(The Center Square) – As young people face increasing mental health challenges, the University of North Carolina System is ramping up a suicide prevention training program for future principals and teachers.
The Mental Health First Aid initiative will train 420 K-12 educators this academic year, the university says.
“This it not something they are taught as part of their program,” Suzie Baker, assistant vice president for student affairs for the UNC System, told The Center Square. “It’s outside of the scope of the program and so the training arms them with the confidence to be able to respond to students and to ask students the questions.”
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among young people in North Carolina between the ages 10-18, the university system said.
Today’s students are very “digitally connected,” Baker said, which poses a host of mental health challenges not faced by earlier generations.
“They are bombarded by information, with constant information about all the ills of the world and the bad things that are happening,” she said. “Previous generations were somewhat shielded from having to make decisions on whether to let that information in. This generation doesn’t have that option available to them in the same way.”
It’s a “highly anxious” generation, Baker said.
“They have a lot of stresses that other generations didn’t have,” she explained.
Social media adds another dimension, creating expectations of what students should look like, the definition of success.
“Those things are not even real,” said Baker. “But the pressure to try to live up to standards projected by social media, whether real or perceived, creates a lot of anxiety and angst and depression and hopelessness.”
The training teaches educators how to interact with a student who may be having a mental crisis. How do you approach them? What do you say?
It then trains educators on how to get the student the help they need, whether that is self-help or professional help.
It covers the impact of social media and cyber bullying. It also teaches the teachers how to ask the student if they are thinking about suicide.
“It gives folks who are not clinically trained the language to use and to validate that it’s ok to ask this question,” Baker said. “You are not giving them ideas by asking them this question. You are potentially giving them the avenue they need to ask for help.”
