FORT WAYNE, Ind. (Press Release): More than a half-million dollars in grant funding earmarked for services to meet behavioral health and chemical dependency needs of students at Purdue University Fort Wayne have been awarded to Jeannie DiClementi, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology.

The three-year, $582,000 grant was secured through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is funded via the 2004 Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, signed by President George W. Bush, which authorized $82 million for youth suicide prevention programs on college campuses nationwide.

Programming from this most recent grant awarded to DiClementi and her team is called Partners United for Student Mental Health. Its focus is to strengthen the links that already exist between the university and area service providers, including those located on campus, and to fill gaps to better address the mental health, substance abuse, and suicide prevention needs of students.

“This new program is a natural extension of our ongoing efforts to serve the mental health needs of our campus community,” DiClementi said. “In addition to education, training, and awareness efforts to identify those in need of help, we can now work to reinforce individualized pathways to intervention resources.”

In 2012, DiClementi received her first Garrett Lee Smith suicide prevention grant for $618,000 to start Project COMPASS, an ongoing program that provides suicide awareness and gatekeeper education and training throughout the Purdue Fort Wayne community.

DiClementi was also awarded a $369,000 grant in 2018 for the program Purdue Aware: Helping Our Students through Faculty and Staff Training.

In her role as grant author and principal investigator, she has helped Purdue Fort Wayne receive more than $1.5 million in mental health funding through three total applications.