Suicide. A word no one ever wants to hear. The feeling of hopelessness and despair.

Often, however, there is not a distinct tell when someone is suffering from thoughts of suicide. It takes a keen eye, and ear, to spot it.

That is where Contact Helpline’s crisis line specialist training comes in.

“We are partnering with Open Up Mississippi,” said Katrina Sunivelle, executive director for the organization. “They want to train some of our young adults in crisis intervention. Their target age is 18 to 26. Additionally, we are going to train anyone of any age, 18 and older.”

The training will focus on a variety of topics such as crisis intervention, mental health and active listening, to name a few.

“We partner with different trained professionals in the community and they provide the training for each portion of our course,” Sunivelle said.

Rita Felton is one of those professionals.

She will be teaching active listening.

“With the active listening, we find it is very important in any environment,” Felton said. “What I plan on starting with is doing a personality assessment of the class for them to understand what their personality traits are and then we’ll play little dynamics with that.

The main thing is that we want to help people to listen as though they are wrong. (They should) speak as though they are right and listen as though they are wrong. Because that can give your mind time to catch up and really lean into what someone is saying so you can be more supportive. I think the dynamics of any type of crisis is always going to start with communication and active listening is a big part of that. I’m very excited to bring this piece of it to this training and to be able to help people lean in and be able to hear each other instead of drowning out the hurt and the pain and not really being attentive to what is being said.”

The training, which begins July 17, will last four days through July 20, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day. It will take place at American Legion Post 69, 308 Legion Drive, Columbus.

It can serve as a standalone training, offering community members the skills to identify people at risk and ways to help.

It can also serve as a jumping off point for someone interested in becoming a certified volunteer with Contact Helpline.

“We are required, as crisis centers, that each person who answers our calls must take 40 hours of training,” Sunivelle said. “This will be the start of their training. They will complete these four days of training and then they will come in and have 12 hours of apprenticeship training. During that time, we will evaluate and support them actually answering the crisis line. We are preparing them to answer the crisis line.”

The training also focuses on the individual. It allows the person to look at themselves and understand where they are at.

“The most important part of the training is it helps you,” Sunivelle said. “It helps you to address some of the issues in yourself. It’s important that we can see ourselves as a person at risk. We incorporate self care and self awareness into this training because that’s important. It’s important that you identify things within yourself before you can help someone else. … The reason we are targeting this age group is because we learned the younger we address some of these issues that our youth and young adults are encountering, they can have a more mentally healthy life. Our ultimate goal is suicide prevention.”

If an applicant is interested in joining the Contact Helpline team, Sunivelle said the group will be more than glad to have them.

Now that the organization answers the national hotline, 988, it has doubled its call intake.

“When I say we have an increase in calls, that’s wonderful,” Sunivelle said. “That means we have more people who are reaching out for help. We want to make it comfortable for them. The need is also to have someone to answer that call. We have to have trained individuals on the line to take the increase in calls we have.”

To register for the course, visit bit.ly/Helpline23 or call (662) 327-2968 for more information.

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