Roane State Community College is participating in Suicide Prevention Awareness Month with a variety of events, including the screening of a highly acclaimed documentary titled “The ‘S’ Word.”
“Unfortunately, right now you hear so much about suicide,” Roane State Dean of Students Brenda Rector said. “We lose some 1,000 Tennesseans each year to suicide, and that’s just not acceptable.”
“The ‘S’ Word” will be screened at 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 20, at the Princess Theatre, which is at 421 North Roane Street in Harriman, and it is free, a press release said.
The public is invited to view the 90-minute documentary, featuring interviews with four people who tried to kill themselves, but survived, the press release said.
The documentary “takes an intimate look at the lives of these survivors and their loved ones and records their candid and profoundly emotional stories of survival,” according to a review of the film. In the press release, Rector said the documentary’s director, Lisa Klein, lost both her father and a brother to suicide.
Mental health counselors are planning to attend, and there will be tables with information about preventing suicide, Rector said.
The college’s observance of September as Suicide Prevention Awareness Month also included exhibits and information from experts on September 18 and 19 on the Oak Ridge and Roane County campuses, respectively. Those events were in the atrium of the Coffey-McNally Building in Oak Ridge and in the Vann Student Lounge in Roane State’s Dunbar Building on the Roane County campus.
Agencies and organizations invited to participate included the Anderson County Health Department the Helen Ross McNabb Center, a nonprofit provider of behavioral health services; the Roane County Anti-Drug Coalition; and the Tennessee Suicide Prevention Network.
That network has a quilt where individual squares are set aside in memory of suicide victims. Rector said a table at the events in Roane County and Oak Ridge was to be covered with a large sheet of paper where relatives of suicide victims were able to sign memories, tributes, and condolences.
Rector said her office and the college’s Counseling and Disability Office are sponsoring the documentary and other events.
For more information, contact Rector at (865) 354-3000, extension 4364, or rectorbw@roanestate.edu.
More information will be added as it becomes available.
This press release was submitted by Owen Driskill.
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