Funds OK'd for suicide prevention

University of Utah mental health leaders have known for years that two-thirds of teens who commit suicide have gone through the juvenile court system at some point in their lives.

Now the system finally has some money to put that information to work.

A $1.2 million federal grant to the University of Utah given this week will allow Doug Gray, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, to implement a proactive approach to identifying at-risk youth in the 3rd District Juvenile Court and getting them into therapy.

"They're deteriorating. They're getting involved with drugs and alcohol, they're getting into trouble and before they get way down in the court system, they suicide," Gray said. "What's cool about this is we can get the younger kids and try to reduce the work load of the court."

With the grant money, Gray hopes to give all juvenile offenders a questionnaire created to red-flag any teens with mental health problems. Those youths will then be entered into an individualized therapy program and be eligible for in-home counseling services while on probation.

The grant — $400,000 annually for three years — is part of a larger national campaign by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to broaden mental health programs and awareness of suicide.

Many of the teens who commit suicide in Utah fall through the cracks in the juvenile court system, often being the last on a long list of needs, Gray said. According to a 10-year study on youth suicide in Utah, Gray said most suicide victims are only in the court system for minor offenses like truancy and are never a top priority for mental health resources.

"There's never really been a specific assessment tool that could be used. It would be horrible to know you had somebody on your case load that was at risk, yet you didn't have any resources for the kid and the family to do something about it," said Ray Wahl, juvenile court administrator. "That's the piece that had been missing."

The federal grant will allow the system to patch up a few of those cracks, Wahl said. Money for such programs has been tight with ongoing mental health cutbacks, and putting troubled teens on a three-month waiting list for therapy hasn't been enough.

"Quantity for me on this particular issue is not something that I really worry about. If there's a couple of kids that we can help, we ought to do that," he said. "We have probation officers that have kids commit suicide, and they go through all the guilt that parents go through."

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