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Increase Collaboration

Build sustainable and integrated infrastructure in Vermont for mental health promotion, suicide prevention, intervention and postvention



Objective:   Increase collaboration across a broad spectrum of individuals, families, agencies, institutions, and groups to ensure that suicide prevention efforts are comprehensive.

WHAT VERMONT CAN DO

Individuals & Families:

  • Help increase the number of youth and young adults advising the prevention activities of the Vermont Suicide Prevention Coalition.
  • Help ensure the input of people with lived experience of mental health conditions, and suicide and attempt survivors, in advising suicide prevention initiatives and activities.

Organizations:
Non-profit, Community-Based, Faith-Based, and Businesses

  • Increase partnerships between the Vermont Suicide Prevention Center and Vermont Suicide Prevention Coalition and other statewide coalitions, including peer recovery, survivors of suicide and suicide loss.
  • Join the Vermont Suicide Prevention Coalition and integrate your organizational work into the state’s mental health promotion and suicide prevention infrastructure.
  • Support the development of the Vermont Suicide Prevention Center as sustainable infrastructure for suicide prevention, intervention and postvention, through collaboration across a broad spectrum of agencies, institutions, and groups.
  • Encourage professional, voluntary and other organizations to integrate effective, sustainable and collaborative suicide prevention programming.
  • Strengthen relationships between mental health services, schools, Institutions of Higher Education, and family-serving and community organizations.
  • Ensure Vermont 2-1-1 and other crisis lines are accessible and include effective suicide response.
  • Increase the number of Vermont communities that use the Umatter for Schools and Umatter for Communities programs, ASIST, or other best-practice suicide prevention programs.

Schools, Colleges, and Universities:

  • Use JED Foundation comprehensive model to assess current, and identify priority, prevention strategies that are well integrated into systems and services.

Healthcare:

  • Treat mental health conditions as you would treat physical health conditions – as treatable conditions that everyone deals with and that may require specialty care.
  • Link general practitioners and community mental health services for integrated referral networks.

Policy and Systems:

  • Sustain and strengthen leadership of collaborations across state agencies to advance suicide prevention.
  • Integrate suicide prevention into all relevant health care reform efforts.
  • Support the Vermont Suicide Prevention Center in coordinating suicide prevention efforts and helping local communities implement the recommendations of the Vermont Suicide Prevention Platform.