Auburn University is taking its first steps in approaching suicide prevention at an extended, university-wide level.
Though Student Counseling Services and Health Promotion and Wellness Services have done suicide prevention outreach presentations in the past, this September they brought in a master trainer in Question, Persuade and Refer (QPR) to train 28 faculty and staff members to be QPR gatekeepers.
To gather a larger scope of people on campus, Student Counseling Services and Health Promotion and Wellness Services reached out to a range of professionals across different colleges and departments, according to Doug Hankes, director of Student Counseling Services.
With that in mind, the goal is to further spread the QPR training into each department, Hankes said.
“The primary piece of training is actually getting people comfortable with asking the question, ‘Are you thinking about killing yourself?’” Hankes said. “If you boil it right down to it, that’s the question you need to ask.”
The full-day training included role-playing and suicide prevention education such as suicide statistics and risk factors.
Each QPR gatekeeper committed to give three QPR presentations each year for the next three years, according to Eric Smith, director of Health Promotion and Wellness Services.
“I think that if you have been impacted by suicide or you find yourself being the one left behind, you know that you want to do all you can to make sure nobody else has to have the feeling of being left behind,” Smith said. “And I think that’s the impetus and motivation for actually getting someone to be like, ‘I want to be QPR trained.’”
Auburn invited master QPR trainer Mary Chandler Bolin, director of the University of Kentucky Counseling, to implement the training.
“The key with QPR—the underlying sort of theory, if you will—QPR teaches gatekeepers to recognize warning signs and ask directly about suicide risk,” Bolin said.
She said having gatekeepers throughout various areas of the University gives Auburn an advantage.
“Not everybody wears their depression or despair on their sleeve where everybody sees it,” Bolin said. “So the more people that are training in QPR or similar kinds of gatekeeper-level training, the more likely that somebody nearby will notice that something might be wrong.”
Hankes said though Auburn's suicide rate had been below the national average during his 18 years at the University, it has recently increased.
In 2015 alone, five students have committed suicide, according to Student Advocacy & Case Management.
“You want to do (QPR) in a proactive sort of way, not in a reactive way,” Hankes said.
Groups and organizations can request QPR training by emailing qp@auburn.edu.
“I would love to see us really hit the ground running and get a lot of requests for this,” Smith said. “This is an area where I would almost like to be overwhelmed.”
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