Suicide kills 33,000 people in the U.S. every year. Ninety percent of those people have a psychiatric illness, such as depression, impulsive aggressive behavior, bipolar disorder or anxiety disorders. Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States and it is the second leading cause of death among college students.
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 80 percent of college students who died by suicide did not seek help from their institution's counseling center. In cooperation with the foundation and its North Dakota chapter, the North Dakota State University Counseling Center has begun using an interactive Web-based screening program to identify, engage and provide treatment for students with serious depression and other conditions that convey risk for suicide.
"There are a lot of online screenings for moods and depression, but this is the first one that lets us send students an invitation, get a response, let the students stay anonymous and it also gives us the opportunity to engage the students," says Amber Bach-Gorman, NDSU program manager. "If they don't choose to come into the Counseling Center at first, at least they know we are here."
Counselors began sending out e-mails on Oct. 19, inviting students to visit www.ndsucounseling.org, a secure Web site, to complete an online questionnaire. To respond to everyone in a timely manner, e-mails are sent out in groups of 250 per week. The student's self-assigned user ID is the only way responses are identified.
A counselor will review the completed questionnaire and send a response to the student via the Web site, which includes an assessment and, if necessary, a recommendation for follow-up. Students have the opportunity to exchange online messages or to set up a face-to-face meeting with a counselor. Participation in the screening program is voluntary.
The Counseling Center has and still is receiving responses to the initial e-mail. So far they only have come from undergraduates, but Bach-Gorman said the demographics were all very different. "They were different age ranges, different classes and different genders," she said.
NDSU is one of approximately 10 institutions to use the interactive screening program. The American Foundation of Suicide Prevention created the program in 2001 and pilot tested it from 2002-05 at Emory University in Atlanta and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was first implemented in 2006 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later at University of Pittsburgh Medical School, University of Maine, University of Puget Sound, Heritage University and University of California, San Diego.
The North Dakota chapter of the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention provides funding to host the site. The only cost to NDSU is to compensate the counselors. "It is a really wonderful partnership among the national and state organization and our university," Bach-Gorman said.
In the coming months, NDSU counselors hope to see more students coming into the center. "We hope that we can directly relate the screening program to the increase in traffic," Bach-Gorman said. "The other benefit of the program is we will get a better feel for what is going on with students out there."
For more information, contact Bach-Gorman at amber.bach@ndsu.edu or (701) 231-7671 or Brenda Weiler, North Dakota chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, at afspnd@gmail.com or (701) 219-4110. More information about the Web-based program also is available at www.afsp.org.
