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 🙃
I think it’s a valid point of view. I think the thought exercise of seeing whether there is something we could do differently is valid too.
It’s a hard one isn’t it?
A chapter from “Factfulness” comes to mind where the Author (also a doctor) was treating the sick overseas and refused to treat people after closing hours.
The reasoning was that he could treat and save more people over the length of his stay than would be treated/saved by helping everyone until he burnt out.
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 🙃
I think it’s a valid point of view. I think the thought exercise of seeing whether there is something we could do differently is valid too.
It’s a hard one isn’t it?
A chapter from “Factfulness” comes to mind where the Author (also a doctor) was treating the sick overseas and refused to treat people after closing hours.
The reasoning was that he could treat and save more people over the length of his stay than would be treated/saved by helping everyone until he burnt out.
One I idea I have is to rally as many organisations as possible towards pursing the goal of a suicide free canberra.
I think this will be necessary.
How could we do it in a limited time frame?
Share the mission loud and clear as many times as possible