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Suicide Prevention Basics
This collection of short, on-demand courses offers critical training for everyone.
About this bundle
We are proud to support suicide prevention in the military-connected community through our online educational portfolio, which includes courses on Suicide Prevention, Intervention, and Postvention. This collection of short, on-demand courses offers critical training for everyone. Start learning today to make a difference.
This bundle includes the following courses:
VA S.A.V.E.
In collaboration with the Department of Veteran Affairs, this course covers suicide risk in the military and Veteran communities. Learn to identify at-risk Veterans and use S.A.V.E. steps to help make a difference.
VA S.A.V.E. Preventing Caregiver Suicide
After taking this course, you will develop an understanding of the increased risk for suicide we see in military and Veteran caregivers, identify the signs of an at-risk Veteran caregiver, and know steps you can take to help a Veteran caregiver.
Suicide Prevention and the Secure Storage of Firearms: Conversations for Everyone
This course provides critical information for members of every community about the safe storage of firearms. When people are in crisis, honest conversations about accessibility to lethal means for suicide are vitally important.
What Is the Crisis Response Plan: An Introductory Course for People Who Support Veterans
Those who have served, as well as their families, are at a greater risk of suicide than people without military experience. Join Dr. Craig Bryan for an overview of the Crisis Response Plan and how it has helped Veterans and others who are at risk.
How to Use the Crisis Response Plan: An Introductory Course for People Who Support Veterans
In this course, Dr. Craig Bryan discusses the details of the Crisis Response Plan. He then goes through the five sections of the Crisis Response Plan and details the questions to ask in order to help our loved ones.
Columbia Scale for Communities
To create an open, honest discussion about mental health, and to actively prevent more of your brothers and sisters who have served from dying by suicide, military members and Veterans should use the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS).
Postvention: Healing After Suicide
Postvention is a term unfamiliar to many people, yet it is a critical component of suicide prevention. This course, narrated by Dr. Shauna Springer, explains postvention, what it is and why it is important.
Taught by world class instructors:
U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs
Office Of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention
Heidi Squier Kraft, Ph.D.
Chief Clinical Officer, PsychArmor
Heidi Squier Kraft received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the UC San Diego/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology in 1996. She joined the Navy during her internship at Duke University Medical Center and went on to serve as both a flight and clinical psychologist. Her active duty assignments included the Naval Safety Center, the Naval Health Research Center and Naval Hospital Jacksonville, FL. While on flight status, she flew in nearly every aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corps inventory, including more than 100 hours in the F/A-18 Hornet, primarily with Marine Corps squadrons. In February 2004, she deployed to western Iraq for seven months with a Marine Corps surgical company, when her boy and girl twins were 15-months-old. RULE NUMBER TWO is a memoir of that experience. Dr. Kraft left active duty in 2005, after nine years in the Navy. She currently serves as Chief Clinical Officer at PsychArmor Institute, a national non-profit dedicated to evidence-based education for those who live with, care for, and work with the military-connected community. She is frequently invited to speak at conferences and panels on stress, vicarious trauma, and military culture. She is a lecturer at San Diego State University, where she teaches Stress, Trauma and the Psychological Experience of Combat, Health Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Field Placement, and Infant and Child Development. Dr. Kraft lives in San Diego with her husband Mike, a former Marine Harrier pilot. Her twins Brian and Meg, who have no memory of their mother’s time in Iraq, are in college now.
Craig Bryan, Psy.D., ABPP
Stress, Trauma, & Resilience Professor, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Division Director of Recovery and Resilience, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
Dr. Craig J. Bryan, PsyD, ABPP, is a board-certified clinical psychologist in cognitive-behavioral psychology. He is the Stress, Trauma, & Resilience (STAR) Professor at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, and Division Director of Recovery and Resilience in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health. Dr. Bryan is the former Executive Director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at The University of Utah. He served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force as an active duty psychologist, which included a deployment to Iraq in 2009. He has published hundreds of scientific articles and several books including Brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention. He is one of the nation’s leading experts on military and Veteran suicide.
Kelly Posner, Ph.D
Founder and Director, The Columbia Lighthouse Project
Kelly Posner, PhD is a Professor of Psychiatry in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and the Founder and Director of The Columbia Lighthouse Project. The U.S. Department of Defense said her work is “nothing short of a miracle,” central to their National Strategy, and “will help propel us closer to a world without suicide.” For this work Dr. Posner has been awarded with the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. The former President of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, noted the Columbia Protocol (or C-SSRS) and its dissemination could be “like the introduction of antibiotics.” He also stated that because of her work, we “may actually be able to make a dent in the rates of suicide that have existed in our population and have remained constant over time…that would be an enormous achievement in terms of public health care and preventing loss of life.” Dr. Posner’s work with the Columbia Protocol has been noted in a keynote speech at the White House and in Congressional hearings, and she presented in a forum on school safety at the U.S. Senate. Jim Shelton, Former Deputy Education Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, says her work “has the potential to keep the 64 million children in our schools safe physically and mentally by helping prevent school violence.” Through her advocacy, she has changed local, national and international policy, which in turn has helped achieve reductions in suicide across all types of public health settings including healthcare, schools, the military, states and countries. Her policy work helped the state of Utah achieve its first decrease in suicides in a decade and helped the U.S. Marine Corp achieve a 22% suicide reduction. Israeli officials said her work “is not only saving millions of lives but in Israel it is literally changing the way we live our lives.” Dr. Posner gave the invited presentation on tackling depression and suicide at the first European Union high level conference on mental health, was recognized as the most Distinguished Alumna of her graduate school in the past fifty years, and received the New York State Suicide Prevention Award. She was named one of New York Magazine’s “Most Influential,” received the Angel Award of New York’s “100 Socially Responsible,” and the Anne Vanderbilt Award from Partnership for Children. Recommended or adopted by CDC, FDA, DoD, and NIMH, the C-SSRS has become the gold standard for suicide monitoring and is ubiquitous across the U.S and many international agencies. The FDA has characterized her work as “setting a standard in the field” and the CDC said that her work is “changing the paradigm in suicide risk assessment in the US and worldwide.” A lead article in The New York Times called this work “one of the most profound changes of the past sixteen years to regulations governing drug development.” Dr. Posner’s scholarly work has been included in the compendium of the most important research in the history of the study of suicide.
Shauna Springer, Ph.D.
Relationship Expert. Trauma Expert. Trusted Doc.
Dr. Shauna Springer – known as “Doc Springer” in the military community, is one of the nation’s leading experts on PTSD and transitional trauma. Her work has been featured on CNN, VICE, Business Insider, THRIVE Global, US News and World Report, NPR, NBC, CBS Radio, Forbes, Washington Post, and Military Times. She is a regular contributor to Psychology Today.
Over the past decade, Doc Springer has earned a rare form of trust with military leaders and combat warfighters. After serving for 8 years as a frontline psychologist in the Department of Veterans Affairs she transitioned to becoming the Senior Director of Suicide Prevention Initiatives for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. In her new role as Chief Psychologist of Stella Center, she is working to advance a new model for the treatment of trauma, that fuses biological and psychological interventions. She continues to collaborate with colleagues at TAPS to elevate TAPS field-leading expertise on grief and loss. For example, she is a lead subject matter expert for the NFL Foundation funded PsychArmor series of courses on suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention. Dr. Springer wrote and narrated 5 courses to support this critical initiative – on barriers to treatment, TAPS postvention model, grief and trauma, grief in the veteran population, and post-traumatic growth after loss.
Dr. Springer’s reputation for walking with warfighters in the trenches of mental warfare is widely recognized. What Dr. Springer has learned from helping our nation’s warriors confront and overcome the challenges they face gives her a uniquely valuable perspective on how to lead ourselves – and those around us – through times of trauma, challenge, and unforeseen life disruption.