Sara L. Prewett, Ph.D., is an educational researcher and consultant. Her expertise focuses on K-12 students’ academic and social-emotional wellbeing and health. She studies the mechanisms that promote forming high quality teacher-student relationships, particularly among adolescent youth. Much of her work is with teacher professional development and training in methods that support positive school and classroom climates such as teaching teachers how to use effective positive discipline techniques, specific praise, developing prosocial behaviors, and be autonomy supportive for their students.
Melissa A. Maras has a doctorate in clinical psychology and is a research and organizational consultant in Missouri. As a research consultant at the Assessment Resource Center, an engagement unit within the University of Missouri’s College of Education, Dr. Maras manages a portfolio of applied research and evaluation projects for clients in education, nonprofits, government, and business. Her work as an independent organizational consultant focuses on building capacity, strengthening partnerships, and leveraging resources among local schools and communities to facilitate effective, efficient mental health supports for all children.
Sara: Hi Melissa. It’s so great to have this conversation with you. I know you’re fielding a lot of questions from school personnel who want to support the mental health of their students. As we enter another school year amid a global pandemic, with ongoing uncertainty about the future, can you give us a sense of how you’re advising schools?
Melissa: Thanks so much for this opportunity to talk to you about this work. Right now, a lot of my conversations with educators focus on reinforcing and strengthening the many good systems and supports they already have in place. We have to remember that even before COVID-19 shut everything down, adults in our school communities worked hard to provide safe, consistent, and predictable places for many young people to grow and learn. Schools are a critical part of our community safety net for young people. Preparing for and responding to insurmountable and unprecedented challenges—the adults in our school communities are superheroes. So that’s the good news as we head into another challenging, unpredictable year.
That said, schools—meaning the adult humans working in and with schools, as well as schools as essential systems in our broader communities—have been hit pretty hard in this crisis. And our school friends are tired. They’re tired . . . and sad and relieved and traumatized and angry and hopeful and confused and worried and just all the things. And that’s okay. But what it means is that we have to take care of the adults in our school communities. If we want our young people to weather this storm, and we all do, we have to support the grown-ups giving them shelter.
So, honestly, a lot of my work with schools right now is focused on supporting the grown-ups in our school communities—making sure we’re not just doubling down on staff wellness but also connecting educators to additional supports when they need them. Because then the adults in our school communities can support young people when they’re struggling. So it’s super timely that we’re having this conversation now about suicide prevention in schools.
Sara: Schools are an integral part of suicide prevention in our communities, and I appreciate you highlighting the importance of including adults when we think about supporting our school communities. There’s a lot of information out there about suicide prevention. When it comes to preparing the adults to support young people in schools, how can administrators determine which tools and resources will be the most effective to equip teachers to identify and respond to warning signs?
Melissa: Great question. And you’re right, it can be overwhelming to sort through all the information that’s out there. So first off, I think it’s always helpful to remind adults in our school communities they don’t have to do this work alone. We should always frame suicide prevention as part of a broader, more comprehensive system of school mental health supports. Schools need to rely on community partners to be most effective. Some potential partners include local community mental health centers, local faith-based and civic leaders or organizations, local law enforcement, local health providers, and local business leaders.
Second, preventing suicide means promoting mental health. Promoting mental health prevents suicide. We should also be careful about our language here. A lot of people see “mental health” and immediately think about mental illness—hence some of the stigma around mental health. We all have mental health, just like we all have physical health, right? And we all know that we need to be thinking about our health all the time, not just when we get sick. The same is true for mental health.
So when I say “school mental health programs,” I’m talking about a continuum of supports that start with mental health promotion. Basic social-emotional learning is really the foundation of mental health: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Educators then continue with resources promoting prevention, early intervention, intervention, postvention, and recovery.
The basic premise here is a system of universal supports that provides every young person in the school community with the level of resources they need to be successful. No single person in a school community can be solely responsible for school mental health or suicide prevention, it has to be a schoolwide team effort. Within a school or district, our mental health professionals—the school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers—often lead this work in collaboration with school administration.
We must also keep families at the center of these efforts. Young people grow and learn in a variety of contexts with a number of different important adults, not just in schools. These broader collaborations also take us full circle to expanding suicide prevention for all people in our school communities.
When it comes to choosing resources, I encourage educators to invest time on the front end to carefully select quality, vetted practices, programs, and policies. A lot of good people have already done a lot of good work to develop and improve tools, and we’ll be more effective if we try to use some of those high-quality existing resources rather than recreate the wheel. Specifically in terms of suicide prevention, I always encourage schools to look first to their local and state community resources, particularly specific policy recommendations and requirements coming from their state departments of education and mental health. Any systems-level efforts typically include resources intentionally identified and promoted to compliment what schools are being asked to do.
State and national organizations that represent our local school mental health professionals often curate excellent resources. The National Association of School Psychologists has a terrific resource page with tangible resources for a broad audience on preventing youth suicide. Other national groups with a broader suicide lens have developed searchable resource databases specific to the school setting (e.g., Suicide Prevention Resource Center). Educators know preparation is key, and we all feel more competent and confident when we know how we should respond in a crisis. After a Suicide: A Toolkit for Schools has been a particularly valuable reference tool in my work with schools around suicide and other crises.
There are a number of training and technical assistance hubs designed to support dissemination and uptake of best practices in mental health, including suicide prevention in schools. In observance of September as Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, the National Training & Technical Assistance Center produced a comprehensive list of suicide prevention resources. And the Mental Health Technology Transfer Center Network does a really nice job spotlighting local and regional examples of school mental health in practice (e.g., MHTTC’s School Mental Health Initiative). Most of these national collectives also organize their efforts regionally and topically, so it’s worth spending just a few minutes understanding the wider scope of supports before diving into a particular area.
Sara: We partner with a lot of rural schools, and some struggle to access appropriate resources. What recommendations do you have for rural school district administrators and underfunded communities to access the best tools and strategies?
Melissa: I love rural schools, and I have learned so much about complex systems change and basic humanity partnering with educators in rural communities. The sad reality is that most young people face extensive, seemingly insurmountable barriers to accessing mental health care. What we know is that among those young people who do get the mental health supports they need, the majority access those resources in schools.
This is a complex problem without a simple, clean solution. I’m personally excited about innovations and opportunities emerging through telebehavioral health and consultation approaches like child psychiatry access programs, particularly the potential of connecting our most vulnerable, under-resourced, and marginalized educators and students to accessible, acceptable, and appropriate services. Just as distance learning has been transformed during the pandemic, there are a lot of technological innovations evolving to support and promote quality health care, including telebehavioral health. Some of this work has focused on helping our primary care doctors, like pediatricians, access specialized consultation from experts so they can better support patients in their practices (e.g., child psychiatry access projects).
It takes some elbow grease at multiple levels, and we must include our school-based mental health professionals in this work. It’s also especially important to connect these different kinds of resources with our schools in a way that makes sense for everyone while honoring education as the primary mission of schools. It might seem difficult to implement, but it’s worth it. Young people cannot learn when they’re hurting, and adults cannot help young people learn when they themselves are hurting. Educating through a pandemic has caused a lot of hardship, so we have to address that hurt at all levels.
Specific to suicide and other mental health crises, we need to talk more and louder and better about the various ways people can ask for help regardless of who they are and where they live and how they’re struggling. The National Training & Technical Assistance Center suicide resources I mentioned earlier list a slew of helplines geared toward different populations with different needs, and I try to start and end nearly every conversation I’m having these days by making sure everyone knows how to ask for help if they’re in immediate crisis (National Suicide Prevention Lifeline), 1-800-273-8255).
I want to emphasize that the people who answer these calls really are kind, empathetic, and helpful. More importantly, it’s totally okay to call even if you’re not sure if you need help or how someone could help. We should all feel like it’s okay to ask for help and know how to ask for help, period.
A lot of educators wonder about some elusive threshold that might justify calling a helpline. It’s a really common question: When do I know if it’s time to call and ask for help?
If you are asking that question, the answer is now. Call now. If you are wondering if it’s time to ask for help, it’s time to ask for help, and it’s completely okay to ask for help.
Ultimately, the research shows there are a couple key things we can do to save lives: encouraging people to ask for help when they need it (and making sure we listen when they do) and reducing access to lethal means. It’s a common myth that talking about suicide increases risk. It doesn’t. If you’re worried someone might be thinking about suicide, ask: are you thinking about killing yourself? None of us can be all things to all people, but each of us really can make a difference in helping to save a life.
At the end of the day, every adult working in a school community deserves to know that they have the tools, knowledge, and resources to do everything they can to keep young people safe, healthy, and ready to learn. One way to make sure we are doing everything we can is to keep the adults in our school communities safe as well, so they can keep being superheroes for our children.
Sara: This is all such great information. Let’s end with your final piece of advice. If you could tell adults in school systems one thing they should do or invest in related to suicide prevention, what would it be?
Melissa: Oh wow, that’s tough. I think I’d probably say something corny like keep fighting the good fight, take care of yourselves and each other. I really do think we have to keep coming back around to this question of how we are supporting everyone in our school community, including the grown-ups. Ultimately, I think I’d land on what I’ve said at the conclusion of nearly every opportunity I’ve had to learn with and from adults in our school communities over the past decade: Thank you for everything you do every day to keep all our young people safe and to help them succeed.
