How You are Helping to Prevent Suicide

This will be our sixth year participating as Team Emma in the Out of the Darkness Walk benefiting the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Team Emma was founded just a couple of months after Emma died by Jessica Ricchetti, one of Emma's very wise friends. In the wake of Emma's death,  Jessica wanted to try to understand Emma's death and help to prevent other suicide deaths in the future. AFSP was her answer, and we followed her lead.

Many of you followed our lead. Without knowing much about suicide prevention or AFSP, you generously and faithfully donated to Team Emma each year and helped us raise many thousands of dollars for the cause. We know that you did that without questioning where your money was going. You did it to support us. We are so grateful for that expression of unconditional love.

But we think you deserve to know not just where your money is going, but what your money is doing, because you are making some really great things happen!

Keeping it Local
Many of you may not realize that half of your money stays right here in Connecticut to support all kinds of programs:

• Chapter volunteers run a monthly support group for survivors, which can be a real lifeline for people who have lost a loved one to suicide. 
• Every year the local chapter of AFSP hosts a survivor conference to offer support and education for people who have lost loved ones to suicide. 
• Our chapter has paid to train volunteers in a number of different suicide prevention protocols and educational curricula. These volunteers are available to provide education and/or training for your school or group.
• Your support helps us to purchase and produce educational and informational resources that Chapter volunteers distribute at health fairs and resource fairs.
• We sponsored Mental Health First Aid training for youth leaders in Stamford and Norwalk high schools. These youth now know how to recognize signs of depression and mental illness and how to be a resource to their peers. We look forward to sponsoring this training at more schools!
• This fall we are sponsoring a Mental Health First Aid training for first responders, like police, fire, and EMT/ambulance. This training radically improves the response and safety for first responders and also ensures a safe and effective response for the person in crisis. 
• We have partnered with an area movie theater to sponsor PSAs about suicide prevention that will run in September and will reach thousands. 

Advocacy

Every year, AFSP brings more than 200 advocates from all over the country to Washington, D.C. to learn about important advancements and advocate for legislation that can help prevent suicide. Many of you know that I have participated in these advocacy forums for the past two years. It is an amazing event. We descend upon Capitol Hill and together manage to make personal visits to every single congressional and senate office over the course of one day. The visits, the personal stories, and the compelling facts and data we share are making a difference and we have had some notable victories in the last two years:

• Passage of the Excellence in Mental Health Act which represents the greatest federal investment in community-based mental health and substance abuse treatment and helps insure access to quality, effective services for people who did not have access before.
• Passage of the MODDERN Cures Act, which will allow providers to quickly begin using diagnostics that could dramatically improve the safety and effectiveness of prescribing psychiatric medications.
• Increased funding for the National Violent Death Reporting System that will allow this universal reporting system which, until recently, was only being implemented in 18 states, to be implemented in 32 states, including Connecticut. Almost every major cause of death has a system in place for uniformly collecting data about deaths by that illness. That data has been the foundation that has helped inform incredible advancements in cancer treatment, heart disease and other illnesses. The National Violent Death Reporting System will help us to get that data for suicide deaths. 
• Re-authorization of the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act which provides funding for much of the community-based and school-based suicide prevention programming in our country.

Research

AFSP is supporting promising research that will lead to advancements in suicide prevention. I encourage you to explore the AFSP website to learn about the studies that AFSP is supporting.

It's time for me to ask for your support of Team Emma once again this year, but I do so knowing that, together, we are truly making a difference. Let's create a world without suicide!

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