By Elizabeth McGaw
STARKVILLE, Miss. (Take 30 News) ---- A local Starkville man strives to bring about preventative change in the Oktibbeha school system and on Mississippi State University’s campus.
Dr. Michael Nadorff, an assistant psychology professor at MSU and the director of the department’s clinical Ph.D. program, was recently awarded two separate federal grants, totaling to almost $1 million. The grants are funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
The first grant, entitled “Drug Free Starkville Collaboration,” will target schools in the Oktibbeha school system, implementing preventive programs to deter students from not only alcohol and tobacco use, but also drug use more broadly in the schools.
The grant will also serve to foster a relationship between MSU’s Collegiate Recovery Community, a group focused on students recovering from substance abuse disorders, and local middle and high schools. The students in the CRC will help lead these preventative programs.
“We are working with those groups in order to help design the intervention, to build our coalition, and to reach out to both the schools and also the broader community to make sure that the interventions we bring are the most appropriate ones,” Nadorff said. “The ones that actually affect the needs of Starkville and the needs of our students.”
In addition to the Drug Free Communities grant, Nadorff received a suicide prevention grant that specifically targets MSU students. The grant will supplement already existing suicide prevention work on campus.
We have very high [suicide] rates. In some of my studies, as high as 20% of our students have thought about suicide in recent times,” Nadorff said. “So there is a huge need for us to reach out and to figure out how we can better make students that are struggling, that are having these thoughts, be aware of the resources that we have on campus, and hopefully help link them with the solutions that they need with whatever problems or stressors that they are encountering.”
If you are in a crisis call the Student Health Center at (662) 325-2091 or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8225.