Sunday, May 11, 2025
5/11/2025
Building a Community of Care at UW-Madison - The University of Wisconsin – Madison is proposing a comprehensive suicide prevention initiative to build a community of care for students on our campus. This overall goal of this initiative is to build on the suicide prevention programs already available for our students and staff and engage the entire community in the important roles they can play to prevent suicide on our campus. This work will include enhanced suicide prevention training, coalition building, and a data-based social norms communications campaign. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a public, research university, located in Madison, Wisconsin. UW-Madison enrolls 47,932 students, with 33,506 (70%) of those undergraduate students (Fall 2021). Approximately 8,000 students live in on campus residence halls. There are 24,232 faculty and staff employed at UW-Madison. The undergraduate/graduate student demographic profiles include: White (68%/51.8%); Latino/Latina (6.1%/6%); African American (2%/2.3%); American Indian (<0.5%/<0.5%); Native Hawaiian (<0.5%/<0.5%); 2 or more races (3.6%/2.7%). The most recent available campus data regarding suicide, mental health, substance use, and resource utilization show trends towards increasing prevalence among college students as well as increasing demands from students around services. For example, the 2019 UW-Madison Healthy Minds Survey found that 31% of respondents screened positive for depression (up from 21% in 2016), 26% screened positive for anxiety (16% in 2016), 11% reported suicidal ideation in the last year (9% in 2016), and 32% received mental health therapy/counseling in the last year (22% in 2016). This grant has 5 goals, responsive to our past work, and rooted in best practices. These goals are 1) Establish and convene a UW-Madison prevention coalition for campus and community partners to come together, build consensus on strategy, and collaborate on enhancing policies, aligning systems, improving services, and working towards changing the campus culture and environment to better support student mental health, prevent suicide, and prevent substance misuse; 2) Expand and enhance suicide prevention training offerings for UW-Madison faculty, staff, and students focused on recognizing warning signs, responding, and referring students to resources (RRR); 3) Promote help-seeking, reduce stigma, increase awareness of resources, and align mental health messaging at UW-Madison by using recent campus data to design, implement, and evaluate a social norms clarification campaign. 4) Increase faculty and staff engagement with suicide prevention, mental health promotion, and substance misuse prevention by convening and facilitating a new Faculty/Staff Mental Health Advocate Network; and 5) Increase the capacity of campus mental health providers, clinicians in training, and non-clinical case managers to treat and support students at-risk for suicide, serious mental illness, and substance use disorders. Given the population-based, comprehensive nature of this work, we anticipate at least 50,000 students and staff will be reached during the lifetime of this project.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).