Help schools address mental health and suicide

In the past few months, Unsilence has completed a number of focus groups with a diverse group of audience participants. The goal of these focus groups was to determine the overall impact of the TOMORROW interactive digital feature as a means to increase empathy in participants around the difficult nature of talking about suicide in schools.

Although we are analyzing the data and putting together a full report, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of the results!

Some of the particpants responded with the following:

"I think TOMORROW is a good starting point for people who are not- who don't know a lot about suicide, or don't talk about it. It's a narrative, which means it's a way to get across about going to a teacher, to somebody, in a plain, mundane way. It makes you invested."

"I think the way TOMORROW is set up is very smart, like, choose your own adventure - also, the different perspectives, because I'd never thought about it from the teacher's, or administrator's point of view. That's very important to understand other people's point of view. No matter where you are in life, if you're the student or you're the administrator. How people are feeling, how people deal with things is very different. Everyone's point of view should be acknowledged. I thought about that through the whole process."

"Being able to choose what we do next makes you engage more with it, and think about the relative merits of each of these choices, more than you would if you were just given a list of best practices."

The overall initial finding:

Participants were given a form of the Social Empathy Index before and after each workshop. Scores showed an increase in empathy. According to a t-test this showed to be a significant increase.

Thanks to you, we are able to continue this important work and increase our reach and impact of bringing this important issue to light and increasing empathy in participants!

Sincerest Gratitude!

The Unsilence Team