The first draft is done and sent to the publisher, Jossey Bass, a division of Wiley Publishing. And it’s now with the editor and will be sent out for peer review. I’ll get it back some time in January and have one more edit. I’m not sure what to expect. Will I be the one to merge all the comments from the reviewers?
Kim O’Brien Ph.D. and I interviewed over thirty experts, school counselors, teachers, students, and principals. And we included data from Kim’s studies and comments from mine. I didn’t realize I had so much data on this blog, my YouTube channel, and my article on The Mighty. Thousands of comments from young people (anonymity preserved) served as examples.
We included some creative ways teachers can integrate strategies in the classroom that have an upstream approach. Upstream means before things get to a crisis. These are really shifts in teaching to help students build healthy coping skills for managing adversity. Because preventing suicide is about spotting students at risk and having the training to do so, having a protocol for managing the identified students, but also helping them develop skills. So a lot of suicide prevention isn’t literally suicide education while it should include some of that as well as education on mental health, it’s more about creating a foundation where suicide and other high-risk behaviors are less likely to occur because students have better strategies. There will be a download that accompanies all book purchases that will have worksheets, quizzes, games, templates, sample policies, and some scripts as examples. We cover prevention, intervention, re-entry after a suicide attempt, and suicide death in the family as well as postvention. But mostly it’s about what teachers can do specifically, how important those relationships are, and how to leverage them for the health and well-being of the whole child.
It was tough to get this manuscript written by the deadline. Now I can take a sigh of relief.
The book, Emotionally Naked: A Teacher’s Guide to Preventing Suicide and Recognizing Students at Risk is expected to publish in August of 2021.
