Expanding Capacity for Suicide Prevention: The ALIVE @ Purdue Train-the-Trainers Program

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students (National Mental Health Association & The Jed Foundation, 2002), with 1 in 10 college students reported having seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months (American College Health Association, 2007). Although there is a need for consistent suicide prevention programming and training on college campuses (Kisch, Leino, & Silverman, 2005), providing campus-wide outreach and training may strain overwhelmed college counseling centers (Gallagher, 2009).

One effective strategy for suicide prevention is gatekeeper training (Isaac et al., 2009; Tompkins & Witt, 2009). Gatekeeper training has been described as “a prevention strategy that improves detection and referral of at-risk individuals” (Tompkins & Witt, 2009, p. 134). A number of scholars (see, for example, Tompkins & Witt, 2009) have suggested that a particularly important group that should receive suicide prevention gatekeeper training in the college environment is resident assistants (RAs).

In a major review of the literature, Isaac et al. (2009) found gatekeeper training to have a positive effect on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of trainees from a variety of populations. Gatekeeper training has been found to be effective specifically with university students, faculty, and staff (Cimini et al., 2014; Pasco, Wallack, Sartin, & Dayton, 2012; Tompkins & Witt, 2009).

At this university, providing systematic suicide gatekeeper training experience for over 300 RAs on campus within the short period of RA training was beyond the capacity of the university’s counseling center. The result was that only some of the RAs received this important training, leaving a significant hole in the campus safety net. The capacity of the outreach arm of the campus counseling center needed to be expanded.

In partnership with the campus counseling center, we opted to use a “train the trainer” (TTT) model (Neef, 1995). This allowed faculty and clinical experts to train counseling graduate students to provide standardized suicide prevention and outreach on campus. TTT has been found to be as effective as having a professional conduct the training with those ultimately to be trained (Neef, 1995). In addition, those trained as trainers showed increased confidence in their ability to teach the content (Corelli, Fenlon, Kroon, Prokorov, & Hudmon, 2007) and have also been found to increase their own skills (Demchak & Browder, 1990).

In addition to providing a needed service to the campus in training RAs, counseling students could benefit from learning specific content about crisis and suicide prevention. For example, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (2009) includes core curricular content that contains “crisis intervention and suicide prevention models” (p. 12). This may be lacking in counselor preparation programs (e.g., Barrio Minton & Peace-Carter, 2011; Wachter Morris & Barrio Minton, 2012). For example, over one third of recent graduates from counseling programs reported zero hours of classroom attention to crisis (Wachter Morris & Barrio Minton, 2012).

The questions explored in this study were:

1. 1. Do TTT participants increase in their knowledge of suicide, knowledge of places to refer, and crisis communication skills following training?

2. 2. Does knowledge of suicide and knowledge of places to refer predict crisis communication skills of TTT participants following training?

METHODOLOGY

Participants

The ALIVE @ Purdue team trained a total of 12 graduate students to serve as ALIVE @ Purdue Educators. Ten were graduate students in the Ph.D. counseling psychology program, and two were master’s students in school counseling. The group consisted of eight women and four men; nine were White, two African American, and one Hispanic. Eight educators (six women and two men, six White and two African American) participated in both the pre- and posttest assessments.

Instrumentation

The evaluation packet included a demographic form, the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory–2 (SIRI–2; Neimeyer & Bonnelle, 1997), a knowledge of suicide scale, and a single question measuring knowledge of referral resources for emotionally overwhelmed students.

Suicide Intervention Response Inventory–2

Participants’ crisis-related communication skills were measured using the SIRI–2 (Neimeyer & Bonnelle, 1997). The 24-item SIRI–2 comprises a...