New Hampshire – NAMI New Hampshire

Connect Garrett Lee Smith (CGLS) strives to reduce suicide incidents by supporting the NH Suicide Prevention Council (SPC) to implement the State Plan and increase capacity on the individual, community and systems level for suicide prevention and postvention. CGLS improves access to mental health care through early intervention and referral, builds caring communities, clarifies service provider roles and responsibilities, changes attitudes and behaviors, and enhances skills.

Goal #1: Promote implementation of the State Plan by providing technical assistance and consultation to the SPC. CGLS will partner with SPC to: strengthen relationships across systems, educate policy leaders, and enhance awareness of cultural needs.
Goal #2: Establish a statewide environment that improves the understanding and response capacity of systems to high risk youth by educating, training, and reducing stigma related to mental health/substance use disorders. CGLS will train key service providers to address target populations including survivors, veterans/military, GLBT, Indians, substance-involved youth, foster care and attempt survivors by training 600 statewide leaders annually for a total of 1,800, utilizing the Best Practice programs of Connect, AMSR and CALM. CGLS will disseminate 7,000 media products annually for a total of 21,000 promoting help-seeking behavior and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Goal #3: Strengthen the ability of regional coalitions and key stakeholders to recognize youth at risk, provide an integrated culturally-competent response, and connect them to appropriate resources by implementing the Connect National Best Practice suicide prevention, early intervention and postvention program. The northernmost NH region is rural, isolated, economically depressed, with substance use and suicide rates that greatly exceed both the state and national averages. Working with regional coalitions and service providers to strengthen relationships to address the target populations, CGLS will train 600 participants annually for a total of 1,800 in the Connect model.
Goal #4: Improve the quality of NH’s suicide prevention, intervention and postvention activities by conducting local and cross site evaluation and enhancing the capacity of existing statewide data surveillance systems. CGLS will work with the SPC Data Committee to improve data collection, data analysis and reporting between systems so key decision makers can allocate resources based on objective information. Local and cross-site data will be used strategically to inform and improve project performance.
Goal #5: Promote sustainability of suicide prevention, intervention and postvention efforts in NH by implementing the NH State Plan. CGLS will: a) develop an educated leadership, b) strengthen public/private partnerships, c) expand help-seeking efforts through public education d) improve data monitoring and surveillance activities and e) improve public policy and statewide financial support. Evaluation guides all CGLS activities.