More to be done...?
A guest article from Matt Breen
Whenever I hear of a suicide, I’m filled with a sense of urgency. That R4R isn’t doing enough and that more needs to be done. And through all of R4Rs success and impact, perhaps there’s truth to this urgency…
Right now, we’re giving Canberran’s an opportunity to connect and get out of their heads at one of our runs or walks. We’re also sharing stories to offer people a blueprint for overcoming and preparing for their struggles.
We’re doing this at the moment with the understanding that by improving individual and community resilience, we’re taking strain off societal, professional, and emergency resilience layers.
Building Belief and a Tipping Point.
We believe that if we improve individual and community resilience layers, help coordinate the societal resilience layer, and inform the Government resilience layer, that more lives will be saved.
And once suicide figures are noticeably dropping, we believe the belief in the possibility a suicide-free Canberra will reach a tipping point where it becomes part of the Canberra identity, resulting in an exponential amount of progress toward the goal.
A hard truth
If this approach proves successful… If we are to achieve this by reducing suicide figures from 60 to 0 over the next nine years, that means we can expect more than 400 suicides between now and then…
This only adds to the urgency.
We at least need to ask ourselves… is there anything we can do in the next 6 months to dramatically reduce figures..? If we had to make Canberra suicide-free in 2025… what would that look like?
We need your opinions
This is the question that will be posed to the board, but importantly… we need it to be posed to you, our community… What do you think needs to be done?
This isn’t an answer to the question you’ve posed, but my thoughts on this. I don’t think you or the R4R community should feel that they aren’t doing enough or in anyway responsible for ‘missing someone’ (for lack of a better term) when when someone suicides in the ACT. I love the ‘saving one life at a time, as many times as possible’ goal, but I’m not so sure about the ‘suicide free’ goal. To me it’s striving for an unrealistic perfection, where anything less than that is a failure. ‘We saved 30 lives this year’, for example, shouldn’t be negated by ‘we missed one’.
There will always be people you can’t reach, and R4R won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. That doesn’t make it any less valuable to the people that it is helping.
So I wouldn’t try do to anything different in the next 6 months in an urgent effort to save more lives. There’s already been huge growth and structural change in R4R this year, and I think it’s important to ride that out instead of feeling like you need to do more. This might be a controversial opinion though 🙃
One I idea I have is to rally as many organisations as possible towards pursing the goal of a suicide free canberra.