Many years ago when I worked in America I was called by the Chief of the local fire department of a small town. There had been a wave of suicides in the local high school, three teenagers were dead. All of them know one another, silence had been maintained and the town was in shock. The Chief wanted to bring a committee of leaders together to do something to prevent this from ever happening again. I got a call because my practice was located in a neighbouring community. It turns out I wasn’t the only psychologist who was asked for help; but I was the only one who volunteered to assist without being paid.

We met over several occasions and assembled a committee of adults. We wanted to start a suicide prevention initiative and it occurred to us that we needed to work with young people in the local community, get them involved, and bring them to a point of awareness that suicide amongst teens can be addressed in schools and communities. With that in mind we reached out to the student union of the local high school and asked for people to come and join us in a meeting.

We were overwhelmed with offers of assistance from students of all ages. We had nearly 100 young people turn up at our first meeting. All of them had known at least one of the teens who had killed themselves. All wanted to do something to see that a tragedy of this nature never happened again. We managed to establish a workable committee of students and adults, about 25 in all, and we set about trying to set up an awareness campaign within the high school.

Our first task was to find a name for our group. I can’t tell you how many meeting we had bouncing around names, trying out various permutations that would be palatable, yet get the message across. After two meetings, in both of which all the adults had taken a lead role in finding a name, we were at the point of despair. We simply couldn’t agree a name.

At the third meeting a 15 old girl who had sat silently through two meetings suddenly lightened up and with great enthusiasm tinged with a certain amount of exasperation said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you people. The name is obvious. It should be called “SAVE-Suicide Awareness, Valuable Education” It was a brilliant insight and the perfect name. That’s the name we adopted for our group and our intervention programme in the school.

That was a good few years ago. I don’t know if the programme we started so long ago is still in place or not. But I do not that we organised some excellent media coverage, sponsored an evening seminar attended by hundreds of people and gaining wide-spread media coverage. SAVE-Suicide Awareness, Valuable Education, a programme of suicide prevention in a high school.