September 10 – 16 is National Suicide Prevention week

“So there’s like five or six warning signs that really are precursors to someone being maybe immediately suicidal and some of the stuff we’ve all heard about.” Hovey said “But it’s true, if someone starts giving away their prized possessions, starts acting impulsively, starts taking a lot of substances, stops paying attention to things in life that used to be important to them. They disconnect and they kind of become withdrawn from friends. All these are really, really bad signs and are things that one should attend to. In that person’s life.”

“If someone’s feeling really tense and suicidal and they don’t know what else to do because they’re in such psychological pain, opening up the conversation actually decreases that immediately.” Hovey said. “And sometimes all it takes is to kind of decrease that tension for someone to start feeling better, because most people who actually attempt suicide it’s a one time deal, I mean, there’s people who might chronically think about it and attempt it, but for most people, they’ve reached this point in their life where they don’t know what else to do and what your immediate thing to do is to alleviate that tension. And hopefully for most people then they are well on their way,”

“So when I think about suicide I think about it at the ideation level It’s a big public health problem. So you’ve got anywhere from 20 to 30% of college students who think about it.” Hovey said. “And of course, at some point it’s going to filter down to actual completed suicides. So yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of research over the course of time that has looked at this. And my research suggests that it is like in the 20% range roughly of people thinking about suicide. We do know based on a few studies that that rate has increased slightly since COVID,”

“Students can make appointments with us, it can be online or in person.” Albert said “It’s confidential and it’s free, but we don’t work outside of those hours.” He said  “Timely care, however, is a supplemental service that we offer. It’s through a company called Timely Care and they provide online 24 seven mental health counseling and that is also free and confidential for students to use so we are really excited about that. And then we continue to have our 24 seven crisis line, the vaqueros crisis line. That’s to be used when a student is in an emotional crisis, they can call any time during the day or night, any day of the week. to speak to someone in confidence”.