Education and outreach programmes

The second half of the job

A crisis line answers the phone. An education programme tries to reduce the number of times the phone needs to ring, and — more realistically — increases the number of people who know it exists and are willing to use it. Headquarters ran both, and the education side accounted for a growing share of the organisation over its last two decades, eventually becoming a separate statewide programme in its own right.

The audience segmentation is the giveaway that this was a real programme rather than a leaflet. The centre maintained distinct offerings for four groups, each described separately in its published material.

Four audiences

Schools, grades K–12

Presentations on preventing suicide and self-harm for junior-high and senior-high students, alongside work with school staff. This is the most delicate audience in the whole programme, and the reason safe-messaging discipline in school settings is a specialist skill rather than a matter of good intentions.

Universities

Sessions for students, and — importantly — for the staff of university housing programmes. Residence-life staff are the people most likely to be first to notice, and least likely to have any training. The centre also spoke to campus groups and classes on suicide prevention, drug and alcohol use, community resources, crisis intervention and short-term counselling, under a formal agreement with the university.

Mental-health professionals

Continuing education for clinicians. By 2018 this had grown into free four-hour accredited trainings for substance-use treatment professionals delivered across several Kansas counties, teaching the link between substance use and suicide and a four-step intervention framework. Details are under training volunteer counsellors.

Businesses and community groups

Presentations for workplaces, civic organisations, coalitions, churches, law enforcement and first responders. The centre also ran critical incident stress management, delivering individual or group support at an organisation's own location after a traumatic event.

In its final decade the statewide arm — the Kansas Suicide Prevention Resource Center — described its work as training and raising awareness in communities in order to reduce stigma around mental health and suicide while teaching community members to identify and intervene when someone is considering suicide. That is the gatekeeper-training model, delivered by a crisis line that had been doing a version of it since the 1970s.

Children and young people

The Phone A Friend programme began in 1985 and was still being counted separately in the centre's statistics twenty-five years later, running at over fifteen hundred contacts a year. It was a line for children — most obviously children at home alone after school — and its persistence as its own category says something about how a crisis line's community role broadens over time.

The centre also maintained pages aimed at children, at teenagers and at parents, including practical material on being home alone. Those pages are deliberately not restored. Material written to be read by a child, republished on an archive that cannot answer anybody, would be exactly the wrong artefact.

Keeping an invisible service visible

Everything a crisis line does is confidential, which means it can work for fifty years and remain unknown to the people who fund it. The centre's answer was a run of community activity that reads, at first glance, as unrelated to suicide prevention and is in fact central to it.

Everybody Day, the spring festival it organised in South Park from 1975 to 1985 for the entire city, was revived decades later. There was a fundraising bicycle ride. There were auctions, a Hallowe'en music event, an integrity award dinner, a documentary about the volunteers, and an annual push around National Suicide Prevention Week — for which the centre published a genuinely useful do-it-yourself toolkit encouraging any community to run its own week at little or no cost, with bookmarks in libraries and local businesses, a city or county proclamation, and a group viewing of a national webinar.

The toolkit is a small but telling artefact. An organisation confident in its own position would have promoted its own services; this one published instructions for other communities to do the work without it. That is consistent with the centre's stated position that suicide prevention is everyone's business, and it is the sort of thing that leaves no trace in any funding metric.

Speaking about the media

The last strand of outreach was public advocacy about portrayal. In 2018 the organisation published a statement about a widely watched television drama, and talking points on imitation risk following high-profile deaths. It engaged with state legislation and with a national campaign on the three-digit crisis number.

That is education aimed at the people who shape how a whole community talks about suicide, rather than at individuals — the highest-leverage and least measurable work in the field. Further context is under from a national toll-free line to 988 and the media recommendations the organisation was following.