Prevention initiatives target four counties

After an especially tough school year in Colorado regarding youth suicides, the state attorney general’s office will fund new prevention initiatives to help teens statewide.

The initiative will help up to 40 additional schools in Colorado adopt a national program that uses “peer connectors,” students who are trained to identify depressed and suicidal youth on social media and at school and then link them to adults.

The attorney general’s office will spend $200,000 to expand the Sources of Strength program, which is already in about 100 Colorado schools, Attorney General Cynthia Coffman announced Tuesday in Pueblo, one of four counties in the state with the highest rates of youth suicide.

The office also will spend $173,000 to study suicides and suicide attempts among youth in those four counties, which also include El Paso, La Plata and Mesa. The point is to find out the best methods for preventing youth suicide and how to use state funds most effectively, Coffman said.

Since the start of the school year, several youth suicides have shaken communities throughout the state. Among those covered in the media was the recent death of a 10-year-old Aurora girl who was bullied. In August, the suicides of two boys in two days in Littleton prompted a community conversation, and in Thornton, a 13-year-old took her life after she was repeatedly criticized on an anonymous messaging app.

Sources of Strength reached Colorado about five years ago, beginning in Douglas County schools. It has spread to schools in Boulder, Jefferson, Mesa, El Paso, Cañon City and Fountain-Fort Carson. Schools in the four Colorado counties with the highest youth suicide rates will get priority in funding, but the program is open to any school, said Dan Adams, director of training for Sources of Strength, which has an office in Englewood.

Colorado has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation, with more people dying by suicide in this state than in car crashes or homicides. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people ages 10-34.

Of Mesa County’s 49 suicides in 2016, four were teens age 15-19 and six were people age 20-24. El Paso County had 186 suicides last year, 15 deaths of teens 15-19 and 21 deaths of people age 20-24.

Colorado’s Safe2Tell program, an app for youth to report concerns about themselves or others anonymously, has experienced a dramatic uptick in reports about suicide the last three years. Safe2Tell, which is run by the attorney general’s office, received 673 reports about suicide in the 2014-2015 school year and 1,742 such tips last school year.

Help is available

To talk to a trained counselor, call 844-493TALK (8255). Find out more about Safe2Tell at safe2tell.org and more about Sources of Strength at sourcesofstrength.org.