According to the president of the American Association of Suicidology the time was long overdue for Americans to address the problem of the rising number of suicides// in the nation. Suicide awareness and prevention programs must be initiated in the nation's schools.

James Mazza will challenge the more than 600 people attending the association's 39th annual meeting in Seattle tomorrow to make suicide "a community and societal issue because no one escapes it." His talk begins at 8:45 a.m. in the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

The meeting starts today and runs through Monday and will attract crisis center workers, a survivors group, researchers, prevention experts and therapists. The meeting is held concurrently with a crisis center conference and an annual healing after suicide conference.

Mazza, a University of Washington associate professor of educational psychology who focuses his research on reducing and preventing suicide, said there is a critical need to initiate suicide awareness and prevention program in the nation's schools. Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults ages 15 to 24, behind traffic accidents and homicide.

"Right now we don't do anything that has a mental health focus in our schools that is standardized across our state or country. We need to focus on our kids when they are first getting the bumps and bruises of life," he said. "There are no wide-scale school programs on suicide awareness and prevention largely because schools don't have the resources to effectively deal with the at-risk youth they identify. And there are no federally funded resources available for mental health assessment. As a result, schools only focus on having students pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning or other assessment tests and are ignoring their mental health needs. Education should not be equated to only academics.

"We have to have resources dedicated to suicide preven
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