Losing someone to suicide is horrible. It cuts you to the core and scores you deep. For forever-after you ask yourself why didn’t I see this coming? You wrack your brain and you see all of the signs in hindsight but then you constantly have to remind yourself, hindsight is exactly that. Hindsight. You remind yourself there is no point dwelling on what’s already been done. You tell yourself to let it go. You tell yourself to just move on. But you can’t. It’s so much easier said than done.
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day and to show just how important this issue is to us we’ve released a suicide awareness module under our Wellbeing Banner.
It’s not a big module but sometimes it’s the little things that make the big differences.
The numbers
The statistics around suicide are staggering.
In 2016 there were 2866 deaths by suicide in Australia.
Of those 2866 reported deaths by suicide 2146 were men and 577 were women.
Rates of suicide are also highest among middle aged men from 30 – 54.
Furthermore, rates of suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders are almost double that of non-indigenous Australians.
So, what can we do?
We can never truly know the extent of our words and actions. How they will be received, how they will be remembered, or the impact they will have. But we can try. We can do our little bit and maybe make a little change to some way too big numbers.
We can reach out. We can ask “R U OK?”.
We can talk to people and we can remind them “You can talk” too.
We can educate ourselves. We can learn the risk factors to look for and dispel the myths. We can learn what warning signs to look for. We can know who to call when we need to escalate the issue and we can find out where to go when we need more information.
This is where we come in. We’ve collated all this information and wrapped it up into one easy to use module. It’s our little bit toward tackling a public health issue that we wish we could fix; a public health issue we know we can’t fix alone.
To bring those numbers down it’s going to take a whole range of little things from a whole range of groups and people. This module is just one little thing we hope can help.
