New suicide-prevention safeTALK training offered to ASU employees
Audience members display their mobile phone lights after sending a text to a friend during a talk by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Nov. 13, 2023, at the Memorial Union on the Tempe campus. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News
Arizona State University is offering suicide-prevention training to faculty and staff to recognize when someone is struggling and to help that person connect to resources.
The four-hour, safeTALK training sessions, which started over the summer, are held in person on all four ASU campuses.
The initiative began with a small pilot program in ASU Counseling Services, according to Chief Wellness Officer Judith Karshmer.
“And they came to me to talk about how it could be an all-ASU initiative,” she said.
“And it’s exactly what would build upon our visit last year from the surgeon general. When he came, he was so compelling in his commitment to fighting loneliness and helping students get a connection.”
Suicide is among the leading causes of death for young adults and college students, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Also, college students report feeling stressed, disengaged and high levels of anxiety, Karshmer said.
In November 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy visited ASU as part of his nationwide tour, titled “We Are Made to Connect,” where he talked about how to increase social connection.
During his visit, Murthy told the crowd: “What we’re trying to build is a people-centered life, where people are the priority. When a friend is in crisis, we show up. When a family member needs something, we’re there.
“But what we have and what society pushes us toward is a work-centered life. Not that work isn’t important. But it turns out that when we are more connected to each other, we’re better at work.”
Murthy said he heard from hundreds of college students that they’re lonely, even when surrounded by hundreds of peers. But he sees those same students as driving the change in attitudes about mental health.
“It’s the young generation of high school students and college students and recent graduates who have the courage to think differently and talk differently,” he said.
Karshmer said that she’s heard from faculty and staff that they want to help students in distress, but don’t know how.
“So you often hear, ‘I knew the student was upset, but I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to overstep my boundaries,’” she said.
SafeTALK is an international training program created more than 40 years ago in Canada and now used in more than 30 countries in many different languages. The point of the program is to recognize that suicide exists in every community and in every culture, and that people considering suicide can be supported to make life-saving choices.
The training is designed for anybody over the age of 15 and is intended to support everyone in the ASU community, not just students.
Mackenzie Cotlow, project manager for Wellness at ASU, has led several safeTALK training sessions.
“It gives you a formula for how to start that conversation and what that looks like. It’s giving people the tools,” she said.
TALK stands for Tell, Ask, Listen and Keep Safe.
The training empowers people to say the word “suicide.”
“You ask directly, ‘Hey, you know, when someone is homesick and it's hard to be apart from their family and they're struggling in classes and they're having relationship problems, they might be having thoughts of suicide. Are you having thoughts of suicide?’
“We’re not skirting around what it is we're talking about. We are labeling it as suicide. It's very direct. We're not saying self-harm. We're not saying hurting yourself.”
Then the listening comes in.
“And they might say, ‘No, I'm not having thoughts of suicide.’ And that's ideal.
“But someone might say, ‘I’ve thought about it.’ And that prompts the person who has been trained in identifying this situation to say, ‘I want to keep you safe.’”
The trained person then knows how to connect the person to resources such as a crisis hotline.
“You don’t have to be a mental health professional to do this,” Cotlow said.
“It can be a 10-minute conversation.”
Often, people in the training sessions will ask Cotlow if she ever used her training in a real situation, and she shares how she helped a person in her neighborhood who was very upset.
“I overheard her. And I was nervous, but I thought, ‘I'm going to talk to her because this literally could be the difference between life and death.’"
So Cotlow went through the steps and the woman said she was not thinking about suicide.
“But she was overwhelmed with a stranger’s kindness and it was worth it to impact someone that way,” Cotlow said.
The training sessions do not ask people to share their personal experiences.
“That’s really important, because I think people could be turned off by that and be afraid to go into that space. That is not what the training's about,” Cotlow said.
Karshmer said that eventually, the training will be offered to students. About 400 faculty and staff members have already been trained, but the sessions have been filling up, and there is a waiting list in some locations, she said.
“We are excited with the wonderful problem that we have more people than slots right now. We're working on that, and we don't want anybody to walk away from this,” she said.
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