Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette Copper Shores Program Director of Outreach and Education Kristine Martens, shown at her desk Monday.

HANCOCK — Registration is now open for community members, 18 and older, to partake in Copper Shores’ suicide intervention training Oct. 16 – 17. The training will go over Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), to provide safety to those contemplating suicide. The training is held each year in hopes to provide more individuals the necessary tools to succeed in intervention.

Copper Shores Program Director of Outreach and Education Kristine Martens explained Copper Shores likes to compare ASIST to CPR training, saying the more people who are trained in the community able to respond, the safer everyone in the community will be. Martens added due to the Copper County’s low population, the numbers of the impact of suicide are suppressed due to research being based on populations of 100,000.

“So often it’s hard to get these numbers, but myself, Dial Help and now Copper Shores has a long history of working with people who are having thoughts of suicide, and we’ve also responded to some suicide and so I can tell you that, yes, this does affect people in our area, whether somebody had an action around suicide or they were just thinking about it,” she said. “And every time we do lose somebody in our community by suicide, it affects a great number of people.”

Martens added even one suicide can have a ripple effect in the area due to the area being so tight-knit.

“One thing I do share in ASIST is that often even suicides by famous people have a large impact on people in our local community, and we saw this when we used to answer the lifeline of Dial Help,” she said.

The training will be made of two day classes taking place in the conference room at UP Health System Portage. The classes will be interactive and include some role playing to practice communication skills. The intervention training will focus on getting the individual contemplating suicide to safety or walk through a safety plan to keep the individual out of harm’s way until the individual can access professional services. While anyone can participate in the classes, Martens believes the classes could be especially beneficial to those in jobs which interact with people on an individual level such as social workers or Human Resources employees.

“Often, suicide isn’t always something that is covered in a formal education that you might have gotten, and so this can kind of help fill in the gaps,” she said. “It’s also important for people who may have that formal education who did miss out on that suicide part, and they’ve sort of been trained by their work. This will give those folks even a guide on how to work through this whole plan.”

Both days of training must be attended in their entirety and run from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Breakfast and lunch will be provided. Registration can be made on the Copper Shores website, www.coppershores.org/news/free-suicide-intervention-training-october-16-17-2025. The deadline to sign up is Oct. 10.