An Interdisciplinary Approach to Campus Suicide Prevention: Collaborating to Create Effective Campaign Messages

Background: The Freshmen Accessing Community and Embracing Survival (FACES) initiative at Michigan State University (MSU) includes several comprehensive initiatives focused upon increasing education and awareness in the areas of suicide prevention, and student mental health and wellness.

Program background: Key components of the FACES initiative include the launch of a campus-wide media campaign to increase college student help-seeking behavior and a focus on stigma reduction related to mental health concerns. Our campaign efforts began with the recognition that collaboration was necessary to effectively assess the campus climate and determine the appropriate messages and avenues for reaching our students. In collaboration with the Health and Risk Communication Center and the Department of Communication in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences, the MSU Counseling Center has embarked upon an empirical exploration of suicide prevention education and awareness to inform our campaign development.

Evaluation Methods and Results: This presentation will explore the campaign development process, highlighting the qualitative and quantitative strategies used to assess help-seeking behaviors and mental health stigma of MSU students. Specifically, the research team identified four professionally designed messages from other universities and conducted a series of focus groups to examine initial reactions to and opinions about the messages. The results from the focus groups were used to create a quantitative survey with a large group of students. The survey asked about message characteristics as well as where students would like to see information about the Counseling Center displayed. The results from the survey will be used to create suicide prevention and help-seeking messages tailored for the MSU campus.

Conclusions: Overall, this presentation/poster will share our process and provide an overview of key focus group findings and survey results.

Implications for research and/or practice: This presentation/poster will illustrate the collaborative process used to design messages, and provide contextual understanding for the recommendations emerging from the data. Future MSU campus campaign plans will also be discussed.