On Board Online • March 16, 2026
By Alan Wechsler
Special Correspondent
In 2024, one in 10 adolescents ages 12-17 had serious thoughts of suicide in the prior year, and 4.6% made a suicide plan, according to a 2025 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
About 700,000 (2.7% of 12- to 17-year-olds) attempted suicide in the same time period, according to a report titled Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
A promising strategy to address issues that can lead to suicide involves "cultivating the leading causes of life," according to Scott LoMurray, a suicide prevention expert who has presented at two NYSSBA events.
Time magazine recently named LoMurray among the 100 most influential people in health in 2025. In January 2026, the magazine published an article by him entitled, "We Need to Rethink Suicide Prevention, Starting Long Before Crisis."
LoMurray is chief executive officer of a Bismark, North Dakota company called Sources of Strength. It partners with thousands of elementary, middle and high schools across the United States and Canada, offering evidence-based programs to promote mental health and prevent adverse outcomes.
Conventional approaches to suicide prevention involve identifying vulnerable youth and "navigating that 'waterfall-edge' crisis moment," LoMurray said at NYSSBA's 2025 Annual Convention & Education Expo, held in New York City. "We can do a lot more to move upstream. How are we building protective factors to keep people from falling in the river in the first place? How are we building connections and resilience that really helps prevent the onset of that crisis?"
The Sources of Strength model begins with training two to five adult advisors, school staff and other adults, to mentor a peer leader team. Peer leader teams range from 10 to 50 students to create a variety of "hope, help, strength" messaging activities to impact a diverse group of youth.
What kind of messages? It could be anything from setting up a table at homecoming to doing class presentations or just interacting with students. Some schools have even recruited celebrities to take part in related events, such as Katy Perry and Jack Black, LoMurray said.
Peer leaders can spread the idea that asking an adult for help is a viable alternative to someone considering suicide. Studies have found that suicidal peers were four times more likely to seek help as a result of such messages, LoMurray said.
He said suicide prevention needs the same kind of approach used to reduce heart disease. "We didn't reduce heart disease deaths by 60% in 50 years in this country by just getting better at performing heart surgery or putting defibrillators in shopping malls," he said. "We took a public health approach to get healthier as a society .We got healthier, exercised more, ate better. We need a similar approach to mental health."
In his article published by Time magazine, LoMurray wrote: "Feelings like sadness, fear, anger, or anxiety are not negative emotions, they are human ones. And we need more dialogue about what helps us humans navigate the difficulties that life brings our way ... There is a meaningful difference between the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and the cultivation of mental health. A thriving society invests in both."
He concluded his article as follows:
Effective suicide prevention cannot be limited to keeping people alive when they are at their lowest point. Our goal must be to prevent those moments of suicidal despair from forming in the first place. It must be to help people heal, and to build lives of beauty, purpose, connection and joy.
Progress in suicide prevention has always come from a community: survivors, people with lived experience, clinicians, researchers, educators, advocates and policymakers who drive this lifesaving work forward. We will always need crisis lines, mobile response teams and evidence-based treatment. But if we want to see meaningful and lasting change, upstream prevention must stand alongside these tools as a central pillar of our national approach.
Read LoMurray's article at bit.ly/4cD9z3J .