A group of school counselors and social workers from St. Joseph schools gathered Wednesday morning for a suicide prevention training.
St. Joseph School District Coordinator of Counseling Kim Hill said a different professional development topic is covered every year at the back to school meeting.
“This came to the forefront of our agenda because of some recent suicides and violence in our community, so we thought it would be very good,” Hill said. “We had people in the community reach out to us and offer to come talk and we felt that it would be good timing to have them come and share with us. There’s also some new legislation, it’s bullying legislation, but within it are some legislative guidelines for schools in terms of suicide prevention and awareness, so it just seemed like a good fit for us to proactively focus on this at the beginning of the year.”
Speakers included, Assistant Professor at Northwest Missouri State University Dr. Jackie Kibler and Missouri Western State University President Dr. Robert Vartabedian.
Kibler spoke about suicide prevention and how to help students cope with pain.
“The suicide research shows that the majority of people who survive suicide attempts identify that they don’t want to die, they just want the pain that they’re feeling to stop,” Kibler said. “So we talked about teaching kids that pain is a normal part of life and then helping them with coping strategies to deal with that pain.”
Kibler said, in St. Joseph, there’s been a higher suicide rate than the national average over the last year and the national suicide rate has gone up for children age 10-14. She also said suicide is the second leading cause of death for ages 10-25.
“The district has some great things in place for prevention,” Kibler said. “One of the things that I tried to bring in working with the school district is taking more of a wellness approach to suicide prevention. I really emphasized self-care to the counselors, taking care of themselves and being able to model that for the kids and their colleagues, because this group in particular gives of themselves a great deal and so trying to take care of themselves is a piece of that puzzle, I think.”
Kibler said some of her advice for suicide prevention in and outside of the school setting is to pursue real connections with people.
“Kids today and adults today, we’re big with social media, we’re big with phones and it adds to our lives but it also takes away from our lives,” Kibler said. “There’s some researchers that say it provides a lot of connection, but it also provides a lot of loneliness. So I think that’s happening particularly with kids, also with adults, and so connecting in real ways, putting the phones away, which is hard, it’s not going to be natural for them to want to take that away and interact with you. But they need that interaction, they need that connection, so that’s what I would encourage: to have real connection.”