Tag: suicide awareness

Suicide rates for our youth and young adults have been climbing since 2001. The reasons for this trend is complex but experts suggest it is a perfect storm of historical events, easy access to distressing information, an unhealthy screen time to outside and social time ratio, and compromised sleep, among other things. The good news is, young people are extraordinary. They have lower mental health bias, they have a desire to help others, and they will change the word.

In this episode I speak with John MacPhee, Executive Director for The Jed Foundation about his thoughts on best practices for engaging young people and schools in the work of suicide prevention and mental health promotion.

John MacPhee
About John MacPhee
John MacPhee brings 30 years of leadership and management experience from the business and not-for-profit settings to his role at the JED Foundation. Passionate about supporting young adults in their transition to adulthood, John advises several organizations including the S. Jay Levy Fellowship for Future Leaders at City College, Trek Medics, Crisis Text Line, the Health Policy and Management Department at the Mailman School of Public Health, and HIV Hero. Earlier in his career, he served in executive positions for Par Pharmaceutical, Inc. and Forest Laboratories, where he oversaw functions such as business development, alliance management, clinical development, regulatory affairs, sales and marketing. John continues to contribute to the development of novel medications for disorders such as Parkinson’s disease through board roles with Adamas Pharmaceuticals and Blackthorn Therapeutics. In 2016, John received The Allan Rosenfield Alumni Award for Excellence in the field of public health from the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He earned a BA from Columbia College, an MBA from New York University and an MPH from Columbia University.

About The Jed Foundation

The Jed Foundation is a 501c3 organization that believes in a comprehensive, public health approach to promoting mental health and preventing suicide. JED’s programs are grounded in our Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health Promotion and Suicide Prevention for Colleges and Universities and for High Schools. These evidence-based models can be used to assess efforts currently being made in schools, identifying existing strengths and areas for improvement.

The programs and resources recommended through the JED Higher Education and JED High School programs have been developed with an equitable implementation lens that ensures that the needs of students who are potentially marginalized and/or underserved due to societal and structural inequities and school-specific community demographics are considered deliberately and intentionally. For more information go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/hope-illuminated-podcast/97

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people in many places around the globe, and many countries are seeing increasing rates of suicidal despair among our teens and young adults. How do we develop a more “youth friendly” suicide prevention strategy?

We listen to them and empower them to lead.

Come hear about the incredibly ground breaking work led by A/Prof Jo Robinson at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She is co-designing youth suicide research and prevention programs like “Chat Safe” with youth as her active partners. Their shared mission is to help young people feel better equipped to communicate safely about suicide on-line.
About Jo Robinson
Jo Robinson is an Associate Professor at Orygen, where she leads the suicide prevention research unit, which is regarded as the leading centre of youth suicide research in the world.

A/Prof Robinson’s work focuses on the development, and rigorous testing, of novel interventions that specifically target at risk youth across settings, on evidence synthesis, and on the translation of research evidence into practice and policy. Her work has a strong focus on the potential of social media platforms in suicide prevention. This includes the development of the #chatsafe guidelines, the first evidence-based best practice guidelines for safe peer-peer communication about suicide online, which are now available in 12 countries around the world.

Examples of other current projects include the development of a multi-faceted and systematic approach to youth suicide prevention across north-west Melbourne, the establishment of a self-harm surveillance system in emergency departments across Victoria, and a large-scale school-based study.

A/Prof Robinson also has a keen interest in policy development and evaluation and has led the development of two major policy reports and is regularly called upon to provide advice to both state and federal government. She is a member of the Self-injury Advisory Group for Facebook and was an advisory board member for the Oprah Winfrey production The Me You Can’t See.

She is also an Associate Editor of a leading suicide prevention journal – Suicide and Life Threatening Behaviour and Vice President of the International Association of Suicide Prevention. For more information on this episode go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/hope-illuminated-podcast/96

Storytellers in suicide prevention have the power to shift culture and change the world in ways other stakeholders are not able to do. Our “voices of insight” have influence and shape others’ understanding on a deep level. People with lived experience seek to stand in solidarity with our research colleagues, policy champions and mental health professionals to embed our deep wisdom in a processes of partnership. In this podcast, I speak with the world renowned Bronwen Edwards, a global authority on the power of lived experience to drive large scale change in suicide prevention. We talk about how we can approach our partners — who may have different values, priorities and points of view — with “compassionate curiosity” so we can “collaborate the big collaboration” (instead of “fight the good fight”).

About Bronwen Edwards
Bronwen is the CEO of Roses in the Ocean, a national lived experience of suicide organisation that has spent the last decade building the capacity of people with lived experience to utilise their voice and insights to inform, influence and enhance suicide prevention, and the capacity of communities, organisations and government to meaningfully engage with them.

Having advocated for non-clinical alternatives to traditional services for many years, Bronwen and Roses in the Ocean also work with communities to co-design new service models including safe spaces, develop and support the critical suicide prevention peer workforce, and continue to drive and support the implementation of system reform.

Bronwen holds a variety of state and national advisory positions, to which she first and foremost brings her personal lived experience of suicide to the table, while also striving to honour the vast perspectives of others she has been privileged to work with and walk alongside over many years.

Bronwen is the Co-Chair of the International Association of Suicide Prevention Special Interest Group: Lived Experience.