Engaging Student Voices in Campus Suicide Prevention Efforts
In order for campus suicide prevention initiatives to be effective and appropriate, students voices must be included in all levels of prevention work, from strategic planning to implementation and evaluation. In this webinar, three universities in Wisconsin will share their varied approaches to engaging student stakeholders in suicide prevention efforts and how doing so helped make their suicide prevention activities more successful. Presenters will provide overviews of various models for student engagement, share how to translate student engagement initiatives to other campuses, and discuss challenges, successes, and lessons learned. The three presenters are either formerly or currently project staff for Garrett Lee Smith Suicide Prevention grants at their universities.
Speakers:
Valerie Donovan, MS, CRC, works in Campus Health Initiatives and Prevention at University Health Services as the Suicide Prevention Coordinator in January 2013. In this role she addresses suicide as a public health issue on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus as a part of a multi-faceted strategy for engaging with partners on broader student mental health needs. With campus and community partners, she works to strengthen campus practices and policies relating to suicide prevention and mental health services, reduce stigma surrounding mental health issues, provide education to the campus community, and promote help-seeking behaviors among students. She is the chair of UW-Madison’s Suicide Prevention Council and also works to support student activists engaged in suicide prevention and mental health promotion. She holds a master’s degree in Rehabilitation Counseling from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jennifer J. Muehlenkamp, Ph.D., received her doctorate in clinical psychology, with a specialty focus on Suicidology, from Northern Illinois University in 2005. In addition to having her scholarly work recognized by awards from the American Association of Suicidology, Dr. Muehlenkamp provides frequent clinically-focused workshops on topics related to self-injury and suicide risk detection, intervention, and prevention. She launched early programming focused on suicide prevention at UWEC in the spring of 2012, and is currently the project director of UW-Eau Claire’s GLS Campus Suicide Prevention grant awarded by SAMHSA in 2014.
Kelley Tipton, MPH, is the Coordinator for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s (UWM) Suicide Prevention Project. In this role, she provides leadership for project evaluation activities, coordinates development of educational materials, the Campus Connect Suicide Prevention training program, and the Life Happens. STUDENTS CONNECT! College SOS training program. Ms. Tipton received her B.S. from Kentucky State University (Frankfort, KY) and earned her MPH from West Chester University (West Chester, PA). Prior to joining UWM, she spent 9 years working with ECRI Institute (Plymouth Meeting, PA) as a healthcare technology analyst. She provided procurement advice to member hospitals, conducted comparative effectiveness reviews, and collaborated on manuscripts for the Annals of Internal Medicine and Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.