New law says all Maine school workers, from teachers to bus drivers, must train to spot the warning signs. There were 15 tragic reasons in 2013.

“Bruce” knew his teenage son was stressed, over-scheduled with sports, extracurriculars and a girlfriend, busy sometimes five nights a week.

He seemed to genuinely enjoy it all, and the worst of the sports season was almost over.

Bruce thought about telling his son to cut back but didn’t.

Going on two years ago, after an argument at the end of a bad day, his son killed himself.

Bruce shoulders the blame. He imagines other people must think the worst.

“‘You must have molested him, you must have beaten him with a hammer when no one was looking,'” he said. “We were just normal parents. We thought we were doing everything right.  Since my kids could talk, we talked about drugs, smoking, premarital sex. The only subject I didn’t harp on with the kids was suicide. If I covered the basics, that would take care of itself.”

Bruce wishes he could stop the next kid.

Maine is trying.

Thousands of teachers, bus drivers and school lunch workers will be trained over the next three years to spot the warning signs of suicide — not to solve problems themselves so much as to whisk a troubled student to someone who can — all the result of a new state law.

Maine is one of 11 states in the country to adopt some form of mandatory training for school employees.

It’s also one of six states with a new federal suicide prevention grant, $1.2 million to spend on outreach and suicide screening through school-based health centers starting this spring.

Last year, at least 15 teenagers committed suicide in Maine; the Medical Examiner’s Office is still working on the official tally. If that number holds, it would be about twice the number who took their own lives in 2012.

Grace Eaton lost her son Glen Gilchrist 16 years ago. She pushed for the new Maine mandatory training law, rallying legislators and other parents. She’s now the school counselor at Livermore Elementary School. A year after Glen’s death, she took the training to become a “gatekeeper,” someone trained to spot the warning signs.

The signs were there — a busy senior at Mt. Blue High School, Glen was a standout athlete but hard on himself — and Eaton had asked once, point blank, would he ever commit suicide?

He’d told her of course not.

“If one teacher sees signs and helps that student, isn’t it worth it?” Eaton said. “If I could go back 16 years myself, of course I would do things differently, the things I know today. I didn’t get that chance.”

‘Harder to be a kid’

Figures show the number of suicides and the number of teenagers seriously considering it are on the rise in the state.

In each of the years 2010 and 2011, suicide was ruled the cause of death for 10 people between the ages of 13 and 19, according to the ME’s office. In 2012, that number dropped to eight, and rose to the tentative 15 last year.

The numbers continue to add up in 2014. Just two weeks ago, a young man took his life in Lewiston.

In 2010, the last year data is available, Maine had the 11th-highest rate of teen suicide in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the recently released Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey, 16.8 percent of middle school students and 14.6 percent of high school students said they had seriously considered taking their own lives, numbers higher than two years before (14.5 and 12.7, respectively).

The survey’s numbers were particularly alarming for Western Maine: One in four middle school girls and one in five high school girls had seriously considered suicide, compared to about one in 10 boys.

Experts say girls report more suicide attempts, but more boys actually die.

The figures are sobering, but it’s important to know they have been worse, said Greg Marley, clinical director for the Maine chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Marley is also training director for NAMI Maine’s suicide prevention program.

“For 1997, for middle school, the rate (of those seriously considering suicide) was about 31 percent,” he said. “It fell very significantly between 1997 and 2007, before it started to edge up again.”

He traces the rise in part to the Great Recession, with impacts that weigh on young and old, and said it mirrors an increase in suicide rates for all ages nationwide.

“I certainly hope to reverse that,” Marley said. “Maine is widely recognized across this country for our youth suicide prevention work.”

Twenty years ago, then-Gov. Angus King created a task force that led to the creation of the Maine Youth Suicide Prevention Program, now the Maine Suicide Prevention Program, under the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“They have so many years ahead of them to live and do good,” said Dr. Sheila Pinette, director of the Maine CDC. “In the old days, it was kind of a stigma; children didn’t want to talk about it, families didn’t want to talk about it. You had to be strong. 

“Now we’re trying to say it’s OK to talk about suicide; (it) does not put your family at risk or your child at risk,” she said. “In fact, we believe it’s just the opposite.”

Starting as a pilot project in 2000, the state has offered prepackaged classroom lessons for health teachers on the topic of suicide awareness, called Lifelines, for more than a decade.

Craig Jipson at Edward Little High School will teach his spring class of freshmen those lessons in a week. He calls it the “scariest subject” he teaches all year.

When Jipson asks if anyone in the room has known someone who’s committed suicide, “typically, I’ll have 80 percent of kids raise their hands.”

Jipson, state-certified in the Gatekeeper and Lifelines programs, has trained Auburn administration, high school and elementary school staff about suicide awareness and prevention ahead of the new mandate.

“I’ve had several staff contact me this year, ‘I’ve had a student write this in an essay; what do you think?'” Jipson said.

About 10 kids approach him each year, wanting to talk about themselves or a friend.

“It’s getting harder and harder to be a kid,” said Jipson, who’s also a three-sport coach. “It used to be a kid picked on you, you could at least go home to get away from it. Now if you turn on your phone or computer, there’s no getting away from it. Everywhere they turn, the things that are said are so vicious and mean.”

One Edward Little student said their best friend reached out to Jipson when that friend found out the other student was struggling. The student, who agreed to answer questions from the Sun Journal anonymously, explained that they were going through a break-up, and “trying to get great grades in tough classes and pressure from parents get hard after awhile.”

“It got so bad I knew something bad would happen if I did not tell someone,” the student said. “They (the friend) told a responsible adult when I did not dare to. (My) friend saved my life.”

‘So promising’

Her son Glen had been gone almost 15 years when Eaton approached state Rep. Paul Gilbert, D-Jay, with her pitch for a bill that would require in-school suicide prevention training for all staff, regardless of their job.

“(Gilbert) was like an angel,” she said. “He took it and ran with it.”

Every legislator got a personal call from her or another supporter last winter. They didn’t encounter any outright opposition, she said, only concerns about cost. Gov. Paul LePage eventually dipped into his own contingency funds to cover $44,000 for training.

Eaton watched from the balcony as the House unanimously passed the bill last April. The Senate followed suit.

“I was elated,” she said. “It just felt so promising.”

Now Marley, NAMI and certified educators such as Jipson will train thousands of school personnel this year, starting at the high school level, about the warning signs to watch for and what to do. Under the law, high school staff have to undergo a one- to two-hour in-service training session by the start of the 2014-15 school year and all elementary and middle school staff by the start of the 2015-16 school year.

The suicide awareness sessions include a slide show, risks and how to get help for someone, Marley said. An online version is coming from NAMI Maine later this year.

Training has to be repeated every five years.

Maine, he said, is a state where nine times more people die each year by suicide than by homicide.

This tactic is “following a public health approach,” Marley said. He compared it to education about type 2 diabetes: “Make the general public aware of who’s at higher risk based on their history, their gender, warning signs that say, ‘OK, you’re teetering here, your blood sugars are up,’ and also, what anybody could do to raise their resilience to be protected. So we’re doing that with suicide.”

Gilbert said school officials in Iowa and Vermont have reached out to learn more about his bill. Rep. Gilbert’s son is the principal at Mountain Valley High School in Rumford, a district that’s been ahead of the curve in suicide awareness. He’s told his father: It works.

Not too long ago, an employee who was worried about a student’s well-being alerted a gatekeeper and staff intervened.

“The youngster is alive today because of that,” Gilbert said.

Kathy Sutton, health services coordinator for Regional School Unit 10, which includes Mountain Valley, said her district has had an active suicide education program since 2003. It has tailored classroom lessons to middle school students and high school juniors and seniors, in addition to the lessons for freshmen.

Under the new mandate, given its size, the district ought to have six trained gatekeepers. It has at least 24.

“There’s no doubt in my mind the number of people we got into counseling, that we got into hospital admissions,” Sutton said. “We saved kids; there’s no other way of putting it.”

She was “floored” by the latest Youth Health Survey results about teens in Western Maine considering suicide.

“What just impacted me big-time when I saw the new 2013 data was you can never let up,” Sutton said. “You have to be hyper-vigilant all the time. All the time.”

The numbers might be high in Western Maine in particular for several reasons, according to Marley. In rural areas, there’s more gun ownership, more substance abuse.

“There’s less easy connection with support systems, particularly professional supports,” he said. “Life is harder in rural areas, particularly because today versus 30 years ago, we have much higher expectations, the product of television and the Internet, that everyone should have this level of support, of lifestyle, and it’s harder to reach.”

Making that difference

Glen Gilchrist was 17 when he took his life. He’d been an honor roll student, a skier and a runner.

“He was also very hard on himself,” Eaton said. “He was also very impulsive. He was also very stressed during his senior year.”

School staff had told her, “‘I don’t think I’ve seen Glen this depressed before,'” she said. “Do I think they were worried about suicide? Not that they said.”

When she asked Glen directly, would you ever? He denied it.

“I have too much to live for,” her son told her.

“What you don’t know, you don’t know,” she said. “And what your kids tell you, you believe.”

That December morning, Eaton left the house for her younger son’s basketball game. Glen wanted to stay behind.

A special education teacher, she went back to school to become a counselor after his death.

“I knew that in order to make it in my world, I needed to do something,” Eaton said. “Some days it’s really hard; some years it’s really hard. Through the years, I know I have saved kids through my job.”

She has no doubt this new initiative is going to make a difference. Eaton wants to see it expanded to would-be teachers in college, to police and fire officials and to parents.

“Does it mean we’re going to save every one?” she said. “Probably not.”

Bruce calls his son’s suicide “a rash decision without time to consider the consequences.” He hadn’t considered his son at risk.

He asked to remain anonymous because the family is torn; the death was recent, within the past two years, and they don’t want attention. But if he can help another parent, another child, with his story, he’d like to.

“When I see families at Walmart, I feel very jealous,” he said. “It’s very cliche. You don’t realize how much things change until you get that phone call.”

Let kids know it’s safe to share anything at any time, and give them a judgment-free out, he said. Let them know that if they don’t want to reach out to you, that’s fine. Just reach out to someone.

“I don’t want this to happen again and I realize it is going to happen again,” Bruce said. “If I could prevent it from happening, I would be on your roof yelling it for everyone to hear.”

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Call for help

The number of initial calls to the Maine Teen Suicide Prevention Crisis Hotline (1-888-568-1112) by Maine teens, 2011-2013

2011: 676

2012: 705

2013: 632

Source: Maine Department of Health and Human Services

Western Maine’s high rate

In 2013:

1 in 4 middle school girls seriously considered suicide

1 in 5 high school girls seriously considered suicide

Source: Maine Integrated Youth Health Surveys

Warning signs and risk factors for suicide

From the Maine Teen Suicide Prevention program:

* Dramatic mood changes

* Withdrawal from friends, family

* Insomnia

* Uncontrolled anger or talk about seeking revenge

* Expressing feelings of hopelessness, purposelessness (no reason for living)

From Dr. Sheila Pinette, head of the Maine Center for Disease Control:

* Family members with a history of suicide

* Changes in the family such as death, divorce or remarriage

* Drug and alcohol use

* Not doing well in school

* Family violence, child abuse

And then what?

For adults, be available and, importantly, listen.

Grace Eaton, a school counselor at Livermore Elementary School who lost her son to suicide, said she’s voiced concerns to parents before about red flags in a child’s behavior only to hear from the parent that the child “just wants attention.”

“Would you rather give the child attention or would you rather see them dead?” said Eaton.

For help, call the Maine Teen Suicide Prevention Crisis Hotline at 1-888-568-1112.