September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day. This annual campaign originated in 2003, when the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to push their efforts to increase the awareness of the issue of suicide to a global level. Every year since, many great initiatives have set out to breakdown the stigma associated with suicide and to encourage the use of the available resources for help and support.
Suicide is a societal issue that does not choose who and where to impact. It affects every community around the world. Every year at the global level, suicide is the cause of more than 700, 000 deaths. Every suicide has a far-reaching impact on many individual levels, including a social, emotional and economic consequence that affect individuals in all communities across the world.
The theme for this year’s campaign, which is the start of a triennial campaign from 2024-2026, is “Changing the Narrative on Suicide” with an additional call to action to “Start the Conversation”. The theme aims at encouraging open conversations about suicide in order to increase the awareness of the importance of reducing the stigma surrounding suicide. Changing the narrative on suicide will attempt to shift the culture from one of silence and stigma to one of openness, understanding and support.
For more information regarding the World Suicide Prevention Day campaign, please feel free to check out the World Health Organization (WHO) website or the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) website.
If you would like to help change the narrative on suicide, but do not know where to start, look no further than your local Health Promotion team. We can provide unit briefings, where we come to you to start the open conversation about suicide and resources available. We also offer a one-day course, called Mental Fitness and Suicide Awareness, where participants learn how to maintain and promote mental fitness as well as how to intervene should they come across someone contemplating suicide. The next scheduled date for this course is 3 October. For more information or to register for this program, please log onto our website.
Article written by Nathaniel Smith, Health Promotion Specialist at CFB Borden.
