U of C introduces new suicide prevention framework to support students in need

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The University of Calgary has launched a new suicide awareness program after a spring 2019 survey revealed nearly 90 per cent of students reported feeling overwhelmed.

The Suicide Awareness and Prevention Framework, launched Thursday, was built off results from the 2019 National College Health Assessment study in which 70 per cent of the 5,000 U of C students who responded reported being very lonely, 69 per cent said they were anxious and 16 per cent said they’d seriously considered suicide. Nearly three per cent of respondents, or 150 students, reported having tried to commit suicide in the previous 12 months.

These numbers, though pre-pandemic, are up from 2013 and 2016, the other two years U of C has participated in the survey.

Debbie Bruckner, senior director of student wellness, access and support at the university, said the survey results are just one piece of the puzzle in developing a comprehensive strategy to support students with mental illness, but noted removing the stigma is a vital step.

“It’s about making sure that we have many, many conversations about suicide prevention, about mental health, about coping and resilience in many different ways, and it becomes pervasive in the environment as opposed to just something you seek out if you’ve got a problem,” she said, adding a major component of the project is training students to offer help and support to their peers.

“I think more importantly than the awareness around suicide is upstream work. So if the only thing we do is offer one-on-one pairing of a student who needs support with a counsellor, we’ll run out of capacity really quickly . . . But if we train 35 students every week on helping skills, then they’re interacting with X number of students in their classes and that builds momentum that creates cultural change.”

Bruckner said around 3,000 students have reached out over the past six months offering to volunteer to help their peers in need of support, nearly double the number of students who reached out for support.

The framework has a holistic approach that works to prioritize building resources on campus while also working closely with outside organizations, Bruckner said.

“To ensure our students have access to treatment, and can transition in and out of treatment and back to university, we had to engage with those other systems” for representatives on the advisory committee, including the university’s department of psychiatry, the Centre for Suicide Prevention and the Distress Centre, she said. “We also made sure half of our committee are students, so we actually have the student voice.”

More U of C students have been reaching out for support in the past few months, she said, and the new framework will help assess each student individually and offer them a multitude of options to get the help they need.

“This semester we have more students wanting to learn how to support their peers — through enhancing natural helping skills, suicide awareness and prevention — than we’ve ever had, so I think it speaks to wanting to build a network and wanting to support one another in what is a really complicated, vulnerable time.”

ocondon@postmedia.com