Hi, my name is Lynda C. I earned the Girl Scout Gold Award by creating "Not One More: A Mission to Eliminate Youth Suicide" for my school.  Now I'm sharing it with the world through this website.

Since I was 13, I knew I wanted to make a suicide prevention program. At 10 years old, I began struggling with poor mental health. At one point I experienced suicidal ideation that resulted from an extreme desire to escape the situation I was in. It was horrifying and I felt that I had nowhere to turn. Luckily, support from family, friends, and an amazing nurse practitioner got me through to the healing process. 

When I began to process the trauma from that time, I made a resolution that no one would ever feel as helpless as I did.

Of course, life caught up to me, and I forgot about the resolution until last year. Last year, my family attended a funeral for one of my brother’s friends. At the time, my brother was a senior in high school. His friend was the same age. His friend fell victim to the 2nd leading cause of death for people ages 15-24: suicide.

Something had to happen, and something had to happen right then.

So, I began researching. How many children report feelings of poor mental health? How many children had gotten to the point of suicidal ideation? Made plans? Attempted? One specifically sickening point in my research was when I noticed that teen suicides in my home town had doubled from 14 in 2018 to 28 in 2019.

So what is missing from currently existing suicide prevention programs? What isn’t there that is integral to preventing children from ending their own life? More research soon made this answer glaringly obvious: 

mental health was treated like a passing topic. 

I understand that sometimes the only thing that a school can do is a seminar one time per year or a theme-week.  Life is busy. I get it. I am not discounting that as an ineffective method to teach about mental health. But what I feel so many schools fail to realize is that it gets increasingly difficult to remember the presentation that was given in October when you are struggling with poor mental health in February.

I believe that mental health needs to be revisited throughout the school year. There must be a culture that destigmatizes discussions around mental health and asking for help. Students must know who their support system is and what to do when they feel that they are struggling.

Schools can provide this to them. And I can provide it to the schools. When I started I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that objective. All I had were some ideas floating around my head to serve as the guiding principles (or vision). I wrote them on a whiteboard and took a picture.

Thus, Not One More: A Mission to Eliminate Youth Suicide was born. This curriculum is intended to fit with any schedule and to be implemented by anyone. Busy teachers, ambitious students, and involved administration can perform any activity in this program. One of the best things about this project is that it’s not treated as a one-size-fits-all effort to eliminate suicide. Does your class enjoy creating but have difficulty understanding that they’re appreciated? Try out “Classroom Cities and Student Storefronts”! What about classes that are having trouble appreciating one another? Ok, “Love Bags” is perfect!

There are activities that lend themselves to spontaneous incorporation into unplanned downtime and times of heightened anxiety, as well as activities that can be incorporated into assignments, extra credit, announcements, assemblies, etc. I wanted to make this program incredibly easy to operate. All it needs is you — the person reading this letter — to get an idea from one of the pamphlets... and take action.

As the years progress, I hope the stigma around mental health will decrease, and self-confidence and community morale will increase.

Together, we can eliminate youth suicide.

With Love,

Lynda