Dr. Sally shares the stories, science, and strategy of suicide prevention.
This year, for World Suicide Prevention Day, the theme is “Creating Hope through Action.” For too long we’ve been stuck in “awareness raising” — a necessary but not sufficient condition for change.
It’s time to take action. Here are 10 tips for an impactful National Suicide Prevention Week (September 5-11)/World Suicide Prevention Day (September 10th) - action steps you can take with you to impact your community all year long.
There is an element of humanity that is struggling with and ultimately often excluded from conversations about mental health in general and suicide more specifically. That element is spirituality, which may or may not be directly related to religion. Spirituality is difficult to measure and cannot be prescribed and yet for the span of modern human beings it has been a staple in understanding grief, surviving trauma and counteracting the hopelessness that we know fuels despair and suicidal intensity.
…I don’t really have the chops to be a researcher or the patience to be a clinician, but I often find myself in new territories, listening to people share their insights about living through unimaginable suffering. Then I look to connect partners much smarter than I who can make a difference in alleviating that despair. So, as I am listening, I think to myself, “there are the stories I wish we would talk about more.”
“Applying business skills to resolving social ills…part saint, part politician, part business person,” said Robert Redford about social entrepreneurs.
What is Impact Entrepreneurship?
Social entrepreneurs, or “Impact Entrepreneurs,” as I like to call them, bring together the best of the nonprofit heart and the for-profit efficiency. They are the ideal blend of the best of both worlds and the future of how business and social change gets done.
I have often said, “Hope is the antidote to suicide.”
I realize that the word “hope” – like “love” and “support” and “leadership” – is often experienced as cliché, having lost its power and meaning from overuse. I would like to reclaim it and use it like Wonder Woman’s shield (goodness I love that movie) to defiantly deflect pessimism, bitterness and negativity coming at us from all angles.
As advocates for suicide prevention and mental health promotion, we must be warriors of hope. Now is the perfect time to explore how we can learn to build hope as a practice – like pieces of protective armor that protect us as we forge our way onward to the frontiers of what is possible....
When we consider a comprehensive strategy to suicide prevention and mental health promotion, it’s helpful to segment approaches into “upstream” (preventing problems before they emerge through self-help), “midstream” (catching emerging problems early and linking people to least restrictive support), and “downstream” (helping people with more serious mental health challenges and suicidal thoughts) tactics.
Thus, for this article, I have organized some of the most popular, best researched and most innovative apps into these three categories.
...One example of a “caring for others” profession is veterinary medicine and animal welfare. Animal rescue professionals and veterinarians fit Thomas Joiner’s model of why people die by suicide: Constant exposure to death and feelings of hopelessness lead to an acquired ability for lethal self-injury, and they have access to lethal means in the form of drugs.
People are often drawn to the demanding professions because of their love of animals, but they soon discover that a large part of the job involves ending the lives of beloved pets and otherwise health animals. In fact, vets come face-to-face with death at five times the rate of physicians. Both veterinarians and animal rescue professionals are witness to the agonizing situation of pet owners choosing to have their companions euthanized because treatment is too expensive or too difficult or because breeding was uncontrolled and the family has become overwhelmed....
