Suicide Prevention and Mental Health
Subject Matter Expert
Rosalyn Blogier is a subject matter expert in the prevention of suicide and a licensed clinical social worker with over 40 years of experience evaluating, referring, and treating individuals, couples, and families across the diagnostic spectrum. She has run therapeutic groups for individuals with eating issues, those in recovery from substance abuse, prospective adoptive parents, as well as psychiatric process groups. She worked in social services agencies, health centers, departments of psychiatry, in-patient psychiatric and substance abuse settings; collaborating with teams of professionals to provide the best possible treatment for those in her care.
Her graduate training was funded
by a NIMH grant in community mental health which laid the complementary groundwork
for her second career as a Public Health Advisor at the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration. (SAMHSA) She began her work at SAMHSA in
2008 where she developed her current specialty in suicide prevention,
particularly in collegiate mental health and the prevention of suicide.
Rosalyn
served as a Project Officer and Coordinator of the Garrett Lee Smith (GLS)
Campus Suicide Prevention Grant Program for which annually a competitive call
for applications was issued for campuses to be awarded funds to enhance student
mental health through networking, training, education, and outreach efforts.
Over the years, this program became an
instrument of transformative change that saved the lives of countless college
students and faculty across the country. This grant program shaped
collegiate mental health efforts with opportunities to share experiences in
national conferences, webinars and collegiate list-serves supported by SAMHSA
and organized by Rosalyn and her teammates.
Rosalyn additionally developed high-level meetings at SAMHSA, inviting
experts in the field to a meeting regarding collegiate mental health and
substance misuse and another conference featuring subject matter experts to
assist in providing wisdom for the development of the more recently re-written
GLS Campus Suicide Prevention Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), for example.
Rosalyn was the Contracting Officer Representative for many years on the
expansive 18-million-dollar evaluation contract of the GLS State and Tribal,
the Campus, the Native Connections and the Crisis-Center Follow-up grant
programs which provided seminal data to the field of suicide prevention.
Among Rosalyn’s other
involvements in suicide prevention was the organization of the Expert Panel on
the Deaths of Despair which included Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and co-author
Ann Case among other scholars in the field. She also oversaw the development of
several toolkits including Promoting Emotional Health and Preventing
Suicide: A Toolkit for Senior Living Communities, Promoting Emotional Health
and Preventing Suicide: A Toolkit for
Senior Centers and Preventing Suicide: A Toolkit for High Schools.
Rosalyn led an effort to advance a white paper on tele-mental health financing
and she guided a unique contract across agencies in which SAMHSA created
training in mental health for service providers within a grant program at the
Administration for Community Living. She was often called upon to review
relevant documents, participated in agency workgroups and created a list-serve
for clinical specialists across SAMHSA and partner agencies to share resources
for Continuing Education opportunities.
Adjectives describing Rosalyn and
her work include transformative, dedicated, persistent, ahead of the curve,
passionate, resourceful, thorough, graceful, and creative.
Rosalyn graduated summa cum laude
with a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Welfare from Ohio State University
and with a Master of Science degree in Social Work from Simmons College, now
Simmons University.
Saving Lives, Restoring Hope, Strengthening Communities”
Effective Suicide Prevention Initiatives for:
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