Florida State University

Noles CARE in Academics aims to enhance existing campus suicide prevention interventions by providing more accessible resources to academic departments across the FSUcampus. We will accomplish our goals by training faculty, staff, and students within FSU’s academic departments to localize sources of support in the learning environment of students, and to encourage early detection of student distress and referrals for professional help. Through this project,we hope to make suicide prevention resources more available to our campus community of over 41,000 students and over 14,000 employees. In particular, we will incorporate specific components into our training that addresses high-risk groups such as members of the LGBTQ community, those identifying as racial or ethnic minority students, and student veterans.

We anticipate executing a model of suicide prevention training in which we train target faculty, staff, and students (e.g., department chairs, faculty volunteers, administrative coordinators, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and those in leadership positions) in academic departments extensively. These trained individuals will become more skilled in the identification and referral for help of students in distress. These target members of academic departments will serve as points of contact for other faculty, staff, and students to consult with, and they will assist with referrals to help distressed students. We will also provide suicide prevention information to other faculty, staff, and students through methods that are less time-intensive and located within the academic environment. A core team composed of mental health professionals and peer educators will be responsible for all in-person trainings. In addition, to facilitate the main rollout of our campus suicide prevention efforts across academic departments, we will develop and implement a mobile application and web site for Noles CARE in Academics.

The goals of the project are as follows:

1. Assess the needs of faculty, staff, and students within academic departments in carrying out suicide prevention efforts; the desire to implement suicide prevention training within academic departments; and the preferences of faculty, staff and students for receiving suicide prevention training within academic departments.
2. Increase the percentage of faculty and staff who feel competent in handling students’ mental health concerns.
3. Increase the percentage of student leaders who feel competent in intervening with distressed peers.
4. Increase the perceived efficacy and comfort of students with talking to faculty and peers about getting help with their mental health concerns.
5. Utilize a multidisciplinary leadership network to integrate suicide prevention training with other mental health initiatives on campus to increase student support for mental health within academic departments.