Episode Details
Back to Episodes
Suicide Prevention
Description
This podcast addresses suicide prevention.
Lt. Governor Spencer Cox shares his personal experience and hard work to raise suicide prevention awareness in Utah.
Then, Jordan School District Health and Wellness Specialist, McKinley Withers, shares advice for parents on how to start a conversation about suicide prevention with students. How do you open the lines of communication and keep the conversation going.
If you or anyone you know needs help, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or by calling the University of Utah Crisis Line at 801-587-3000. You can also download the SafeUT app.
For additional resources visit wellness.jordandistrict.org
Audio Transcription
The following podcast is about suicide prevention. If you or anyone, you know, needs help contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or locally by calling the university of Utah CrisisLine at (801) 587-3000 or download the SAFE UT app.
Superintendent Godfrey:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Today, we're going to talk about something that is impacting far too many families throughout Utah and the country right now. And that's suicide. More importantly, we're going to talk about suicide prevention in just a moment. We'll hear from our Jordan School District Health and Wellness Specialists, McKinley Withers. He joined us on the podcast previously with the episode titled, Happiness Forecast. He has information and resources for us to help prevent suicide, information for parents about what to do, if they're worried about their teen or just what they ought to be talking with their teen about, even if they don't see signs of a problem. But first, we had the opportunity to talk to Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, who has a very personal story to tell. He's raising awareness statewide and has an important message for students when it comes to suicide prevention. Lieutenant Governor Cox.
Thank you very much for taking a few moments to talk with us for the podcast. You've been an advocate for suicide prevention. Tell us a little bit about some of what's been happening lately.
Sepncer Cox:
Well, we have some really exciting announcements around suicide prevention, as you know. This has been a struggle for our state, unfortunately the numbers of those that we've lost over the past few years have been unacceptable and, of course, losing any life. These are all preventable deaths. And so we really have turned a corner in Utah, in focus on this at a pub public policy level. We started about two years ago, the Governor Suicide Prevention Task Force, and coming out of that task force with some of the best and brightest in the state, we've had some incredible ideas.
The legislature has been very supportive. One of those ideas was the creation of a fund to help us to help us with suicide prevention awareness. We've never had a true statewide campaign with all stakeholders involved, to make sure that we're giving people good information and helping people understand where they can go for help and how to overcome those dark feelings that so many of us have had, me included. And so we got a million dollars from the legislature, if we could match it from the private sector. We announced yesterday, and we're so excited about this, the private sector stepped up. We now have the $2 million. We are just going through the RFP process right now for that suicide prevention campaign. And next year we will be launching that. It's a huge deal for Utah. We're very excited. And we just have to do more to help, especially our young people, understand that we need them to stay. That this life is so important and that things will get better.
Superintendent Godfrey:
Thank you very much. That's an exciting initiative. And yo