The North Carolina Central University Honest Conversations in Safe Spaces Suicide Prevention Program will strengthen NCCU’s capacity and infrastructure to provide coordinated behavioral health programming that promotes mental health and suicide prevention. This comprehensive program will include campus/community collaborations, gatekeeper training, and mental health promotion programming that targets those students considered at greater risk of suicide.
Using a public health model, the project will bring together community and campus stakeholders as members of a Suicide Prevention Coordinating Committee that will be tasked with developing a comprehensive suicide prevention effort that includes the development of a suicide response protocol that campus mental health professionals and other administrators will follow when working with students with suicidal behavior and an organized tracking or monitoring system for those students.
In addition, to reduce the risk of suicidal behavior, the proposed program will implement specific mental health promotion interventions and strategies to reduce risk factors associated with suicide while also enhancing protective factors. While these strategies will be available to the entire NCCU student population of mostly African American students, a special focus will be placed on programming with targeted groups of students who are considered at high risk for suicide, including students who identify as LGBTQ, students with disabilities and veterans and military-affiliated students.