The Suicide Prevention team formed with a small group consisting of Meghan, Tyler and Mattie. They began by researching existing organizations and resources aimed at supporting people with suicidal thoughts, as well as conducting understanding exercises. The team found it hard, especially at first, to speak about suicide – it’s a challenging topic and their comfort level with it was low. However, this was a topic that the team felt extremely passionate about, and so they persevered.
The team then reached out to the Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline and got connected with who would eventually become their community partner: Becca Waste, an ISPH volunteer and Boise State graduate student interested in working with youth. The team found her interview very insightful, and several other connections resulted from this interview. Becca provided valuable insight and empathy surrounding suicide, and gave the team access to resources that currently exist for people experiencing this issue.
The team also reached out to the Boise Hive, a local non-profit music studio whose mission is to reduce suicide among musicians in the Boise community. The team took a tour of the Boise Hive, which provides safe, substance-free environments to practice and perform music, as well as mental health services for local musicians.
Thanks to the team’s connection with the ISPH, they learned about an opportunity with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s public performances of Romeo and Juliet. Because youth suicide is prominent in the story, it felt important to include the ISPH as a professional resource to facilitate discussion and support after the show.
The Suicide Prevention team was offered the chance to contribute to the program for the show. The opportunity arose to include teen voices in the conversation, and the team decided to use that voice to collaborate with the ISPH on a comic that illustrated the role of the Hotline, and de-stigmatizing the use of it.
This comic was distributed at local showings of the play, and impacted the audience by the intentional inclusion of this prevalent issue in our community. The team is grateful for the time they spent on this project, and the knowledge, empathy, and insight that will now be applied to their lives because of it.
