Suicide prevention training being offered in Washington schools, communities

Suicide prevention training and crisis preparation will be provided to schools and communities in three rural Washington counties.

The efforts are funded through two grants from the Washington Women’s Foundation and the Washington state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

“We believe that suicide prevention is everybody’s business,” Jennifer Barron, project director at Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention, said in a press release. “Everybody in a community has the ability to know warning signs, to be able to talk to the suicidal person and to get help. That’s really the goal of putting the two grants together.”

The efforts will focus on Island, Okanogan and Stevens counties, which had suicide rates of 20.4, 25.2 and 16.2 per 100,000 persons between 2009 and 2013, compared with 14.5 per 100,000 persons for Washington overall.

Forefront will provide 6-hour training sessions to mental health and health care professionals and shorter sessions for school employees and any other interested community members.

Coalitions will be created to determine optimal approaches to suicide prevention for each community’s needs.

Barron hopes to incorporate the Forefront Cares program, which matches individuals who have lost loved ones to suicide with individuals newly bereaved by suicide for one-on-one telephone support.

“People are nervous about the subject and wonder if talking about it is going to help or make things worse,” Caitlin Jones, a school-based mental health counselor in Island County, said in the release. “It’s a somewhat taboo subject, and it’s a scary subject. So just getting the information out there can really empower adults as well as kids, I think, to be able to identify the signs and speak up if they're seeing something.”