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Using Abstraction In Suicide Prevention
There’s a powerful, hidden skill in suicide prevention. Read this article and you’ll be able to practice it in every day conversation – maybe even with people in distress. Who knows, it might help you support someone down from the edge. It’s called ‘Abstraction’. Abstraction is very popular and well understood in other fields like…
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How To Write With Life Saving Clarity In Digital Crisis Support
In learning suicide prevention there’s a tonne of obstacles and challenges. It’s hard, scary work and you’re here remove some of those obstacles and equip yourself with tools, skills and mindset to lower the barrier for others too. Long term this kind of work – preventing suicide – changes people, changes families, changes communities and…
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How To Finally Stop Asking ‘Why’ To People In Crisis
‘Why do you think he lied to me?’ she asked yet again, as though we hadn’t covered it a hundred times this week. My eyes wanted to roll as far back into my head as they could, I didn’t let them. I’d been here so many times in my life, with my mum, my exes,…
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10 Ways Suicide Prevention Work Will Hurt You
1 >> Comfort. If the comfort zone is where you want to stay, suicide prevention work will challenge that! 2 >> Avoidance. If you don’t want to feel expanded and laid bare to self awareness, suicide prevention work will challenge that! 3 >> Attachment. If you value your attachments to stuff like ego, a saviour…
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Here’s How I Reconcile A Huge Tension In Suicide Prevention
Suicide prevention comes with many tensions. No one-size-fits-all. It’s as complex and nuanced as the people in it. This is what makes risk obsession and black and white thinking so harmful. Intake policy for example might encourage getting info from patients quickly. But it’s chronic invalidation that led them to want to kill themselves in…
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3 Tips To Ease Your Journey Into Mental Health Work
1. Forge time for self care – support work does not reward sacrifice, it rewards boundaries. We are caregivers, that’s why we’re here. However if we don’t figure out how to give to ourselves first, we wont be here for long. Your organisation, or pro health network, your workplace or place of worship, at the…
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Here’s How Writing Sentence Stems Can Save Lives
In suicide prevention, you can’t control outcomes but you can improve your skill set. After many hours of crisis support the toughest part was by far feeling like I’d failed someone. If I got hung up on or worse, I’d beat myself up and feel terrible. On one hand I know I can only do…
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In Crisis Support How Do You Validate Without Colluding?
When starting out in crisis support, it’s difficult not to relate. I would hear something heart breaking and want to say ‘Hey, me too!’ but was told this isn’t appropriate… After years of service and many hundreds of conversations, I can confirm; it is inappropriate! But for so many of us (myself included) it can…
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Stop Trying To Improve Until You’ve Done This
Nobody starts out ‘good’ at crisis support. At least, nobody in the hundreds I’ve mentored, trained or watched go through the journey. When we’re early in – taking those first tentative steps – the expectations we place on ourselves can really hurt. When I first came through I found it incredibly disheartening if things didn’t…
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Responsibility To Increase Ease + Quality Of Your Suicide Support
The biggest barrier to developing non-judgement is the burden of self awareness Learning to hold non-judgemental space for people can be incredibly uncomfortable and confronting. This discomfort begins with self discovery. Its clear we need to let go of our biases, judgements and even the roles we think we have to play (and therefore our…
