Florida School Toolkit for K-12 Educators to Prevent Suicide

t rusted adult for help. Hannah Baker‘s final day portrayed her in front of the post office about to mail her 13 revenge tapes and a community member came up and commented to her that she was really a talented poet and that they had missed her at the poetry meeting on Tuesday. In the real world that’s often all it takes for someone to decide life is worth living, as no adolescent is suicidal 24/7 and it would have been much more realistic to have shown Hannah dropping the revenge tapes in the trash and going on with her life. Season one also showed an angry male student with an arsenal of weapons and clearly indicated that season two would likely include a school shooting. Thankfully, season two, three and four were not as popular as season one. As someone who has responded to 16 different school shootings, I believe strongly that getting young people to go to a trusted adult is a powerful way to prevent a school shooting. It was inexcusable that season two portrayed Clay knowing that a classmate was on the way to the school dance with an assault weapon and rather than notifying law enforcement and adults at school, Clay and his friend Tony chose to try to prevent the shooting on their own. This was a very unfortunate message! The U.S. Secret Service study of school shooters found that 81 percent of them told others of their violent plans. We must end the conspiracy of silence that allows homicidal and suicidal statements to go unreported to adults! Season three and four continued the theme of portraying students as leading secret lives with regards to sex, drugs, violence and mental illness without adult awareness, support, or intervention. 45. What about the role of medical professionals especially physicians in suicide prevention? T he literature estimates that approximately 70 percent of the individuals who died by suicide saw the family doctor in the months before their death. Physicians have a tremendous opportunity to be alert for the warning signs of suicide and to intervene. They need to be comfortable and competent to ask their patients about depression and suicidal thoughts and actions. I know that my father saw his family doctor in the week before he died by suicide. There is growing awareness that key professionals such as psychologists, family therapists, and physicians should have continuing education on suicide risk assessment and management for renewal of their respective licenses. Currently, there are seven states that require this continuing education for license renewal. My greatest hope is that a future generation of physicians will be much more comfortable with direct inquiry about suicide and will improve their suicide assessment abilities. Specifically, with regards to young people there was a national recommendation that came out in 2009 from the U.S. Prevention Task Force recommending that all teenagers, regardless of the reason they were in the physician’s office should fill out a short questionnaire about energy level, joy of life, depression, and thoughts of suicide and that questionnaire should be scored before they walk out of the office. I am hopeful that more physicians will follow that national recommendation. Unfortunately, in responding to suicide clusters I have found the one group least likely in the community to be involved in prevention efforts has been the local physicians, and their involvement is critical. For example, after seven students at a single high school had died by suicide in one school year then it was essential for all high school students from that school to be screened for depression when they saw their family physician for any reason. In another cluster response with more than 100 area professionals at the school planning meeting, the one physician who had promised to attend did not. In another cluster response, the only physician really involved was the county coroner. Florida S.T.E.P.S.