Suicides and Young People in Washington State

On the heels of the suicide of WSU's quarterback, Tyler Hilinski, comes news of a suicide of a freshman girl in Richland, Washington.

Forefront is an organization that works to prevent suicides; their website has a plethora of info.

Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
1.800.273.8255
OR
Text Crisis Text Line at 741741

 

Washington State K-12 suicide data from SW Washington Education K-12.

Their data show that SPS had 18 suicides from 2006-2015 (with 5 in 2015).
Special Note: Aberdeen SD with 3415 students had five (5) deaths in the 10 year period which makes it, on a student population basis, the highest in the State.

Any…any student suicide is 1 too many.

We wondered what the data showed in the way of suicide’s in the K-12 range so we could start digging in to see if the programs are having any effect. So we went on a data gathering journey we would like to describe and share the information we found.

Step 1: Contact OSPI and ask for suicide information – Response: They don’t have any and don’t track the data. Why? They talk about suicide but don’t make an effort to track data to see if the time, effort and money spent has an impact. They suggested we reach out to the WA State Dept of Health.

Step 2: We attempted to contact the WA State Dept of Health. We emailed them and as of this report have never gotten a response. That’s in nearly 1 month

Step 3: We emailed the three (3) WA State Representatives for the 17th District (Paul Harris, Vicki Kraft and Lynda Wilson). We were fortunate to get a response from Vicki Krafts legislative aide who contacted the State Health Department and obtained, within 1 day, a report!

In the report we asked for and received reported suicides by school district by year for the years 2006 – 2015. There are 295 school districts so the data came in a giant spreadsheet. WA_State_Suicide_K-12_2006-2015  There is a caveat: This data is based on where the student was at the time of suicide. It is possible that they lived in a different school district than the one they passed in. There is no way to verify anything else.

Thoughts:

1. The numbers are small. Is it even possible to reduce them no matter what the resources used?
2. We need to understand what districts are doing, how much they are spending and somehow determine whether we can impact (reduce) the rate
3. How do we determine whether any given program is effective? How do we determine if we need to make changes if we can’t define change?
4. We also need to determine whether the use of social media, cell phone and computers is influencing the rate of suicides
5. Is it the responsibility of school districts to have this as a focus or is it a family issue?