Community-generated Postvention

Suicide loss is a major impediment to adolescent health and educational progress, yet school-focused postvention programming (i.e., support after a suicide death) is nonexistent, limited to guidelines based on exceedingly few studies of largely White youth. Building on our work with Youth Creating Change, in our next phase, we hope to continue to understand how art can be leveraged for learning to address adolescent suicide.

Our project will utilize a unique mix of qualitative interviews, ethnodrama for developing verbatim documentary theater, theatrical dissemination for community discussion, and ongoing community review to aim to. The ethnodrama approach is unique in a) amplifying the nuance and authenticity of youth voices, b) building guardrails for psychological safety for youth suicide loss participants, while c) creating conditions for empathy with youths’ experience by ethnoactors and audience members. This project convenes a trailblazing research-practice-partnership between NYU ARCADIA’s Dr. Pamela Morris-Perez, NYU Verbatim Performance Lab’s Joe Salvatore, and Youth Creating Change’s Jana Sczersputowski and Stan Collins to develop the first-ever school-based, community-generated, postvention healing program.