Florida School Toolkit for K-12 Educators to Prevent Suicide

messages on suicide contagion among youth, particularly since teens most often seek help from their peers. Empowering adolescents to be part of the development of safe messaging for other teens, in conjunction with suicide prevention experts and media representatives, might also be beneficial. The full impact of what some are calling, “social-media contagion” (Luxton et al., 2012) is not yet clear with regard to adolescent suicide prevention and may need to be more clearly defined in order to develop relevant postvention strategies in the schools. Additionally, efforts to prevent suicide contagion need to consider the research that supports safe messaging, including: publishing stories that educate and shape attitudes while avoiding misinformation; avoiding sharing the initial, unrealistic, and extreme immediate responses of those closest to the deceased; avoiding reports of denial or minimization of warning signs; acknowledging multiple contributing factors to suicide (i.e., not just bullying); and disseminating stories of positive coping, receiving or offering help, and the availability of services (Gould, 2018). The use of technology to deliver mental health support has grown exponentially (e.g., teleweb services, digital self-help, and mobile apps), increasing the accessibility of online support services to deliver interventions to young people at times of the day when suicidal ideation or thoughts may escalate quickly. Leveraging the communication networks used by adolescents can be an effective way to quickly respond, mobilize resources, and disseminate information to large groups of adolescents following a suicide and to reduce the likelihood of a cluster. Preventing Contagion: Guidelines for Schools Successful suicide postvention is dependent upon a timely, efficient, and targeted response to a student suicide and increasingly, the ability of school personnel to recognize the possibility of contagion. Need for timeliness. Since predicting where a suicide cluster will occur is not possible, it is critical to develop a set of postvention strategies that are ready to implement following the identification of a cluster (Cox et al., 2012). The timely implementation of a response plan following a suicide cluster in a school setting has been associated with fewer students showing negative symptoms (e.g., PTSD; Poijula, Wahlberg, & Dyregrov, 2001). Doing so is complicated, however, by the fact that increasingly, due to the speed of information exchange in our technology-connected world, students are often aware of a peer’s suicide prior to the knowledge reaching educators and parents, narrowing the window during which adults can intervene and prepare affected students. School, parents, and communities need to find ways to intervene and provide information and support to students sooner. Need to utilize best practice resources. Among the myriad of easily downloadable best practice resources, schools have access to After a Suicide: Toolkit for Schools (second edition). This important resource will be discussed more fully in Part 2 of this series (reprinted in this toolkit, starting on page 131). Need for interventions of longer duration. Generally, we have observed that postvention assistance in schools after a suicide is often too short in duration. In fact, research has found that 30% of students continue to show signs of PTSD as long as 6 months after a suicide cluster occurs in a school (Poijula et al., 2001). For identified students who are vulnerable prior to a student’s death and are further triggered by a peer suicide, the support needed at school can last even longer. We have Florida S.T.E.P.S.