Students respond to rise in suicides by going offline

Offline October

After several years of rising suicide rates and news of two teen suicides in two days, a group of Colorado high school students took action and inspired their peers to take a break from social media for a month.

After several planning sessions, they launched OfflineOctober.com and urged friends to delete four specific apps – Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter – from their phones for a month. The goal, Kurowski explained, was to stop “hiding behind screens. … We wanted to try spending more time face to face, instead of just looking at phones.”

Listen to their Interview here on how taking a month off from social media proved to be a great thing.