Thrive recognizes National Suicide Prevention Week

CHICO >> Thrive, a North Valley Community Foundation program focused on emotional healing for children, families and individuals after the Camp Fire and other local crises is recognizing National Suicide Prevention Week.

The initiative is taking place from Sept. 5 to 11 and is intended to inform and engage health professionals and the general public about suicide prevention and warning signs of suicide. Thrive is participating by sharing important messaging to raise awareness about suicide and reminding those experiencing suicidal ideation, help exists.

Thrive Program Manager for the North Valley Community Foundation Erin Morrissey said the program is always looking for ways to spread the message of available resources.

“The way that we are kind embracing it is to just uplift the voices of the organizations that their sole mission is suicide prevention,” Morrissey said. “This is a great opportunity for us to share resources and to lift up other resources that are out there. There’s some amazing ones from National Suicide Prevention and we’re also sharing some of our own End the Silence resources.”

End the Silence, a youth mental health and suicide prevention initiative from Thrive, has previously held summits for Butte County youth. The most recent summit was April 22 and attracted more than 700 participants.

“This is going back to the idea that young people want to talk about these things — they don’t want to just hold it inside,” Morrissey said. “They want to be able to talk about their experiences or their friends’ experiences and feel like they’re not alone in that.”

Thrive began in October, following concerns from people close to the organization of ongoing mental health issues among young people in the county.

“Our folks that are working with young people, mostly in the adolescent and high school age group, kind of raised the alarm and said, ‘we’ve got a real problem here and this problem is only going to get bigger,’” Morrissey said. “We sort of pulled together a small little task force of folks from Butte County Office of Education, Butte County Behavioral Health and the Boys and Girls Club, to the state just to try and work through what to do.”

In order to understand the needs of the age group the Thrive program would be helping, Morrissey said 15 focus groups were held and from there, strategies were refined.

“We asked them what they needed and what they wanted adults to do. What we heard was they wanted adults to know what to look for and what to say,” Morrissey said. “Out of that grew the End the Silence campaign and part of that was the suicide prevention youth summit.”

The next program Thrive will launch is a care team designated to addressing three different stages of suicide crisis: suicide ideation, suicide attempt and death by suicide. While it isn’t a crisis line Morrissey said, it will be a way for community members to gain resources at a much faster rate than other providers.

“The care team would respond to each of those in a different way but they would respond,” Morrissey said. “The idea is that there is no wrong referral source. Anyone can activate the care team.”

The Thrive care team is expected to launch in October.

For more information on Thrive or the End the Silence initiative, visit https:// www.nvcf.org/thrive.

Information on National Suicide Prevention Week can be found at https:// afsp.org/national-suicideprevention-week.