Teens congregate in the high school hallways, tears streaming. A bewildered student sits alone on the floor. Girls huddle in the restroom as rumors fly. Guidance counselors, still absorbing the news, set out to identify kids in distress. The principal braces for the onslaught of questions from parents and media. Teachers prepare for classes that will be anything but normal.

A student has just died by suicide, and now the crisis response begins.

Contagion Concern

It’s called “postvention” — when crisis responders come into a school to provide support, give out factual information and address stigma after a suicide. The team monitors students and gets treatment to those who need it. Prevention of further tragedies is the goal.

“Seeing other children very upset can make you more upset,” says Shelby Rowe, manager of education and prevention programs for the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention. And that, she says, can be traumatic for vulnerable kids, even if they weren’t close friends with the child who died.

Contagion — a ripple effect where one suicide leads to another — is a concern. Teens ages 15 to 19 are most vulnerable — their risk of suicide after exposure to that of another person is higher than for any other age group.

Providing Help to Kids, Staff and Parents

As the former executive director of the Arkansas Crisis Center, Rowe promoted suicide awareness to counselors, teachers and nurses across the state. Her first step was debriefing counselors and their colleagues: “Just them talking about their feelings of helplessness and trauma and fear, knowing that they were the ones who the rest of the school was going to be looking toward,” she says.

Next, Rowe’s team met with children. “It was one on one, to give each child a chance to talk about what they were coping with,” she says. The team included partners from a local mental health association. “If we felt somebody needed immediate acute care, we were equipped for that to happen.” Parents received fact sheets on what to look out for in their children: Did they see healthy grieving or signs that kids needed some extra help?

Space to Talk

Scott Poland, director of the Suicide and Violence Prevention Office at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, works with schools around the country following suicides and other tragedies. “Sadly, all schools are going to deal, sooner or later, with the death of a student,” he says, and every school needs a response plan.

All kids need a chance to express their thoughts and emotions in small groups. “We put the desks in a circle,” he says. “I’ll basically say, ‘I don’t know much about Sheila. I’ve heard a few things about her, that she’s a great person. What can you tell me about her?'”

He says kids have a “real need to reminisce about the deceased — they talk about where she sat in the classroom, and what she liked to do.” With younger kids, poster boards and markers come in handy “to give kids a chance to draw and write and make things for the family.”

A child’s suicide leaves classmates shocked, confused and hurting for answers. “‘Why? Why did she do this?'” is their first question, Poland says. “The answers have died with her,” he tells kids. “I’m here to help you.”

“How did she do it?” almost always comes next. The response is truthful and concise, Poland says: For instance, “she shot herself” is enough. “We’re not going to dwell on the specifics or the details.”

Most Vulnerable

Suicide is caused by a variety of issues, building up over time. Untreated or undertreated mental illness is a major factor for suicide. For someone who is already struggling — with a generalized anxiety disorder, depression, family strife or substance issues — “the traumatic loss of a close friend is going to dramatically increase their risk,” Rowe says.

Poland says during early intervention, responders look out for kids who appear especially emotional or distraught. “It might be kids that were angry. If we gave them an opportunity to write, we might be particularly concerned about what [a student] has written.”

In those cases, he says, a teacher would arrange a one-on-one talk with the school counselor, who could call parents to discuss the situation and suggest community mental health resources.

Memorials for Life

While memorials can give kids an outlet to express their grief, extended memorials keep the focus on death, and outsized tributes may serve to glorify or glamorize suicide, experts say.

Large-scale memorial services at the school aren’t helpful, Rowe says. “The school needs to be a safe place for all students, and the gym or auditorium should never be associated with the traumatic loss of your friends.”

Instead, schools can use low-key ways to recognize the student’s life. For instance, some teachers place a box on the child’s chair and offer, “If you have a special story or a memory that you want to share with that child’s family, just put it in the box,” Rowe says. That encourages kids to think of good memories, and the box can become a scrapbook for the child’s parents.

“A lot of schools do community walks, at a high school or a university,” Rowe says. “Or do some other community activity to honor the life of that person.”

Spontaneous memorials that crop up at school — collections of flowers, stuffed animals, pictures and poems — should remain only a few days after the funeral, experts advise. Poland says the important thing is “strive to treat all deaths the same, whether the death was from a car accident or a suicide.”

Older kids may talk about getting involved with doing something in the student’s memory, he says, like starting a chapter of Students Against Destructive Decisions. Schools may select a group of students as social media partners to keep an eye out for harmful postings and help disseminate safety-oriented messages where they’ll be seen.

Toolkit for Tragedy

After a Suicide: a Toolkit for Schools, compiled by leading suicide prevention groups, was released in 2011. The toolkit offers a wealth of resources that school administrators can have in place, including facts on mental health issues and suicide risk; sample notifications and letters to parents; and guidance on memorials, social media and more. Parents will also find useful resources within, like how to talk to kids about suicide. For more help on working with media, school officials can share Safe Reporting on Suicide guidelines with journalists. News stories should always include the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free number: 1-800-273-TALK or 1-800-273-8255.

If your children attend a classmate’s funeral, go along with them, experts recommend. You can offer support and talk about help that’s available for them or their friends if ever needed.

Proactive parents can ask schools if they have mental health programs to spot depressed and suicidal teenagers, Poland says. “Parents need to recognize the scope of this problem,” he says. “I’ve had too many parents say to me, ‘I just never thought it could happen to my child.'” Finally, he says, “when parents are informed that their kid needs mental health treatment, they must follow through and get that treatment for them.”

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How Schools Cope After a Tragedy Like Suicide originally appeared on usnews.com