Goal: Promote social-emotional development, mental health literacy, and stigma reduction.

Objective: Provide resources to help improve individuals’ social-emotional skills and increase mental health literacy.

Action Steps:

1. Provide opportunities for youth to learn, practice, and model social-emotional skills with their peers in safe and supportive environments both at school and in the community. 

2. Implement developmentally appropriate mental health curriculum that engages all K-12 students.

Create formal and informal opportunities for parents to network to share parenting strategies, successes, challenges, and resources. This will provide support for families to continue to build relationship skills.

3. Provide life-long opportunities for adults to continue to learn, practice, and model social-emotional skills.

4.Standardize the use of non-stigmatizing language when discussing mental health and suicide.

5. Tailor stigma reduction campaigns to communities at higher risk of suicide. Involve members of these communities and their families in the development and implementation of stigma reduction educational materials and campaigns.

Evidence-based peer-to-peer programs help build social-emotional skills and can reduce thoughts of suicide. Include sports and other extracurricular activities, and out of school time programs to help reinforce these skills.