Care packages to promote universal suicide prevention for remote Alaska Native communities: What worked?

Abstract

Purpose

Alaska Native (AN) youth living in remote Alaska suffer disproportionately from suicide when compared to all other American youth. Promoting Community Conversations About Research to End Suicide (PC CARES) is an intervention led by trained community facilitators, which shares scientific best practices to prevent youth suicide with community adults to spark feasible, culturally tailored personal and collective action. After training 34 AN facilitators to implement PC CARES in their home communities in late 2019, COVID-19 precluded in-person PC CARES activities, but the need to help adults support youth mental health during this period of quarantine and social distancing remained.

Method

The resulting adapted “PC CARES at Home” intervention delivered mail-based mental wellness and suicide prevention information and resources to adult community members from June 2020 to July 2022. The project sent 1527 care packages to 492 participants.

Finding

According to short surveys (n = 199) and interviews done with randomly selected recipients (n = 24), adults who received the PC CARES care packages were very satisfied with the contents and found them useful.

Conclusion

Both acceptance and utility of mental health and safety promotion care packages has implications for offering information and resources to adults in remote communities to support them in promoting youth mental wellness.