After losing their son, Tyler, who was quarterback at Washington State University, to suicide in 2018, Mark and Kym Hilinski have been on a mission to empower college athletes with knowledge on tackling mental health issues.

While touring colleges across the country, Kym received an unexpected call late one night from a high school student. The student thanked the Hilinski’s for the work they were doing. The couple suspected the child was struggling with mental health issues and asked who could support him.

The student said his grandmother was the best person he could go to. But when he told his grandmother about his problems, she said, “You’re not praying hard enough.” This phone call was one moment that spurred the Hilinski’s to modify the current curriculum developed by Prevention Strategies in Greensboro, N.C. to target all high school teenagers, not just athletes. Alabama students will be the first to try this new program.

“There’s nothing wrong with praying the right way,” Mark said. “I get it. But if you had cancer, you’d go to an oncologist and pray harder.”

The Hilinski’s are proud of their work with the NCAA to improve the mental health outcomes of college athletes, but they realized that everyone is struggling.

When the Hilinski’s approached Prevention Strategies about helping high school students, Dr. Stephen Hebard, researcher and chief innovation officer, started looking at the “chilling” data on the teenage health crisis in the United States.

Hebard said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Youth Risk Behavior Study” reported “a trend over the last decade of increases in things like persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness,” Hebard said. “It shows increases in students who are considering attempting suicide, who have made a suicide plan, who have even attempted suicide.”

The mental health program consists of six 15 to 20-minute self-guided modules. All that’s required is access to the Internet and an email to log in. The modules build upon each other. The first module defines stigma and examines the students’ perceptions of mental health stigma.

“When a student participates with the modules, they do some really important things,” Hebard said. “They start to think about their own relationship with mental health and how they feel about it, and they identify somebody in their life that they view as safe and supportive of them.”

The key to this curriculum is to identify mental health struggles before they reach a crisis point. This tactic is similar to teaching children “stop, drop and roll.” Hebard said you can’t wait until there’s a fire before instructing children what to do, and the same prevention techniques apply to mental health.

Other modules explain how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors affect mental health. The students also learn how to identify when a peer or family member is struggling with mental health problems.

The Hilinskis connected with Alabama’s mental health service coordinator program by working with the state legislature. Coordinators expressed a lot of positive interest in the pilot program.

“The support so far has been tremendous,” Mark said.

The program blends seamlessly within a school learning environment. Hebard emphasized that school administrators are busy, and the program will help students build healthy habits while not being a “heavy lift” for teachers.

Recruiting for the pilot program has begun, and any high school in Alabama is eligible to participate. Interested schools can email [email protected] for more information.

“We’re just so grateful for the politicians and the educators in the great state of Alabama that see the need and are going to do something about it,” Kym said. “We don’t want to lose another Tyler. We don’t want someone to struggle in silence and not know how to reach out and ask for help. We think these modules will really help them do that.”

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, reach out to the 24–hour National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255; contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741; or chat with someone online at suicidepreventionlifeline.org. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours.