Grim Topic, Festive Events: Upbeat College Health Fairs Focus on Suicide Prevention

“I was uptight, wanna let loose / I was dreaming of bigger things … I was lightning before the thunder ...”

It’s a little after noon on a Friday, and Brandon Julot, a senior, plays the resolute Imagine Dragons song on his DJ console in Goucher College’s spacious Ungar Athenaeum. Students shoot hoops with members of the basketball team. The scent of popcorn fills the air, and out front is parked a Kona shaved-ice truck.

It’s a festive scene — but the theme is suicide prevention. If that contrast is jarring, it’s also intentional.

This Fresh Check Day health fair is one of hundreds the Jordan Porco Foundation has helped organize on college campuses in 42 states since 2012. The foundation estimates that 100,000 students have attended the two- or three-hour events, usually midday. They snack, pick up stickers, water bottles, and other swag, and register for bigger prizes like movie passes, restaurant gift cards, a portable speaker, or a massage.

Preventing Suicide Contagion

No college wants to plan for the aftermath of a student’s suicide, but not to, experts say, is reckless and dangerous. “Postvention” guidelines on how best to notify students, handle mourning and memorials, and offer counseling might play a crucial role in averting suicide clusters.

• A Postvention Primer
• After a Suicide, What Colleges Can Do to Protect the Public Health
• Resources for Handling Suicide’s Aftermath

In the process they learn about wellness resources on and around the campus, and about the mental-health warning signs to watch for in their classmates and themselves. The Jed Foundation, which works to prevent teen and young-adult suicide, estimates that 1,300 to 1,400 college students die by suicide yearly.

“I don’t think many students are aware of all the resources available to them for mental wellness,” says Nae Jefferies, a Goucher senior majoring in peace studies. “This is a really good way to address these types of issues … both fun and informative.”

It’s the kind of event Jordan Porco might have gone to as a college freshman in 2011. If he had, the upbeat snowboarder and longboarder might have seen his drop in appetite and sudden shift in mood as signs of trouble. “He acted differently,” says his mother, Marisa Giarnella-Porco, in a phone interview. “He wasn’t the same fun-loving kid.”

He had been a worker and saver but was suddenly going through a lot of money, she remembers. He was, uncharacteristically, chain-smoking. Over a holiday break, he wondered if he’d chosen the right college and whether he should take a gap year. He felt like everyone but him had everything all figured out, his mother says.

Porco’s subsequent suicide prompted his parents to set up the foundation in his name, its mission to educate the high-school- and college-age population about mental health and the risk of suicide. Fresh Check Days are part of that mission.

“This could happen to anybody at any age,” Giarnella-Porco, a social worker, says. “It’s about paying attention.”

Jordan, she says, wasn’t the type of guy to go to a somber lecture by a prestigious speaker. He might, however, have attended a fair with an uplifting vibe, one that opens up conversation about difficult topics and lifts the cloud of mystery from the counseling center.

Each booth at Fresh Check Days is staffed by a student group, a faculty department, or a staff division — the Title IX office, athletics, the chaplain’s office, and so on. The foundation, in Hartford, Conn., provides organizational, educational, and technical support, says Leah Nelson, its director of programs, but each fair is a campus undertaking. The events are designed to be relatively low cost, she says, usually a few hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the college’s budget.

Monica Neel, director of Goucher’s Student Counseling Center, likes the model’s emphasis on peer-to-peer messaging. And with some 50 students, faculty, and staff members volunteering in the booths, the event — this is Goucher’s third Fresh Check Day — reflects shared accountability across the campus for students’ emotional wellness, she says.

The fair, says Jean Perez, Goucher’s director of student wellness, is part of a stream of similarly geared activities throughout the year, like yoga in the chapel and making origami cranes as an exercise in mindfulness and artistic expression.

One Mandatory Booth

To qualify for the bigger prizes at Goucher’s Fresh Check Day, students have to visit five of nine wellness-oriented booths. The only mandatory one is called “9 Out of 10.”

“One in 10 college students contemplate suicide,” a sign there reads. “Be one of the nine who helps someone!” The students sign a pledge promising to do just that. They answer quiz questions about signs of suicidal thinking and discuss the answers with booth volunteers like Eleanor Struewing, a Goucher senior studying psychology and studio art.

“Name two signs someone may need help,” reads one prompt.

The list of possible answers: “Isolating, trouble in schools, mood/behavior changes, seems anxious/depressed, risk-taking, recklessness, self-harm, ‘talking suicide,’ eating issues, sleeping issues, experienced trauma, giving away possessions.”

At other booths, students are tested for sexually transmitted infections or welcomed into Goucher’s LGBTQIA community. They make squeezable stress balls by filling balloons with flour, and pick up schedules for Goucher’s group-fitness classes. At the Rise Up booth, they hear about the mental-health impact of sexual assault. To experience the warmth of giving and a sense of community, they assemble pencil pouches for students at a middle school in nearby Baltimore, inserting positive messages (“You’ve got this!”).

Jess Willard Ayer, of the Renfrew Center, educates the students about eating disorders. At the “Know Your Limit” booth, Jenna Belen, of the Bergand Group, a substance-abuse rehabilitation facility, hands out tote bags and her card with a personal cellphone number on it. “I hope you never need to use it,” she tells one student. “I’m in long-term recovery myself, so there’s nothing too weird to ask, believe me.”

Julia Shimer, a junior, and her friend and classmate Lexie Wink, both elementary-education majors, are enjoying their shaved ices and have the tropically dyed mouths to prove it. For them, the stressors and scenarios they hear about at the fair aren’t hypothetical. They’ve found that sometimes life comes at you fast and that learning to seek help can be a vital skill.

When they were freshman roommates, Shimer received a thyroid-cancer diagnosis. The radiation treatments were physically tough, but “psychologically it was really hard” too.

“It could have been a lot worse,” she says, if not for support from Goucher staff and faculty members who helped her stay in school throughout.

Wink is at Fresh Check Day in part to say hello to a Goucher counselor who helped see her through a period of depression, anxiety, and phobia that began around final exams of her freshman year.

Neel, the counseling director, says that some 48 to 50 percent of Goucher’s students say they come to college with a pre-existing diagnosis, from ADHD to mood disorders. In a given academic year, about 25 to 30 percent of full-time undergraduates use the counseling center’s services, and roughly 45 percent of recent Goucher graduating classes have used them at some point during their years here.

Alex Van Deventer, a freshman, says Fresh Check Day makes him feel “more part of the Goucher community — and safer, too.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.