Key Findings of Two Prevention Programs Funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHSA), Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS)

Background: The Center for Mental Health Services leads federal efforts to promote mental health and prevent mental illness, including suicidal behavior. This presentation discusses key finding of two national prevention/promotion programs that are funded by SAMHSA’s Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS): the Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Youth Suicide Prevention Program and the Implementing Evidence­Based Prevention Practices in Schools (PPS) program.

Approach: The GLS program supports states, tribes, and campuses to implement prevention, intervention and postvention services that target suicide and suicidal behavior from age 10­24. These services include gatekeeper trainings, screenings, awareness and outreach across the United States. Presentation will specifically focus on the structure of the state programs and discuss important evaluation outcomes of impact on reductions of death by suicide and suicide attempts from the SAMHSA funded cross­site evaluation. In the second program, PPS grantees were required to implement the classroom­based, universal evidence­based preventive intervention, The Good Behavior Game. A pilot evaluation was conducted as a survey administered to nine randomized PPS grantees. It consisted of six domains with accompanying indicators. Each domain represents an area of competence needed by a grantee to move toward quality implementation. The presentation will focus on the specific process used by the SAMHSA/Ce-PIM partnership to create a data analysis plan to analyze the survey answers. Preliminary data will be presented.

Results: The GLS evaluation matched counties that received GLS program support with similar counties that did not. The results indicate that there is a reduction in youth suicides and suicide attempts in the first year of the program for those counties receiving GLS funding for certain age ranges that implemented gatekeeper trainings. Additionally, preliminary results of the pilot PPS evaluation will be presented. For the PPS program, the process to create a data analysis plan: 1) created a new framework to add precision to the monitoring of SAMHSA grantee programmatic activities, and 2) created a framework that could be used by other services/researcher partnerships.

Conclusions: Comprehensive GLS program activities were associated with a reduction in suicide rates and attempts. Sustained suicide prevention programming efforts may be needed to maintain both the reduction in suicide attempt rates and deaths by suicide. For the PPS program, creating quality indicators for the implementation of this new framework is a potential endeavor by a services/research partnership.