Contact: Allison Matthews
Photo by: Beth Wynn
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A coalition of higher education members from across the state are at Mississippi State this week for training to help address major health challenges for college students.
The Mississippi Coalition of Partners in Prevention is presenting sessions July 14-15 for suicide prevention and alcohol abuse prevention in order to take the information back to their respective organizations.
"When a participant is finished training, he or she will return to their university or community college to train gatekeepers at their institution and within the community," said Joyce Yates, MSU director of health education and wellness. "This will be a blitz of prevention education over the entire state."
The coalition is made up of Mississippi's public institutions of higher learning, as well as representatives from most community colleges in the state and some additional members, including Rust College and the Madison Rankin Prevention Partnership. Yates said the group is still recruiting additional members.
The group's mission is to proactively address the prevention of high-risk, negative health behaviors on Mississippi campuses by providing high-quality consultation and training, research support, and policy development to member institutions. MCPP actively seeks partnerships with state and community agencies in order to provide campuses with a variety of resources to support their prevention efforts.
Funding for the current training is being provided by the Mississippi Department of Mental Health.
The coalition is preparing to address two serious health challenges in positive ways by equipping people with information about suicide, the second leading cause of death of college-age students across the nation, as well as alcohol, which Yates said is the leading abused substance on college campuses.
The training includes "Question, Persuade, and Refer," also known as QPR, which teaches three steps that anyone can learn to help save a life from suicide. According to the QPR Institute, available at www.qprinstitute.com/, "Just as people trained in CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver help save thousands of lives each year, people trained in QPR learn how to recognize the warning signs of a suicide crisis and how to question, persuade, and refer someone to help."
Additionally, the coalition is utilizing a TIPS training program, or Training for Intervention Procedures, to discuss alcohol abuse prevention strategies. TIPS is a skills-based training program designed to prevent intoxication, underage drinking and drunk driving. For more, see www.gettips.com/.
MSU is Mississippi's flagship research university, available online at www.msstate.edu, facebook.com/msstate, instagram.com/msstate and twitter.com/msstate.