Colorado Mesa University is hoping to better enhance its suicide prevention through a university-wide survey sent out this week. According to Susan Becker, professor of psychology at CMU and a large proponent of campus-wide suicide prevention training, the survey will help assess students abilities to talk about suicide and know what to do.

“After using [our training programs] for a while, it is now a good time to do a follow-up and that is where the survey comes in. The survey is about following up and finding out if people are able to talk to people at risk and use the information they have from their training compared to people who have not,” Becker said.

“For the last five years or so I have been working on offering suicide intervention training on campus and to the larger community,” Becker said. “We used to be more focused on the two-day applied intervention ASSIST training, which is extremely good, but we also wanted to look at shorter training for people who just weren’t ready yet for that level. So we made our own hour-long training that we have been using for about three years now, as well as the ASSIST training.”

Suicide rates are much higher in the Grand Valley area compared to the national average, according to The Daily Sentinel. Becker believes a large reason is that people are afraid to talk about suicide.

“I believe people care enough to respond, even without training, and want to be able to help someone in distress but to talk about suicide with someone directly is really scary and we need support for that,” Becker said “The goal of most of our training is to help people be confident in being able to ask about suicide and helping them know how to connect with more help. You don’t have to fix anything, you don’t have to solve anything, just help someone who is at risk for suicide to ask for more help from someone who is more trained.”

This survey data, according to Becker, will allow the university departments and other suicide prevention organizations in the area to improve the training of people on how to handle this major issue in our community and she would encourage you to take the time to contribute by filling out the brief survey.