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Vol. 38, No. 18

5-1-2007
By: Adam King

Program reaches out to students considering suicide

When Darcy Haag Granello identifies a student with suicidal warning signs, she often walks them to counselors at the Younkin Success Center to get help. It’s this personal investment that often saves lives at Ohio State, she said.

But often students who die by suicide fail to approach someone who can help them and are left to decide on their own how best to deal with their mental anguish. There have been four Ohio State student suicides during spring quarter, including one at OSU Marion.

Granello, an associate professor of counselor education, hopes to change the culture at Ohio State with the Campus Suicide Prevention Program. The program will teach faculty, staff and students how to help those who often don’t feel they have anywhere else to turn.

The initiative, which also aims to create national standards and practices for college campuses, is in the first year of a three-year, $225,000 grant funded by the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, named for Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith’s son, who took his own life while attending Brigham Young.

“Most of the people on our campus want to reach out. They just don’t know what to do,” said Granello, who along with husband Paul Granello, also an associate professor of counselor education, makes up the program’s two principal investigators. “So we want them to be able to recognize which students are at risk and have the skills and knowledge to help them.”

Twenty-seven campus organizations and units and seven community agencies have signed on as partners, agreeing to participate in training, evaluation and outreach efforts associated with the grant.

The program, which began in October, will first train people from each of the participating units to be suicide prevention “gatekeepers,” or individuals who can recognize and respond to distressed students. For those who don’t have time to go through two hours of face-to-face training, the Campus Suicide Prevention Program also is developing a Web site that will teach the basics of recognizing warning signs and how to help.

Sarah Newlin

“One size doesn’t fit all, and because faculty and staff are so busy, we want to provide different training options,” said CSPP Manager Sarah Newlin. “We’re one of the first universities to create an online training program, so that gives us the freedom to be creative.”

The first goal of CSPP, however, is to remove the stigma of mental illness and show it’s as treatable as a physical ailment. For instance, Granello said, if people have too little dopamine in their brains, they end up with Parkinson’s disease. If they have too much of it, they develop schizophrenia.

“Warning signs of suicide should be taken just as seriously as signs of a heart attack,” Newlin said. “It’s been such a hush-hush subject, and that just exacerbates the stigma associated with it. We don’t want to glorify it, but we need people to know it happens. More importantly, we want people to know it is preventable.”

To educate the campus, CSPP and its partners are developing a social marketing campaign to be implemented sometime in the fall.

Granello said everyone can help prevent suicide on campus.

“The best thing we can do for people at risk for suicide is to reach out to them because they feel all alone,” Granello said. “You need to allow people to talk about their experiences and about feeling upset and then suggest they go to a counselor to talk about it.”
Added Newlin, “Each and every suicide on campus is a terrible tragedy, but the fact that we’re trying to do something to prevent future deaths and create a more supportive campus environment gives me hope.”

For more information, visit the CSPP Web site at education.osu.edu/paes/campussuicideprevention or other college-oriented sites including activemindsoncampus.org, sprc.org or halfofus.com.

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