American Indian Life Skills Development

The American Indian Life Skills Development curriculum is a school-based, culturally tailored, suicide-prevention curriculum for American Indian adolescents. Tailored to American Indian norms, values, beliefs, and attitudes, the curriculum is designed to build self-esteem; identify emotions and stress; increase communication and problem-solving skills; and recognize and eliminate self-destructive behavior, including substance abuse. The curriculum provides American Indian adolescents with information on suicide and suicide-intervention training and helps them set personal and community goals.

Each lesson in the curriculum contains standard skills training techniques for providing information about the helpful or harmful effects of certain behaviors, modeling of target skills, experimental activities, behavior rehearsal for skill acquisition, and feedback for skills refinement. The curriculum is delivered three times a week over 30 weeks, during the school year.

This program aims to drastically reduce suicidal thinking and behavior.

Overall, the evaluation produced evidence to suggest the curriculum succeeded in creating a healthier psychological profile. Students exposed to the curriculum scored better (lower) than the no-intervention group at posttest on suicide probability and hopelessness, and the intervention group showed greater ability to perform problem-solving and suicide intervention skills in a behavioral assessment. However, the evaluators noted potential threats to validity owing to the coexistence of the two groups throughout the intervention.