Photo courtesy of Cody Sumners.
Cole Anderson, an Eagle Scout and Chelsea High School student, made benches for Double Oak Park as part of his Eagle Scout project. The benches contain suicide hotline information.
After four Chelsea High School students committed suicide in a span of just 15 months in 2022 and 2023, the community got a wake up call.
Lt. Cody Sumners, who serves as assistant commander for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office patrol division and is also a member of the Chelsea City Council, said he was contacted by concerned citizens in the city who wanted to do something.
“I said I’ll put a meeting together, but I have no clue what we can do, but we can at least talk about it,” Sumners said.
The day after receiving those phone calls, Sumners held a meeting at the SCSO substation at the 280 County Services building.
“We had a meeting of about 10 to 12 people, … parents, teachers and coaches, and we started spitballing, ‘What can we do?’ Because this is unacceptable,” he said. “We came up with a three-prong approach: We need to focus on getting the word out in the community, in churches and in schools.”
That meeting developed into the Chelsea Mental Health Action Committee, which wants to make mental health and suicide resources more widely available in the community.
Sumners began serving on the board of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) chapter in Shelby County in January 2022 and is working to create a NAMI Shelby presence on the north side of the county, with hopes to offer support groups in the future. He said the meetings were hosted at Shelby Baptist in Alabaster and have now been moved to Central Alabama Wellness in Calera.
“We could offer classes like NAMI basics, family-to-family and peer to peer,” he said.
“We are trying to grow NAMI Shelby and start getting mental health resources available in the community, so we can end the stigma and put those resources out for anyone taking advantage and [who] may need help and doesn't know where to turn.”
Meetings have already been held with local pastors and a group of churches about doing Youth Mental Health First Aid, where the pastor and anyone who works with children or youth can be trained first and then offer the class to teens. Several churches have already offered to be a host site for the training, Sumners said.
Sumners also hopes to get the NAMI programs into the schools to start teaching the kids what to look for when someone is in a mental health crisis, through the Teen Mental Health First Aid program. Making that program a reality will require finding instructors and funding.
“We’re missing the boat by training all the adults,” he said. “We need to train friends to look out for their peers and find a way to get kids the training they need to help them identify when someone is having an issue, how to approach them, how to offer them resources and, most importantly, who to notify.”
Sumners said Cole Anderson, a Chelsea High School student, built benches at Double Oak Park for his Eagle Scout project and included a plaque with a QR code for NAMI Shelby and the 988 crisis lifeline.
The Chelsea Mental Health Action Committee already has over 30 members and recently participated in several events around the city, including the Community Pep Rally and the Suicide Prevention Seminar at Morningstar United Methodist Church in September and National Night Out and the Chelsea Fall Craft Festival in October.
Sumners said he wants this initiative to include community members, local churches, NAMI Shelby, the city of Chelsea, the Shelby County Commission, the Shelby County Board of Education, COMPACT, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and Central Alabama Wellness.
“I see this mental health initiative as being a partnership between many groups, all dedicated to saving lives, educating and ending the stigma associated with mental illness,” he said.
For more information, visit namishelby.org.
