Prevention

Grass-roots efforts called vital

But experts say organizations need to come together with common goals to be effective

Donna Terek / The Detroit News Glenda Everett has been active in suicide prevention since her 14-year-old son Jesse killed himself.

By Sarah A. Webster / The Detroit News

    GARDEN CITY — Glenda Everett learned a lot about suicide after her 14-year-old son, Jesse, killed himself in 1996.

    Mostly, she learned that she had missed a string of warning signs. Posters on his bedroom walls of celebrities who had killed themselves. Constant complaints of stomach pains and headaches, a frequent sign of depression. A serious drop in grades.

    So Everett did what others did to combat smoking or drunken driving: She organized a grass-roots effort to raise awareness.

    “I feel Jesse has left me quite a job to do,” said Everett, who heads the Yellow Ribbon suicide education program in Michigan.

    Grass-roots campaigns started by everyday people are critical components of successful social-health movements, said Constance Nathanson, a Johns Hopkins sociology professor who studies such movements.

    Nathanson said the volunteer-led Group Against Smokers’ Pollution (GASP), started by Cara Gouin in the early 1970s, was one of the most effective groups in the anti-smoking effort — more important than organized medical groups.

    A layering of messages, from scientific, medical and grass-roots efforts, tends to be most effective at penetrating the public consciousness on an issue.

    Jan Christensen of the Michigan Department of Community Health said it helps when a smoker, for example, sees a billboard that pushes a point that smoking is bad, then hears the same message from a doctor, and then from a neighborhood activist.

    But in the violence arena, unlike the anti-smoking or drunken driving movements, there’s no consistent or cohesive message, The Detroit News found. Grass-roots movements against violence tend to be divided, their messages splintered.

    Domestic violence groups tend to work separately from those that work on suicide and gang violence. Among gun groups, there has even been serious division among those that want guns banned altogether and those seeking better controls, Nathanson said.

    This has been troublesome because there are different levels of concerns about the different forms of violence, said John B. Waller, associate professor and chairman in the department of community medicine at Wayne State University. He said there is less concern for gang violence than there is for, say, domestic violence or child abuse.

    “The advocates of domestic violence have done a good job,” Waller said.

    Many of these groups have goals that could be better advanced if they agreed on a few points and pushed them together, some health experts said. For example, systems that track all types of violent injuries would collectively benefit these groups, yet only gun violence groups have focused on that aim.

    Broadening the image of violence to include all of its various forms, from suicide to assault to murder, may also help promote the idea that violence is a health problem because many of the causes and consequences for different forms of violence are the same, said Vernice Davis Anthony, senior vice-president for corporate affairs and community health at St. John Health System.

    Said Davis Anthony: “People have to think of public health as a broader issue.”

You can reach Sarah Webster at (313)222-1463 or at swebster@detnews.com.