Suicide Prevention

Life! Central believes the responsibility for suicide prevention rests with individuals, organisations, professional groups and services across the community. Suicide prevention/intervention should be provided in a coordinated and integrated way according to the needs of the individual and community.

We serve to motivate, enable, and empower communities of all descriptions i.e. towns, schools, suburbs, mine sites, work sites, oil rigs, aboriginal communities, hospitals etc., to work towards building capacity within their community to respond on a variety of levels to people at risk of suicide.

Each individual community would need to elect to opt-in to the Project. Once registered for the project a Consultation Team would visit with key community members and stakeholder organisations (if relevant) to discuss what the community is already doing, what resources they feel they have at their disposal that are working well and also what gaps in community resources exist. A thorough Needs Analysis would be done and evaluation provided.

The important criteria for our project is what and how many activities to engage in in order to achieve accreditation; what training to participate in etc. Suicide Safer Communities Inc. (Project Manager) would guide the process and then evaluate the outcome.

The community is invited to participate in a variety of different levels of suicide intervention training as well as encouraged to participate, over the course of a year, in a variety of capacity building/community enhancing activities designed to engage and connect the whole community.

At the end of each year an evaluation by the Project Managers will take place and if the community has engaged in sufficient activities/training etc. then an accreditation will be granted and the community will be deemed to be ‘suicide safer’. A commemorative plaque/sign would be awarded for public display. A maintenance program would then be implemented and an accreditation will be conducted each year.

A range of activities/training/public events etc. would attract points towards the community’s yearly accreditation based on the size and population demographic of the individual community. These might include things such as the organization and holding of market days, fetes, festivals, etc., provision of services/programs/resources considered to be suicide prevention and suicide prevention/intervention training among many other options. A public awareness raising campaign would be undertaken to educate the ‘mums and dads’ and ‘family and friends’ in what to look for with regards to someone’s risk of suicide and what to do about it. Depending on the population of each community a number of workshops will be conducted that will be open to the entire population resulting in everyone working together to create a ‘suicide safer community’.