Youth Suicide Prevention

Manitoba Health and Healthy Living led the development of Reclaiming Hope: Manitoba’s Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy in collaboration with several key partners.  The goal of the Strategy is to prevent the tragedy of youth suicide and suicide related behaviours, with a focus on high risk populations. The Strategy is aimed at helping youth develop healthy individual coping strategies, enhancing family, social, and community supports and increasing access to mental health supports and activities to both enhance protective factors and reduce risk factors known to contribute to suicide behaviour. 

Several key areas were identified for action following the release of the strategy, one of which has been to support education-based initiatives in schools and alternative education settings.  Schools can play a positive role in suicide prevention because they offer consistent, direct contact time with large populations of young people.  

The Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy Education Initiatives sub-committee co-led by Manitoba Education and Advanced Learning and made up of community, regional and government partners have been working on several priorities with the goal of supporting suicide prevention initiatives in Manitoba schools and alternative education settings.

  1. Best Practices in School-based Suicide Prevention:  A Comprehensive Approach (PDF)
    This guide and tool-kit for schools supports a whole-school approach to suicide prevention using current best practices. 
  2. The development of a made-in-Manitoba multi-media resource to serve as a classroom based suicide awareness video and discussion tool. The program will be available for use in Manitoba high schools in 2017.
  3. Evaluation of suicide prevention programs in Manitoba to determine effectiveness.
  4. The development of the website Everyone Matters Manitoba, a web-based regional suicide prevention program directory and resource list for the education sector.
  5. Supporting youth suicide prevention initiatives in First Nations communities in partnership with Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre.
  6. Supporting the provincial implementation of PAX, an evidence-based early intervention suicide prevention program.