Students develop app aimed at preventing suicide

It started as a Snapchat message.

Like many sixth-graders at Kalispell Middle School, Kelsea Bemis and Lillian Lewis dip easily in and out of digital messaging, but last fall, one text on the popular social app made them pause. It was from a friend, and it said that he wanted to kill himself.

The girls reacted to the message as many other 12-year-olds would — with a mix of fear and confusion, with questions that don’t have easy answers. The most immediate: did he mean it? How could they help?

“I started crying,” Lewis said.

“We were scared. We didn’t know what to do,” Bemis added.

Their friend, thankfully, was OK. But the questions didn’t go away, so Bemis and Lewis, along with their friend and fellow sixth-grader, Elise Suda, decided to face them with the technology undergirding many of the tools used in the day-to-day life as a middle-schooler in 2018. They started building an app — a computer application that can be downloaded to mobile devices.

The girls are members of Kalispell Girls Who Code, a volunteer-led program that offers hands-on coding and computer-science experience to elementary and middle-school girls. Participants spend most of the school year developing an Android app to help the community; this year, Bemis, Lewis and Suda decided to take on one of Montana’s most pressing mental-health concerns. Their “Stop Suicide” app, which provides risk-assessment questionnaires, information on warning signs and directions to resources, won third place at the Montana App Challenge held in Helena in May.

The statewide competition was only one step in a months-long, ongoing process of discussion, discovery and a lot of hard work.

The project first developed as the girls, in the aftermath of their friend’s message, sorted through the emotions that arise when a dense, dark, often abstract problem takes hold in real life. They had heard of or talked about suicide and depression before — a few conversations in school, an article encountered on the internet, a Snapchat video in which someone says “I’m depressed” followed by an “LOL (laugh out loud).” But with their friend, “that was the first time we really experienced it,” Lewis said.

Part of the confusion stemmed from how seriously to take his comments, in a world of memes, cryptic social media posts and LOLs.

“We didn’t know if our friend was really suicidal when he told us this or not,” Bemis said. We didn’t know if he was telling the truth or if he was just sad in the moment. We weren’t sure.”

The questions only widened.

“We wanted to figure out how important [suicide] really was,” Bemis said.

Thus began the research phase of the app development, which uncovered sobering statistics on the scope of mental health and suicide concerns affecting communities in their state.

Suicide remains a critical health problem for all age groups in Montana. The state’s overall suicide rate is consistently among the highest in the nation — or the highest, according to a 2014 National Vital Statistics report. And it’s the No. 1 cause of preventable death for Montana children ages 10 to 14.

In short, the problem was more widespread than they realized, which led to the question: what could an app do?

“We looked at other apps to see what they did and didn’t have,” Bemis noted. “Each app would immediately assume that you were at a high risk for suicide.”

They realized there was an opening for people who weren’t sure what to make of their feelings or potential warning signs. But figuring out how to translate that into an app — and then executing the design and coding — was a lengthy process of trial and error.

“I think one of the most difficult parts of the process was nailing down exactly what the app was going to look like,” said Liz Bernau, a computer technology teacher at Russell Elementary and one of the girls’ mentors. Bernau hosted the weekly Girls Who Code meetings in her classroom.

“At the beginning, they wanted it to be a text app,” in which users could contact area therapists, she said. “But trying to get the therapists and confidentiality was really difficult. So it took a lot of weeding...what could they practically code?”

They settled on building two tests, one for those asking for help, and one for those wanting to help a loved one. App users answer “always,” “sometimes,” or “never” to a series of questions corresponding to the warning signs of suicide, known under the acronym IS PATH WARM (ideation, substance abuse, purposelessness, anxiety, trapped, hopelessness, withdraw, anger, reckless and mood change). The quiz directs participants to green, yellow or red levels of warning, along with information on resources and suicide statistics.

Designing the quiz questions required a higher level of coding and math than the girls had previously tried, Suda said. With matrices full of different combinations of answers, keeping track of the development process could be difficult.

“There’s so much coding to go behind it... You have to change the coding a little bit just to try it each time until it works,” Suda explained.

Building the tools and confidence to push through those challenges is part of why Marianne Smith, another mentor and the founder of Girls Who Code in Kalispell, founded the program two years ago.

Many girls, she said, don’t receive the exposure and experience with computer science growing up to consider technology a viable or “cool” career path. Technology classes are often heavily lopsided toward boys. With Girls Who Code, soon to be known in Kalispell as Code Girls United, “we’re really trying to change that and get girls exposed to these things when they’re young.” Because girls often feel that computer science isn’t for them, Smith said, “I walk in the first day and say, ‘[coding] is not a big deal.’”

The first part of the school year focuses on basic computer skills and how to make apps.

“Then we shift gears a little bit and with the [state] competition, what they have to do is look to the community, and decide on a problem that they want to solve in the community,” Smith said.

For Bemis, Lewis and Suda, the purpose behind their app is not lost amid all the coding, design and matrix math, which is why they still see numerous areas of improvement. They’d like to make the app look more professional, Lewis pointed out. They’d like to add more information on what to do if you are experiencing some of the warning signs, and resources for positive enrichment, such as sports or music, beyond a hotline.

They’re also looking beyond Kalispell Middle School.

“Montana is home to seven Native American tribal communities, so we would want to pair up with them. They don’t have as many resources to help with that topic, so we would like to pair up with some communities,” Bemis said.

Looking forward, the three incoming seventh-graders aren’t sure where the app will go or how app-building will fit in among ambitions in astronomy, acting, lacrosse, writing and more. But the experience of coding and the community engagement has provided a strong foundation to keep fighting a problem that won’t disappear overnight.

“I’m just glad that at least if it were to be a real app, that we would be able to lessen the amount of suicides, even if it’s small,” Bemis said. “That’s how I feel, too,” agreed Suda.

“I’m obviously proud of the actual coding we did,” Lewis said, “but it’s more rewarding to know that our app could actually be saving someone’s life.”

For more information on Code Girls United, formerly Kalispell Girls Who Code, contact Marianne Smith at m.smith@troutmoon.com.

Donations for travel expenses, T-shirts and scholarships to host a Northwest regional tournament are welcome. Code Girls United will meet at Flathead Valley Community College next year for girls in the fourth through eighth grades.

Reporter Adrian Horton can be reached at 758-4439 or at ahorton@dailyinterlake.com