This year Marquette will begin to act on its first-ever suicide prevention program, with funds provided by a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as part of the Campus Suicide Prevention Grants Program.
“The money will go toward increasing awareness about suicide and mental health issues related to suicide, and the second and major underpinning is suicide prevention,” said Bridgette Hensley, counselor and project director for the new suicide prevention program.
Now in her second year at Marquette, Hensley said she has only heard of one possible suicide death on campus that occurred four or five years ago.
The grants, funded by the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, are “match grants.” This means any school that applied was required to provide a one-to-one match of whatever amount they asked for. Marquette will receive $155,724 over the next three years, and will contribute the same amount over that time period. At the end of three years, Marquette will have put $311,448 toward suicide prevention, half of which will have been provided by SAMHSA.
“All colleges and universities, public or private, religious or non-denominational, community and state were eligible (to receive a grant); it all depended on how well they did in responding to the application,” said Dr. Richard McKeon, SAMHSA’s special adviser on suicide prevention.
In addition, the application process for funding requires a university to submit a plan relating how the grant money would be used to implement suicide prevention programs on campus.
“Independent reviewers evaluated and rated each of the grant applications, and the highest scores received the grant,” McKeon said. “If the grantee scored high enough, they would get what they budgeted for. It was not uncommon for the grantee to get what they wanted.”
This is the second year of the grant program and Marquette’s first year as a recipient. Whether or not more grants will continue to be awarded at the end of the established time period depends on what Congress instructs SAMHSA to do, McKeon said.
According to a recent research report about college suicides provided by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the second-leading cause of death among college students. Each year around 1,100 suicides and 24,000 attempts occur among students between the ages of 18 and 24. The estimated suicide rate on campuses is 7.5 per 100,000 students.
“Having death by suicide on campus is something that ripples out profoundly in the campus community,” said Dr. Ann Haas, research director for the AFSP. “Anything done to raise awareness of the problem can be helpful.”
It is a huge issue and an extremely troubling occurrence on college campuses, she said.
“Marquette has an interesting advantage,” Hensley said. “We’re fortunate enough to not have had a lot of suicide attempts, so we can do some very good preventative work.”
The preventative work on campus that will be put into play in the coming year involves a model called “Question, Persuade, Refer,” or “QPR.”
“Twenty-some faculty members on campus were trained in QPR last month,” Hensley said. In the future, “The plan is to first train people who would be considered first responders in a crisis (such as resident assistants) and to introduce the concept of a ‘gatekeeper.’ Gatekeepers are seen as the link between the person in the suicide crisis and the doorway to get help for them.”
Anybody, including students, may receive training to be a gatekeeper. Training will involve a PowerPoint presentation with much of the information from the QPR model, and some additional information that the Counseling Center added to make it more user-friendly, Hensley said.
“It will be less teaching and more of a didactic learning environment,” Hensley said. “The goal is not to train people to be counselors, just to help them recognize symptoms, know what to ask and who to refer them to.”,”Sara J. Martinez”
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