commit to being responsible for their own and others actions. The Buffalo State Cares suicide prevention program reinforces this concept and will derive benefit from this campus-wide initiative. Various administrators, faculty, and student groups have worked together in developing this proposal to integrate suicide prevention awareness into the campus infrastructure. Commitments have also been received from a wide array of community partners.

Measurements of how many individuals will be served quarterly, annually, and throughout the lifetime of the project will be undertaken for pre/post-interventions, for all educational components of the program, and for all services rendered. Buffalo State College intends to reach approximately 20% of its student population annually, with the program affecting 60% of students by the end of the grant allocation.

Bowling Green State University

Empowering a Community: Creating a Culture of Care for Suicide Prevention, is Bowling Green State University’s (BGSU) comprehensive approach to suicide prevention. The project will develop initiatives to educate the campus about the warning signs of suicide, to empower them to intervene, to reduce stigma associated with help seeking behaviors, to promote a culture of shared responsibility for suicide prevention, and to increase awareness of resources for support.

BGSU enrolls nearly 18,000 students on its main campus in Bowling Green Ohio. The current student population encompasses students with permanent residences in 50 U.S. states and 70 other countries. 620 students are classified as international. Ethnic and racial minority students made up about 19 percent of the entering fall 2010 class, including 2,970 African-American, Native American, Hispanic, and Asian-Pacific Island students. 1,880 enrolled undergraduates are over the age of 25. Empowering a Community is designed to reach the entire student body as well as all employees of the University. Strategic marketing and program development will insure that all members of the campus are included in this project. Specific outreach to traditionally underserved and underrepresented groups (e.g. African American, Latino/a, Native American, Asian American, International, Veteran and LGBT students) will be conducted. In addition to social marketing, the project will employ both QPR and At-Risk to empower both students and employees to detect and intervene with students who may be experiencing psychological distress. The project will also seek to raise awareness on campus by taking a leadership role in forming more systemic campus partnerships with community based suicide prevention initiatives that already exist through the involvement of student groups, campus organizations, and administration.

Boston University

The Boston University Suicide Prevention Program (BUSPP) has worked to develop and support a multimodal, comprehensive suicide prevention program with Boston University (BU) faculty, staff, parents, families, students, and targeted student groups including peer leaders, Reserve Officers’s Training Corps cadets, international students, Greek Life members, athletes, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender student communities on campus.

We have worked to achieve all of the following:1.Increase awareness, both universally and within these targeted populations, of the signs and symptoms of depression, student distress, suicide risk, and helpful university resources.2.Increase help-seeking behaviors by decreasing barriers including stigma, lack of awareness, cultural barriers, and misinformation that inhibit utilization of mental health services and resources on our campus and within our community.3.Enhance linkages within the university community between mental health services, substance abuse services, gatekeepers, faculty, staff, students, families, and relevant external community services in such a way that they are sustainable and promote a BU culture of wellness.

The BUSPP activities in our first year have included the implementation of the evidence-based Student Support Network Training (a Cohort II product from Worcester Polytechnic Institute) that teaches students to be empathetic listeners and excellent referrers to university resources. To date we have trained 250 students. Educational seminars have been given to most departments on campus about campus suicide and mental health promotion. Suicide prevention materials including a ruler to measure the signs of distress have been developed and handed out at large university functions such as resident assistant orientation, freshman orientation, resource tables during finals, and student activities fairs. A website (http://www.bu.edu/mentalhealth) was unveiled last spring that depicts student voices sharing how important seeking help was to their ability to be well and succeed in college when they were distressed. This website was the product of the development of a mental health roundtable that meets regularly to increase communication and collaboration between university gatekeepers and students. Two webinars on mental health and suicide have been developed and delivered to all 4,000 freshmen through the software Student Health 101. Information about mental health distress and the opportunity to be involved in the Student Support Network Training has been disseminated through the monthly electronic family news. We have spent the year marketing with high visibility for the entire university, the importance of positive mental health and seeking help when distressed. Our marketing activities have included presentations to the BU leadership councils, implementation of National Depression Screening Day across the university, and publication of several front-page articles in the university media. The goal has been to reduce the shame and stigma that students and staff feel. In addition, we have worked closely as Active Minds faculty advisors. Last spring we implemented a POST SECRET project that resulted in 1,000 BU students sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings on decorated postcards that were displayed at three sites across campus.

Bluefield State College

The purpose of the Bluefield State College CARES (Creating Awareness Regarding Suicide) Program is to address suicidal ideation on campus and in the community through a comprehensive program of awareness and early intervention.

Located in the southern West Virginia coal fields, Bluefield State College is a commuter school that serves a region replete in suicide risk factors, including substance abuse, gender identity, and mental health disorders. BSC CARES will (A) formalize a suicide-crisis response protocol; (B) broaden awareness of risk factors and behaviors through gatekeeper training, student seminars and publications/advertisements; and (C) expand access to mental health and suicide prevention services and resources. Efforts will extend beyond campus in the form of (D) providing risk factor awareness and response training to public points of contact such as nurses, teachers and foster parents and (E) providing multiple points of access to the local mental services infrastructure. BSC CARES expects to reach 50% of the population at Bluefield State College campus while reaching out to the community at an estimate of 500-1000 individuals per year.

Blue Mountain Community College

Blue Mountain Community College (BMCC), the only comprehensive community college in rural northeastern Oregon, plans to develop and establish a network-based infrastructure that supports suicide prevention awareness education and training for faculty, staff, students, and student families throughout the college’s 18,000-square-mile service area. BMCC currently provides no health or mental health services for students except a part- time student counselor intern at the Pendleton campus. The urgency of addressing this critical institutional gap was made evident by BMCC’s lack of preparedness when two students committed suicide during the 2003-04 academic year. The goal of this project is to infuse suicide prevention awareness and training throughout the college’’ eight locations. The grant will support six primary activities: 1. Develop training programs for students and college personnel using external local resources available through partnerships such as the Umatilla-Morrow Counties’ Emergency Response Crisis Management Coalition. 2. Solidify networks with local health care providers and integrate the network processes and services into an updated crisis response plan for the college. 3. Develop and implement educational seminars for students and staff. 4. Promote linkages to local hotlines and/or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. 5. Prepare and disseminate informational materials that address warning signs and provide guidelines for referral and other responses. 6. Prepare educational materials for families of BMCC students.

Bloomsburg University

The Comprehensive Campus Suicide Prevention (CCSP) project for Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania is designed to increase student, faculty, and staff awareness of suicide risk factors and signs of potential suicidal behavior in university students. The program will be directed at providing a wide range of educational programs for students, staff, faculty, and families of students as well as increased promotion of the available resources to help those students in need of help. Peer support programs will be developed with mechanisms such as telephone support and on-line support made available to help students’ suffering from emotional problems or from situational/maturational crises. The program will be used to enhance and augment the current services available on the university campus, such as the campus Counseling Center, Student Health Services, and NAMI-on-Campus programs. It has long been recognized that many students do not actively seek help for mental health issues due to stigma, lack of knowledge, etc.

Our hope is that by initially preparing a core group of faculty, staff, and students trained as trainers in suicide prevention, we will then be able to conduct multiple educational offerings on campus through a wide variety of venues such as general education values classes, university seminars, freshmen orientation programs, faculty development programs, trainings for residence hall advisors and leaders of student organizations, etc. The primary goal of the project will be to educate everyone on campus (students, faculty, and staff) regarding suicide risk factors, ways to help the suicidal student access help, and provide support to both the individual who is engaging in self-destructive behaviors as well as for those who are trying to help. In addition, a more detailed suicide response plan will be developed for the university outlining the steps that need to be taken when a student is displaying behaviors indicative of suicide as well as what to do in the case of a suicide attempt or completed suicide. The plan will also address plans for post-suicide intervention services that will be used to help students, faculty, staff, etc. in the event of a completed suicide.

The CCSP will strive to incorporate the involvement of services and support from community agencies in and around Bloomsburg University, including The Bloomsburg Hospital which has a 20-bed inpatient mental health unit, CMSU Columbia/Montour/ Snyder/Union County Mental Health-Mental Retardation) program, NAMI- on-Campus, the local Mental Health Association, local providers of psychological and counseling services, as well as, the university’s psychology and social work clubs and student nurses association. Outreach to areas in and surrounding the campus where students congregate such as local bars/restaurants, etc. will be part of the plan, as well.

Bethune Cookman University

Bethune-Cookman University, a historical black university associated with the United Methodist Church seeks SAMHSA funding to establish a Campus Wide Suicide Prevention Program. Specifically, the university will develop an infrastructure within its Office of Student Affairs to establish a network of key gatekeepers, including health, mental health, residence hall, and security staff, faculty, administrators, student government leaders and community behavioral health partners who will design and implement a strategic plan to diminish or eliminate risk factors that predispose students to suicidal ideation and prevent suicidal attempts and other behavioral health problems. This network of services will be known as Project STEPS-Survival Through Education Prevention and Services.

Project STEPS’s major objectivesinclude: a) providing Q(question) P(persuade) and R(refer) training to key gatekeepers, students and their parents; b) facilitating educational seminars and cultural diversity workshops to students, their parents, faculty, and staff on the myths and stigma associated with suicide and depression, c) promoting help-seeking behaviors within the student body by replacing the negative attitudes of the behavioral health systems held by many African-Americans, d) distributing informational literature on suicide and depression throughout the campus and at all organized student activities; e) strengthening the relationships of off-campus community behavioral health providers, and f) providing educational information to parents on campus, over the Internet, through mail, and through a Campus Wide Suicide Hot Line. Project STEPS has selected this as the bedrock of its training/educational seminars and workshops for administrators, faculty, and staff, gatekeepers, the student body and their parents. The QPR approach to training utilizing various levels within a community is compatible with Project STEP’s philosophy of serving the campus where at-risk students reside as opposed to identifying individual students in need. QPR training recognizes that students who most need help in a suicidal crisis are the least likely to seek it, or demonstrate warning signs of their distress. Therefore, the project will have a special focus on entering freshmen and their parents or caregivers, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

The project will serve an average of 1200 students and 150 faculty and staff over the life of the project. Programming will improve the quality and intensity of services for the target populations through implementation of “best practice” suicide prevention approaches, modified to address the unique needs of a predominantly African-American student body. Services will be implemented through a system of care emphasizing a person-centered, strength-based approach to self harm with family involvement and peer support. The project will promote a prevention delivery system that addresses student body, familial, faculty and staff needs anchored in HBCU tradition and in nearby communities where participants reside, to ensure continuity of care.