Youth Suicide Public Service Announcement (PSA)

Community Memorial Foundation (CMF) addresses the continual devastation of youth and teen suicide by collaborating with various media and communication outlets to increase awareness of a national, anonymous crisis text hotline and attempts to decrease stigma by encouraging audiences to "talk about it" with their peers through a short public service announcement (PSA). Their community partners include local cable news and public access television stations, a local newspaper, a cinema, and social media. The PSA features highly regarded students from the community high school, thus making the PSA both age- and culturally-relevant.

The Crisis Text Line is available 24/7, completely anonymous and, depending on the texter's phone carrier, could be free of charge. Texters are matched with trained crisis counselors who deescalate the perceived crisis using techniques in empathetic listening. Counselors built rapport and trust with the texter and explore issues that are triggering the crisis. Together, the counselor and texter establish the texter’s goal, and they collaboratively problem-solve to come up with a plan for the texter to stay safe in the present and future. The Crisis Text Line is able to gather zip code data from the texter to offer appropriate referrals.

Beginning in May 2016, the local cable news and public access stations played the PSA 15 times per day and has continued into the present. In addition, once per month the local newspaper donates advertisement space to the Crisis Text Line. Lastly, at the local cinema, the PSA was played 20 minutes before each movie (on 14 total screens) from the end of May to the beginning of August. Future plans include playing the PSA at the local cinemas in the summer again and offering various workshops both in schools and targeting parents. Additionally, CMF hopes to produce another PSA addressing effective communication about depression and thoughts of suicide among family members.

Community Memorial Foundation's goal was two-fold: to decrease stigma surrounding youth depression and suicide and increase teen utilization of the Crisis Text Line.

An awareness campaign that incorporates age- and culturally-appropriate actors through various media can successfully increase teen and adolescent usage of a crisis text hotline.

Prior to the PSA, texts to the Crisis Text Line in CMF's hospital service area averaged 200 texts per month. In the six months following the initial PSA in May 2016, the average monthly texts total increased to nearly 650 texts to trained crisis counselors, for a total of 3899 texts. Through social media, during the summer months, the web version of the PSA was shared over 32 times on Facebook and viewed over 800 times.