The COVID pandemic made an already significant problem more challenging: youth suicide. While youth suicide rates dropped nearly 14 percent in Oregon in 2020, our state still ranked 18th in the nation in the number of youths 24 and under who take their own lives.

Clackamas ESD Mental Health, Safety and Prevention Specialist Sandy Mathewson said the distance learning environments schools were forced to implement during the pandemic elevated one of the most important factors that can lead youth to thinking about, attempting and possibly completing suicide.

“Isolation can be very difficult,” Mathewson explained. “When students aren’t physically at school, interacting with their peers and school staff, we get fewer opportunities to listen to them, interact and observe them. We know that as many as 25 percent of suicide attempts go unreported – and that was before the pandemic hit. Suicidal thoughts can strike youth of all ages.”

A recent Cigna survey reveals “epidemic levels” of loneliness in America, and shows social isolation and loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity.

“Being alone, with little interaction with others, can really wear on your mental well-being,” Mathewson said. “The pandemic exacerbated this issue for many students.”

Mathewson provides three different types of trainings to school staff throughout the year to help them identify and intervene with youth who are having suicidal thoughts. One of them, a training Mathewson co-delivers with a colleague at Willamette ESD, is called Youth SAVE, Suicide Assessment in Virtual Environments. These two-day workshops, using material developed by the Oregon Pediatric Society, help school-based mental health professionals and others who serve youth directly learn how to use virtual tools to reach young people who are contemplating suicide.

“The whole training is about how to communicate with a student you’re worried about in a virtual way. This can be via text or using other virtual tools,” Mathewson said. “We also help staff learn how to use an app to walk through with youth to set up a virtual safety plan, that begins with critical steps like ‘How can you make yourself feel better right now?’ The training includes a lot of practice and role-playing.”

“All of the trainings we offer provide powerful frameworks to not just help people identify youth who are in potential trouble, but actually give them tools to take action,” Mathewson commented. “I have people tell me after a training that they know a student right now who could benefit from what they’ve just learned.”

For more information about suicide prevention and other mental health support CESD offers to regional school districts, please contact Sandy Mathewson at smathewson@clackesd.org.