YAM: A Lifesaving Youth Suicide Prevention Program Making Waves in the U.S.
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of YAM, or Youth Aware of Mental Health.
It’s a youth suicide prevention program that’s only available in Montana, Texas, and Idaho. Researchers and community leaders say the program works.
YAM, a universal intervention that was designed and studied in Europe, can reduce the risk of suicides and suicidal thinking by about 50% in adolescents.
A universal intervention is a public health strategy designed to touch everyone.
I heard about it a few years ago from my friend, Matt Kuntz, the Executive Director of NAMI Montana. If you knew anything about Matt’s advocacy skills, you wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he’s the one who brought YAM to the US.
YAM is an uncomplicated five-hour program that is delivered over the course of one or two months during the school year.
The interactive lectures and role-playing sessions are designed to help 13 to 17 year olds to do the following:
- Improve understanding of mental health basics.
- Boost coping skills to survive life’s stressors.
- Reduce stigma by openly discussing 1 & 2.
A randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving more than 11,000 students was conducted in Europe to study YAM’s efficacy.
The RCT showed that the risk of suicide attempts was cut by more than 50% in the year following the intervention. The risk of having suicidal thoughts was reduced by nearly the same amount.
In 2016, Larry Woolf, a retired educator who grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, became one of the first US-based facilitators of YAM. I spoke with him in early May.
In the years he’s been delivering YAM, he has seen the number of youth suicides on the reservation plummet. He believes the program is responsible for the change.
I asked him how a program designed for European teens could possibly help Native American students from a reservation located in Montana.
“The program is driven by the kids,” he explained. “They create the role-playing content and are really engaged.”
Larry may only have a few years left as a volunteer trainer and facilitator for YAM, but he still dreams of making the program available to adolescents in every one of Montana’s seven reservations.
We owe it to Larry and our adolescents to help make it happen. Spreading YAM nationally would be nice, too.
