According to the CDC, suicide is the second leading cause of death for children aged 15 to 19 years old. In 2019, nearly 9% of high school students attempted suicide in a one-year period, while nearly 16% made a plan to commit suicide.
Sadly, these stats are nothing new. And the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. Research by Navigate360 shows that between 2009 and 2019:
As students’ digital and physical lives continue to blend and overlap, your school suicide prevention program needs to adapt. In part, this means that you should consider including someone from the IT department in your task force. They can help determine how technology might be able to help detect students in crisis and improve prevention programs and incident response processes. They can also evaluate different vendor options, and set up new tools to make sure they’re working properly.
In order for a suicide prevention program to be successful, you must first be able to identify when a student is in crisis. Educating all district staff members is a big part of a school suicide prevention program, and is a top recommendation among suicide prevention advocates.
While your IT team likely doesn’t have much formal contact with students, they are in a unique position to help spot trouble if they have the tools to monitor school-provided technology. This is because schools are increasingly detecting suicide digital signals in Gmail, Google Docs, chat apps, and shared drives.
Administrators are struggling to ensure that their school suicide prevention program works in the virtual world. Teachers need to work harder to build relationships with students so that they can identify warning signals, but many signs go unnoticed despite best efforts.
IT teams are in a unique position to impact student suicide prevention because they:
Your IT team shouldn’t be expected to take direct action with the students. Nor are they uniquely trained to make judgment calls on whether or not a red flag requires immediate action in the way that a counselor is. But, they can use tools to detect risk signals in school-provided technology that will quickly send a notification to the proper building resources.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) self-harm monitoring technology more specifically identify cries for help with fewer false positives. This helps protect students’ privacy and saves time. It also means that your response task force is better able to focus on students who truly need their help.
For example, compared to keyword matching, AI can:
Research shows that students will talk about suicidal thoughts, but they also use digital media such as social networking sites, blog posts, instant messages, text messages, and emails. We work with many school administrators who are finding a variety of digital signals in district Google and Microsoft domains.
Here are five digital signals that your IT team can look for.
There is no “one size fits all” approach to preventing suicide. Every person is different, and the contributing factors to their pain are different. Ultimately, the best resource for helping students in crisis are the trusted people in their life. They could be their parents, siblings, friends, coach, teacher, or therapist. Professionals who are trained in child psychology and counseling are the best resources for helping a student in need.
Adding technology support to your school suicide prevention program can help give those people in a students’ life the extra information and time they need to save a life.