Global Health Equity Foundation: Community based media project for suicide prevention

Suicide ravages Eastern Montana, an area known for its sparse population and “cowboy up” mentality.  Montana has ranked among the top 5 states nationally with the highest suicide rate for the past 30 years and among youth age 5-14 the rate is double the US average. Exacerbating the high suicide rate is a lack of mental health awareness, inadequate availability of mental health services, and social isolation. Still, these factors are only some of the many that may have triggered the rising suicide rate over the past decades. In order to attenuate the isolation and the knowledge gap in the Eastern Montana, an increase in suicide and mental health awareness is necessary. Global Health Equity Foundation has merged previous awareness efforts into a single, interactive, community-based approach called Let’s Talk Miles City. Drawing from case studies of community-based media projects for sensitive health issues, Let’s Talk was launched with the Miles City, MT community. It aims to help that population become comfortable communicating about suicide and depression and expressing and hearing feelings. Using multimedia tools and collaborative forums, Let’s Talk educates and empowers youth in media workshops. Their resulting artwork, stories, and performances are presented to the community to generate conversation. The National Institutes of Health, Montana IDeA Networks for Biomedical Research Excellence, funded a three-pronged social scientific study to evaluate this approach to increasing awareness and access to suicide prevention resources.  This paper presents the project, the current results, and project scalability.