Everyone can play a role in saving lives and preventing suicide.
Anyone in the community can contribute -- from trusted care providers to strangers. It was a message echoed by many presenters at a conference sponsored by the Juneau Suicide Prevention Coalition and Division of Behavioral Health focused on breaking the link between trauma and suicide.
“What can we do … to break the link?” asked Walter Majoros with JSPC on Thursday.
Elaine de Mello of the National Alliance for Mental Health New Hampshire shared some stories of how those at risk for suicide were helped — or sometimes failed — by interactions with members of the community.
Anna was the first case. She experienced sexual abuse at a young age, but family and care providers didn’t know. Furthermore, they didn’t know to ask. It wasn’t until she was 22 that her parents discovered the abuse had occurred, and by that time she had been re-traumatized in institutional settings and at 32 she took her own life.
[For more of this story, written by Melissa Griffiths, go to http://juneauempire.com/local/...-21/it-takes-village]
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