Student wellness is a top priority for Oregon State University-Cascades Campus, which will welcome its first freshman class this fall.

While the campus still consists of just one building at Central Oregon Community College and a graduate research center, OSU-Cascades is striving for a wellness culture that incorporates mental health and suicide prevention.

In the most recent state data on suicides, Central Oregon’s youth suicide rates were above the state average. That’s been a high-profile concern for those who work with teens, especially since a boy killed himself during the school day in a classroom at Bend High School in 2014, but it’s something that also touches college campuses.

OSU-Cascades staff members said they’re not aware of any suicides among the 1,200-student body, but they heard about attempts in the last school year. Counselors who work at COCC, the campus of 11,000 credit-seeking students who sometimes feed into OSU-Cascades, say increasingly the students they see for anxiety and depression are at a point of crisis, said Vickery Viles, director of the center for career services, academic advising and personal counseling at COCC.

OSU-Cascades landed a $305,000 federal suicide prevention grant last fall and is working with Deschutes County Public Health Services to train staff, faculty and others who interact with students. The campus is also setting up policies and methods to support at-risk students, even as it grows into a larger four-year institution.

“We’ve talked about students leaving healthier than when they arrive,” said Susan Keys, associate professor and senior researcher in public health. Keys is something of a guru in the field of youth mental health, having formerly overseen the same federal program that provided the grant to OSU-Cascades and the Inspire USA Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on the use of technology to promote well-being and prevent suicide among young people.

With OSU-Cascades about to become a four-year university, Keys said she saw a rare opportunity to create a campus culture in which mental health is discussed and promoted along with physical health and academic success. “I thought it was a very propitious time in the life of this campus,” she said.

Before the first freshman class of 100 students arrives this fall, their assigned student mentors and dozens of other teachers and staff members will have been trained to recognize and help students in need. Deschutes County will conduct a two-day training in July for OSU-Cascades staff members and faculty. There are 45 slots, which will also be open to COCC staff and others.

The training will be in the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training method, which bills itself as suicide first aid for anyone 16 or older. Both OSU-Cascades and COCC also offer faculty, staff and students training in the Question-Persuade-Refer method, which lasts 90 minutes and is likened to CPR.

“The topic of suicide really takes everyone,” said Jessica Jacks, supervisor of prevention for Deschutes County Health Services.

Jacks and Keys hope their joint effort will result in lower suicide rates across the community.

In the most recent state data on suicides, Central Oregon’s overall rates were near the state average of 16.4 deaths per 100,000 people, but youth-suicide rates were above the state average.

The Deschutes County youth suicide rate for 2003 through 2012 was 11.6, compared with a state average of 8.7, according to Oregon Health Authority report released June 19. (The youth suicide rate covers ages 10 to 24 because the total number of deaths within narrower age groups is so low.)

Deschutes County Public Health Services is one of five Oregon counties that also received money through the federal grant program. The local youth suicide rate is one reason the state chose Deschutes County for its first-round grant, about $300,000, Jacks said.

Deschutes County has been conducting suicide prevention training for the past three years, and the good news is that a recent national study shows training for “gatekeepers” like teachers, school staff, doctors and others who have a chance to intervene does reduce the number of youth suicides.

The study, published in May in the American Journal of Public Health, is the first to link training to positive outcomes in suicide prevention, Keys noted. “It’s pretty exciting.”

Looking nationwide at counties that conducted training as part of the Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the study’s authors found a significant drop in youth suicides. They linked training to the drop in suicide rates because in the same time period there was no corresponding drop in mortality rates for older adults or for young people who died of other causes.

The reduction in deaths — 1.33 per 100,000 people — translates to 427 young lives saved from 2007 to 2010, the studies’ authors said.

Beyond training the gatekeepers, OSU-Cascades is trying to weave suicide prevention into multiple facets of campus life. Those projects aren’t necessarily labeled “suicide prevention,” but they are an opening to talk to students about risk factors and what they can do to help themselves or others.

“Marketing of suicide prevention is tricky because not everyone’s going to say, ‘Ah, suicide prevention. I’m feeling a little down. Let me talk about that,’” said Andrew Davis, student life coordinator at OSU-Cascades. That explains why there were so many leftover suicide prevention brochures after the annual student resource fair this past school year.

In the fall, new students will receive wellness kits that include pocket pamphlets on how to identify someone at risk. Other efforts reinforce student wellness, which may keep students from reaching a breaking point in the first place.

Linda Porzelius, head of personal counseling services and grant project director, and Davis will conduct stress-relieving outreach activities at critical times, like exam week. In the past school year they offered students free henna tattoos for taking a personality-strengths survey. That kind of activity removes the stigma from the topic of mental health, and it might encourage someone who needs counseling to seek it, Porzelius said.

Porzelius’ job will shift from part-time to full-time in the fall, thanks to a bump in student fees that was approved by the student-fee committee. While Porzelius has had contact with students who attempted suicide, she’s not in touch with all of them. “We know from the research that most students who try to kill themselves have never been in counseling,” she said.

OSU-Cascades is also setting up an online community so that incoming freshmen can get to know one another and their mentors over the summer. Social connections are a strong protective factor against suicide, Keys said.

Many OSU-Cascades and COCC students are not the traditional young adult — single and straight out of high school.

“We have students that have families, that have financial issues, that are veterans,” Keys said. “We’re also looking at how we do outreach with other student groups.”

Keys credited the students who are employed on the grant team with pointing out some gaps in that effort. They noticed a lack of men participating in outreach activities last school year, she said, so she’s going to convene a focus group for advice on the best way to communicate with men about suicide prevention.

Lynette Winters, a senior psychology major who’s working on the grant team, said she tries to encourage open conversations about mental health, so that people who need help aren’t viewed as outsiders.

“That’s what we’re trying to have that atmosphere here be,” she said. “And I think it is, but we’re getting better at it.”

— Reporter:541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com