YAM teaches basic mental health hygiene to ninth graders

Retired Browning educator Larry Woolf spent 11 years as a teacher and 15 as a guidance counselor in public schools on the Blackfeet Reservation. He has seen, again and again, the devastating pain of teenage suicide.

"Working in the schools, I'd gone to enough funerals for kids," he said in an interview this spring.

The pain of losing those young people motivated Woolf to become a trainer in a new mental health program for teenagers - a program he hopes will sharply reduce the rate of teenage suicide in Montana.

Woolf is now a certified trainer and classroom presenter for the Youth Aware of Men...