Change Initiative and Strategies

Assembling the Change Initiative Project
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Assembling the Change Initiative Project
Introduction
In 2019, CDC published a report on suicidal ideation and behavior and established that suicide is the second leading cause of death among high school students after unintentional injuries CITATION Ive20 \l 1033 (Ivey-Stephenson, et al., 2020). The report shows that trends in suicide attempts had increased. The report also shows that in 2019 a total of 18.8% of students seriously considered suicide, and among them, 8.9% followed through with their plans. The CDC also noted that the prevalence of suicide was higher among LGBTQ students, with a 54.2% percentage. These figures highlight the problem of depression among teenagers. If 8.9% of the surveyed students attempted suicide, that is nearly nine for every 100 students. For suicide to become the second leading killer among high school students, there must have been a structural issue that has been left unchecked, and it is claiming so many young lives.
Suicide is at least a product of stress, and therefore, can be understood as a learned behavior. Social learning theory states that learning is a cognitive process. An individual learns new behaviors by observing and imitating others. Further, the theory also points out that learning occurs through observation of the rewards and punishments. Therefore, the problem of suicide among high school children may be an attempt to seek the rewards of ending their suffering from depression. Suicide as a learned behavior can be explored with important information on subcultural factors in teenage-suicide, the role of suggestion, influences in the methods of suicide, suicide in significant others, the role of the family in shaping suicidal behavior, and cultural patterns of suicide CITATION Les87 \l 1033 (Lester, 1987). Data from these variables show that that suicide is at least in part a learned response to stress and depression.
There are some undeniable connections between the social learning theory and suicide among high school children. First, human behavior is learned through modeling. Therefore, for high school children, exposure to suicidal behavior indirectly or directly tends to increase the risk of adolescent suicidal behavior. Cluster suicides have been found among adolescents CITATION DeC15 \l 1033 (DeCamp, 2015). Secondly, the portrayal of suicide in the media also affects the way adolescents attempt their suicide. Some of the students who confessed to having considered suicide seriously also claimed that they had seen it on the media. In other cases, there have been cyber-suicide pacts (suicide pacts between strangers who have met on the internet). These trends show that suicide is a more learned behavior, and exposure to adolescents’ suicidal content may exacerbate the problem. To resolve suicidality among high school students, strategies to limit their consumption of information that inform them of suicide. Interventionists also need to know how to observe patterns that a suicidal adolescent has to determine if he/she is suicidal. For example, suppose a teenager likes watching movies with multiple depictions of suicide or visiting social media pages that seem to be anchored in prom...