Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESWho Gets Care? Mental Health Service Use Following a School-Based Suicide Prevention Program
Section snippets
Los Angeles Unified School District Youth Suicide Prevention Program
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the second largest school district in the United States, which had an enrollment of 736,675 students grades K-12 in 2001, with 71% of Latino background. The LAUSD Youth Suicide Prevention Program (YSPP) is one of the first school-based programs established in the country consistent with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention School Gatekeeper Training Model to Prevent School Suicide (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1994).
Student Characteristics
More than two thirds of the students whose parents participated were Latino (68%), 16% were African American, 10% were white, and 6% were another race/ethnicity. As described in Table 1, half of the students were female (n = 47), with an average age of 12.5 years (SD 2.98). Students were fairly evenly distributed across school type, with 27% of students in elementary school, 38% in middle school, and 35% in high school. The majority of students had some type of insurance; 84% had public or
DISCUSSION
To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine follow-up service use of participants in a district-wide school gatekeeper suicide prevention program. We found that the majority of students identified by the LAUSD YSPP were referred to school or community mental health services and that more than half had subsequently received these services within several months of the crisis intervention. These findings support recommendations that a school-based gatekeeper model for suicide prevention
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Suicidality, mental disorder and the utilization of mental health services among Australian adolescents
2020, Children and Youth Services ReviewCitation Excerpt :However, evidence suggested that school services offered student greater support by not only eliminating hurdles in the conventional system to seek health care but also reduced the stigma in seeking support for mental health and ultimately enhanced clinical outcome (Nabors, Weist, & Reynolds, 2000; Stephan et al., 2007). In addition to these inherent advantages, school mental-health-services found to be effective in suicide prevention and in screening and treating comorbid mental disorders (Kataoka, Stein, Nadeem, & Wong, 2007; Stephan et al., 2007). Regarding telephone services, few empirical studies reported telephone counseling services as the choice among adolescents with suicidality due to their accessibility, anonymity and lack of parental involvement (King, Nurcombe, Bickman, Hides, & Reid, 2003; Shaw & Chiang, 2019).
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This work was supported by the Los Angeles Unified School District's Mental Health Unit and Crisis Counseling and Intervention Services, the UCLA Center for Health Services Research, NIMH (R21MH068623, K08MH069741), and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. The authors thank Richard Lieberman, Ph.D., and the Los Angeles Unified School District's School Mental Health Unit for their support of this work.
Disclosure: The authors have no financial relationships to disclose.