Andrews University’s Counseling and Testing Center (CTC) recently launched a new campuswide suicide prevention initiative. The goal of the Andrews University Suicide Awareness and Prevention for Everyone, or AUSAPfE (pronounced ‘AUSAFE’), is to provide a structured way of disseminating suicide awareness and prevention training to the entire campus, according to Dr. Stacey Nicely, director of the CTC.
Its official commencement was the erection of a lawn display in front of the Student Center featuring black flags, life buoys and various suicide-related statistics, which Nicely described as the first step of AUSAPfE’s mission: creating awareness. The black flags were assembled to form the number 1,529, the number of deaths by suicide in Michigan in 2023, according to the CDC.
“We wanted to create awareness about the rates of suicide nationally and statewide, and then bring awareness to the fact that accessing mental health professionals, we tends to—each state tends to have a shortage of mental health professionals available to provide care to everyone. So suicide prevention is really everyone’s business,” continued Nicely.
The CTC is currently in the process of enacting its second step, training and prevention, beginning with the student life teams. They plan to expand their operation to faculty next semester, and then to club officers. Their eventual goal is to have everyone on campus trained on the QPR strategy, which stands for Question, Persuade, and Refer.
“It’s a structured training that teaches people to recognize the warning signs of suicide,” Nicely explained. “[It] equips you with how to ask the question around ‘Are you having thoughts of killing yourself?’...When you are able to step into someone’s space, depressed space, and be able to ask them questions around, ‘how are they doing?’ And, ‘Are you thinking of killing yourself?’ You provide—you open up the opportunity for them to access help”.
Even in these first few weeks of the program’s existence, Nicely already has plans to make AUSAPfE a mainstay at Andrews: “So now everyone needs to have access to the training, but over time, those who’ve already been trained and are still here, we wouldn’t need to provide additional training… We have a captive audience with all of the freshmen when they come.”
One of AUSAPfE’s primary goals is to make the conversations surrounding mental health and suicide prevention more approachable. Alongside the aforementioned lawn display, many CTC tables have popped up at various locations throughout campus, with a goal to “bring in conversations around mental health to students in ways that are student-friendly.” CTC members also plan to have a presence in staff meetings, academic assemblies, chapels, and even student groups like choirs.
The CTC encourages students to get involved in the AUSAPfE program. AUSAPfE’s next targets for training are club officers: “Any club officer who’s reading this can reach out to the CTC to schedule — just ask for an AUSAFE training, and we’ll be more than happy to make arrangements to provide training at the club level,” per Nicely. Additionally, individual students may sign up for QPR training using this link.
“We’re wanting students to know that help is available, and suicide does not have to be the way that we attempt to respond to our problems. Help is available,” Nicely concluded.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.