Suicide Prevention Week

• Suicide Prevention Week Events

Please share this information with individuals and email lists because "Suicide Prevention is Everyone's Business." It's as easy as copying and pasting the text below into an email!

Greetings,

Headquarters Counseling Center and the Suicide Prevention Subcommittee of the Governor's Mental Health Services Planning Council urge you to help us spread the word across Kansas or your own state about Suicide Prevention Week, the week of September 5-11, 2010.

Every community can provide activities during this week - activities that can help raise awareness and reduce the number of people who die by suicide. And this can be done for little or no cost!

Information for Suicide Prevention Week, including info on the occurrence of suicide, how to recognize and reduce the risk of suicide, what you can do as a friend or family member, and sample media releases are available through the website of the American Association of Suicidology at http://www.suicidology.org/web/guest/about-aas/nspw.

Ask local businesses, your library, and other public places to leave Suicide Prevention bookmarks on their counters. A sample bookmark is at http://headquarterscounselingcenter.org/SuicPrevBookmark.pdf. Feel free to adapt for your own community, for example adding the after hours number for your community mental health center.

Request the opportunity for a group to appear before your community's City and/or County Commission/Council to discuss suicide prevention as those officials sign the proclamation. A proclamation from Gov. Parkinson is at http://headquarterscounselingcenter.org/Gov'sProclamation.pdf. Feel free to adapt this for your community.

Host a group viewing of a free archived webinar from the SPRC (Suicide Prevention Resource Center) Training Institute http://www.sprc.org/traininginstitute/disc_series/discussionseries.asp. This could be your featured activity for the week.

In addition to the info about Suicide Prevention Week, we would like to share a webinar opportunity for primary care physicians and their staffs. Recognizing and Reducing Suicide Risk - Primary Care will be available on several dates. Registration info is at: http://www.suicidology.org/web/guest/education-and-train/rrsr-pc-webinar.

Best wishes,

Marcia Epstein
Director, Headquarters Counseling Center
Chair, Suicide Prevention Subcommittee, (KS) Governor's Mental Health Services Planning Council
Marcia@HeadquartersCounselingCenter.org

If you've found this information helpful, let me know!

• Please send a brief email describing to whom (by groups, not individual names) you forwarded this information.
• And please send me an email about activities you are planning in or around the week of Suicide Prevention Week.