“I am a psychologist by training, a developmental psychologist. So what that means in terms of educational leaders is that I’m trying to help them understand the mental health needs that exist in K-12 spaces, among the students, the staff and also self-care. It’s to show individuals how to take care of themselves so they don’t get burnt out as leaders.
My background is I’m a trained prevention researcher, so I use a prevention lens to try to help leadership understand, sort of, the proactive things that they can do in their schools to help students, staff and themselves.
We’re trying to prevent mental health distress. But more importantly, in this area, because we have a high youth suicide rate, we’re trying to prevent youth suicide. That’s my ultimate goal.
I want to help prevent youth from doing things like misusing substances, doing things that can potentially endanger their lives, but also prevent them from dying by suicide.
When I did my doctoral work, I was a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pre-doctoral trainee. In that training, we learned a lot about prevention and a lot about ways to intervene with different populations. I was really interested in helping black youth flourish. That was my area of expertise, in violence prevention using community assets to prevent violence among youth.
When I came to Salt Lake City, I found the black population here is very spread out, so there’s not a ‘community.’ As I sort of rewired what I was trying to do at NIMH, I became very startled at the suicide statistics here. The data, as you might expect, showed incidents occurred mostly among white youth and less so among minoritized youth. But there’s a significant population of LGBTQIA+ kids who also die by suicide.
Those sorts of populations piqued my interest. Why are youth in Utah more predisposed to die by suicide than in other places where I’ve lived? So, I started doing some investigations, started looking at ways in which peers could be support systems, the ways in which parents could be support systems and the ways in which we could use social and emotional learning to help kids identify their emotions and connect their emotions to their behavior.
That’s the primary mechanism by which people in general begin to understand how to regulate their emotions and if you can’t understand how, it’s really hard to get them under control and not let your emotions rule you.
Among many factors responsible for the increase in suicides is the social isolation many young people feel across numerous identity groups. Social media is the only thing that has really changed in the last 10 to 15 years and that’s where we’ve seen the escalation.
While I started out researching suicide in Black kids, it’s all the youth I am concerned about. I break it down so that people understand the statistics that exist, but I’m interested in saving the lives of all youth.”
— Dr. Paula Smith, director of graduate studies and associate professor, Department of Educational Leadership & Policy
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Available 24/7.