Overview
Schools can strengthen their community and students’ sense of belonging by fostering protective factors.
Protective factors are characteristics or conditions that may help decrease a person’s suicide risk. These factors don’t eliminate the possibility of suicide, but they can help reduce risk.
Protective factors help create resiliency, or an ability to “bounce back” (i.e., adapt and recover), from setbacks encountered throughout life.
Key takeaways
- Protective factors, such as resilience and life skills, can decrease suicide risk.
- Students who feel connected to their schools, friends, and trusted adults are less likely to attempt suicide.
- Your school can strengthen students’ sense of connectedness.
- Life skills and resilience can be taught and modeled at school.
Examples of protective factors
School divisions should consider practices and programming that foster protective factors as part of a larger suicide prevention plan.
Personal protective factors
- Psychological or emotional well-being, a positive mood
- Coping mechanisms, self-care strategies, conflict resolution skills
- Problem-solving skills
- Positive connections with family
- Close friends
- Adaptive temperament
- Access to faith-based institutions, social groups, and clubs
- Healthy role models
- Cultural and religious beliefs that discourage suicide and promote self-preservation
- Limited access to firearms
- Limited access to medication, alcohol, and other illicit drugs
School protective factors
- Feeling safe at school (especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth)
- Feeling a sense of connectedness to school
- Access to effective care for mental, physical, and substance abuse disorders
Growing your school’s connectedness
Feeling connected to school is vital for a student’s well-being and an important protective factor.
Studies have shown that rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts were higher in schools where students had fewer friends, and where friendships were concentrated among fewer students. Rates of suicide attempts were also higher in schools where students lacked close connections to adults. In schools where close friends had bonds with the same trusted adult, attempt rates were lower (Wyman, P.A., et al., 2019).
How can your school strengthen a sense of connectedness?
Some strategies to consider:
- Create trusting relationships that promote open communication among administrators, teachers, staff, students, families, and community members
- Provide professional development and support for teachers and other school staff to enable them to meet the cognitive, emotional, and developmental needs of students
- Create decision-making processes that facilitate student, family, and community engagement, and staff empowerment
- Support the development of relationships between students and adult role models (such as teachers and coaches)
- Provide education and opportunities to enable families to be actively involved in their children’s school life
- Provide students with the academic, emotional, and social skills necessary to be actively engaged in school
- Create and sustain peer-delivered services and support groups
Building life skills
Everyday activities can help students strengthen their life skills: a key protective factor for suicide. Life skills can include such strategies as critical thinking, stress management, conflict resolution, problem-solving, and coping skills.
No matter what challenges come their way, we want to encourage students toward resilience and the ability to adapt when facing stress and adversity.
Ideas for teaching life skills at school
- Identify common stressors affecting your students and offer skill-building sessions targeting these stressors
- Teach mindfulness and stress reduction techniques
- Provide information about self-help tools and apps
- Create and model an institutional culture that promotes empathy, optimism, support, and forgiveness
- Implement curricula for life skills and classroom behavior management
- Provide resources and information to help students cope with life transitions
- Encourage and support your staff in modeling life skills and resilience