When teens across the social spectrum, from band members to basketball stars, get involved in suicide prevention, more students are likely to consider asking adults for help.
That is the premise of Sources of Strength, a suicide prevention program developed in rural North Dakota and used in schools across the country.
“It really does have the potential to go very deep and reach every single corner of a school,” said Michelle Gonzales, a counselor on special assignment at Jeffco Public Schools on the Front Range. Some Jeffco schools implemented the program four years ago, and it spread across the district as it changed the culture at schools, she said.
Durango School District 9-R introduced Sources of Strength this fall in its middle and high schools after extensive research, said Leah Tanke, coordinator of school counseling. Bayfield High School and Animas High School have also started the program.
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office offered the schools a grant for the program based on the rising number of reports about suicide to the statewide Safe2Tell hotline.
In District 9-R, the number of suicide threats to Safe2Tell rose from six in the 2012-13 school year to 31 in the 2016-17 school year, based on data provided by the district.
The increase may be driven, in part, by greater awareness because the district has promoted the number, said Kathy Morris, safety and security coordinator for 9-R.
When school district staff train students in Signs of Suicide, a suicide and depression prevention curriculum, reports tend to spike and counselors clear their schedules after the trainings to work with students who are concerned, Tanke said. The Signs of Suicide trainings encourage students to talk to an adult if they see signs that a fellow student may be dealing with more than sadness. Counselors have done the training at Miller Middle School for two years and at Escalante Middle School for a year. Similar trainings were done previously.
Unlike an intervention training, Sources of Strength does not focus on the signs and risk factors for suicide. Rather, it emphasizes how to recover from abuse, addiction and other struggles, said Scott LoMurray, deputy director of Sources of Strength.
“Ultimately, our goal isn’t just to keep people alive, but it’s really to help people live healthy lives and full lives,” LoMurray said.
The program emphasizes eight strengths: family support, spirituality, positive friends, mentors, healthy activities, generosity, medical access and mental health.
The founders selected the eight strengths based on scientific research and conversations with people who attempted suicide, experienced severe addiction, depression and abuse, he said.
“It’s really hopeful in its tone and tenor. And really highlights the fact that the vast majority of people who struggle with feeling suicidal do not go on to die by suicide,” LoMurray said.
The program is based on a peer-mentorship model, meaning that each year, students are selected to be trained in Sources of Strength, so they learn about their own strengths and plan campaigns to spread positive messages. The program provides some templates for students to use or they can build their own.
In Jeffco schools, students wrote and delivered notes to adults in the building they would consider consulting with if they were having a hard time and posted the names of adults they trust publicly on a wall, Gonzales said.
“Campaigns like that start closing the gap between adults and kids,” she said.
Since the program has been introduced in Jeffco schools, some principals have seen the culture in their school change.
LoMurray likened the Sources of Strength model to the spread of habits through a social network. For example, if you are friends with a smoker, you are more likely to smoke.
In the same way, hope, resiliency and healthy coping can spread through a social network, he said.
“We’re not training our students to be these junior psychologists and counselors to go out and fix all of their friends, but rather equipping them and empowering them to be these agents of social change. ... They are the patient zero of an epidemic of health,” he said.
In Jeffco schools, the success of the program has varied. Some schools have seen their cultures flip and others have struggled. The schools that have seen the most success with the program are those that strategically selected youth leaders across every single social group, including the leader of the smokers’ pit, Gonzales said.
“It will go as deep and as far-reaching as the school is in strategically selecting our peer leaders,” she said.
The program can prompt short-term change in four months, a scientific trial showed, but the culture shift can take much longer, LoMurray said.
In rural North Dakota, Claudette McCleod has run a Sources of Strength program in the public schools for 12 years through Turtle Mountain Outreach of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
At the first two meetings, only a handful of kids showed up, so she went to the basketball coach and asked him to help her recruit the basketball team and the cheerleaders to lead the program.
“I made it cool. I had to make it cool if I wanted it to be successful,” she said.
Since then, youth leaders who participated in the program have gone on to become employees with Turtle Mountain Outreach, she said.
She attributes the program’s success to consistent meetings that help students build relationships with the adults in the group.
The program can also lead to less school conflict, violence and harassment, LoMurray said.
Sources of Strength has not been shown to decrease suicide rates, and he is not aware of any program that has been able to show a reduction in suicide rates because the size of a study needed to show a reduction in rates would have to be so large, he said.
However, the program is working on a study that may show whether it is associated with reducing suicide attempts, he said.
In Durango, District 9-R plans to implement the program for at least three years and evaluate whether it is making a difference through disciplinary referrals and surveys that ask kids about how connected they feel to adults and other kids at school, Tanke said.
“We want kids to have adults that they feel connected to and are comfortable going to with concerns,” she said.
The district would also like to see the number of students reporting to adults that they are thinking about hurting themselves decrease as a result of the program, she said.
