Community Toolkit Reflections

I acknowledge the Traditional custodians of the land on which you are today and pay my respects to elders past and present, and I extend that respect to any First Nations people joining us.

I want to also recognise those who bring lived and living experience of suicide and suicidal distress to these discussions.

Your courage, insight and generosity help shape more meaningful and effective action and we're grateful for your contribution.

The National Suicide Prevention Strategy was built on a simple but powerful principle.

Preventing suicide is everyone's responsibility and lasting change requires all of us working together.

While governments have an important role to play, some of the most meaningful actions happen within communities where people best understand local needs, strengths, and opportunities.

This new toolkit is another opportunity to turn shared commitment into practical action.

The resources provided are designed to support safe, informed, and hopeful conversations, helping identify the priorities that will make the greatest difference for people in your communities.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Your willingness to contribute, collaborate, and lead gives us reason for hope.

Together, we can help create communities where people feel safe, connected, supported, and able to live with purpose and hope.

My name's Nicholas Proctor. I work for Adelaide University. I'm a professor of nursing at Adelaide University, and for about 30 years been deeply interested in suicide prevention at population levels, but also in clinical work. And I lead a program of work around safety planning, trauma-informed practice in suicide prevention, and supervise students as well. My perspective on the suicide prevention strategy is that it takes the population-based understandings of suicide and suicide-related distress and brings us closer to things that we can do at the point of contact, point of care, or at system-level performance. So it takes things in the wider world we know about for people who are disproportionately impacted by suicide, but gives us guidance to be able to take that forward so that the lives of people who are experiencing suicidal distress, their families, their carers, but also people working in services, have something to work with. And at the core of the things that they do and will be doing, I believe, is bringing compassion and person-centered approaches. When we come together, it reduces ambiguity. It makes pathways for a solution a lot easier.

It creates trust. I believe we're more alike than unalike if we really put our minds to it. We're more alike than unalike in what we want to see happen in suicide prevention. Sometimes what I notice about strategy is it can be this big government document with tables and language that perhaps the people reading it are not familiar with, don't see that language in that format every day. But this strategy at its core is built for people in local and regional communities as well as larger communities. And the reason I say that is that throughout the strategy, there are possibilities for compassion, actionable ideas, person-centered approaches that have reach, relevance, and meaning for the people on the ground. So reach into the strategy. Find your way into it. Don't be intimidated by the strategy. Local communities know the heart of what's going on.

They can tell us things that outsiders perhaps will take time to discover or may not even discover at all. Within communities, there are informal relationships, informal partnerships, and knowledges that can be, if you like, levers to be able to create change or maintain support or create innovation at the local level. So when local communities have that and are recognized for that, it sends a message of validation to local communities. What you know and what you do, and how you can apply what you know and what you do at the local level is valued byus. So please go forward and make that a reality for you.

My name is Pino Migliorino. I am honoured to be on the National Suicide Prevention Office's advisory board, and I have been since its inception, which has been brilliant.

My own history around this issue has been one of bringing a perspective from ethnic communities and more diverse communities, undertaking research with people with lived experience in the development of the advice which predated the office, and making sure that the issues which are considered in the strategy and in the frameworks around it are robust enough to be able to include and reflect cultural and linguistically diversity, which is so important in Australia. The approach to groups which are disproportionately impacted by suicide is really important, and I think the way that the strategy is framed is really important. So in the first instance, it looks at are there aspects of disadvantage in terms of social determinants, and do they have an impact? And I think it's in that framework that the ability to look at then the experiences of migrant communities, refugee communities. While migration is not a determinant itself, aspects of migration fit very neatly and comfortably within the social determinants. So issues like discrimination and that sense of social inclusion are impacted if indeed you are not accepted into a community or feel that you're alienated from the community. If you've come from overseas and have qualifications which aren't recognized, the impact on employment and economic development does get impacted, and therefore, there are some quite specific factors relevant to migration which feed into the social determinants. And then at the individual level, I think that's where it's also really important.

What are the individual circumstances? While those things can group people into potentially predictable areas of stressors, the individual in their own context becomes really important, and it's in this that the ability to see the individual, from my perspective, in their cultural reality, whether it's bicultural, multicultural, or those cultural precepts or values that impact on their lives and how they interact with suicidality itself. I think the main thing that I've really, really enjoyed about the strategy, it does not frame itself around mental health. It frames itself around what are the individual conditions that people experience and what are the prevailing areas around their experiences which could make them more vulnerable to suicidality. The way that the strategy allows communities to come together is by providing a framework which is so broad that it doesn't in itself have a negative impact on people. 

So if the framework was only mental health, then we would come up against quite strong cultural values around that as well, sensitivities, taboos, which would make it very, very hard to do so. But if you start bringing people together around similar life experiences, situations which could make them more vulnerable, then you are going to be able to frame it in such a way that becomes preventative, as opposed to then only dealing with something which is highly critical. One of the big issues around ethnic communities is that in many areas of health, mental health, physical health, the point at which people are actually diagnosed tends to be quite late, and what we need to do is to accept that this is a framing which can actually allow people to address issues far earlier on, so we don't move into a  needs state of services or supports.

My name's Ben Brian. I'm co-chair of the National Suicide Prevention Office Lived Experience Partnership Group. That's my main involvement with the National Suicide Prevention Office and the strategy.

In my primary role, I work currently as an acting program lead for the suicide prevention portfolio at Western New South Wales Primary Health Network, and I've come from a lived experience background. I've worked in the space, mental health, suicide prevention, for around seven years. The work that I do in the community in Western New South Wales is very much around community capacity building, community-led suicide prevention and postvention, and generally, I'm just really passionate about building up the capacity and the knowledge of the community. As we know, that's where most of the solutions sit.

When I think about how a community comes together and sits and talk, I actually sat down earlier myself and thought, if this was me sitting down with someone that didn't know about the strategy but was passionate about suicide prevention, myself being a really visual person, I would look at what are the domains. We have prevention. We have the support, critical enablers.

What are the particular objectives under that? So for example, if we want to talk about a culture of compassion or compassionate care, what does compassionate care look like to the people within that region, within that community? For example, if we want to talk about social inclusion, I think we also need to think about strength-based practice. We need to think about community development. We need to build upon the strengths that exist within those communities.

So it's not just about here's a strategy, how do we change the world? How do we look at strengthening social inclusion in the community?

I think a very simple way to look at that is to get the document, get the simple summary, look at the visuals, and workshop it. I'm really big on getting people to sit down, unpack it, get through the weeds, and keep it simple. What does that look like for you? What are we already doing well, and what are the opportunities to change? I think we can only contextualize the strategy and the outcomes to our own scenario, to our own community, and to our own context. The conversations that enable us to think about solutions in terms of the change that we can do, even getting people to think about a way that is outcome-focused versus activity and output-focused.

I think a lot of the time, we feel if we're not within a system or a service or an organization that we may not be able to bring about change, or we may not be able to support people experiencing suicidal distress. But at the community level, there are ways that we can come together.

There are initiatives, there are activities. A lot of the things that we see, the beautiful gems that shine in small communities are the things that exist within football clubs, men's groups, yarning groups. It's the things that we see where people come together in community, and I think it's really important that we think about it, not just within the system or the service setting, but within the community as well.

My name's Chaya Vogelpoel-Rainbird, and I'm on the Lived Experience Partnership Group with the National Suicide Prevention Office. If you imagine someone goes to university, and they study for years, and they come out of that with a degree, and then they spend the rest of their career in that area implementing that knowledge, implementing the studies that they have looked at, that they've read, that they've written assignments on. Lived experience is not like that.

Instead, we are digging into the real depths of our trauma, of our pain, and pulling out parts of ourselves to better the situation, better the landscape. You will grow and learn from over the rest of your life, and what you bring in experience one year after a bereavement is going to be very different to what you are able to bring out 20 years after a bereavement.

And the same as someone who is caring for someone who is suicidal. What they're experiencing one year into that is very different to what they're experiencing 20 years into that. And as that landscape changes, they can, or we as lived experience representatives, we can bring such a richness in discussion, and we can bring the heart into it. You'll never really understand how many people you've impacted, how many people you've changed.

You sure notice the ones that you didn't.

And for every time I've spoken about my lived experience, for every document I've read, and impact that I feel like I've had, if there's one person that I think maybe I could have had more of an impact, they're the ones that I remember.

They're the ones that keep bringing me back. And ultimately, that real first feeling of what could I have done different, this is what I'm doing different, and I'll spend the rest of my life doing different. It's not going to change the initial outcome. 

It's not going to bring my brother back. It's not going to bring my friends back. But if that means that someone else doesn't have to lose their brother, someone else doesn't have to lose their friends, I don't need to know. I don't need to know whose lives I've impacted.

But I keep coming back because hopefully, I'll make enough of a difference.

I'm Jordan Frith. I'm a Lived Experience Partnership Group member with the NSPO. I have a lot of fun, really rewarding lived experience roles that I do, and I've been engaged in national advocacy for about eight years. And my specific role with the Lived Experience Partnership Group is to provide support and advice from a lived experience perspective, especially as someone based in Queensland and speaking for that community.

The model that's embedded within the National Suicide Prevention Strategy is comprised of three main domains. We have the prevention domain, so how do we actually prevent people from experiencing distress to begin with? We have the support domain, which is how we actually provide effective, supportive, compassionate services to people who are experiencing distress, as well as their families and supporters and communities that surround them.

And then we have critical enablers, and these are the things that are necessary to achieve everything else that we want to achieve within the strategy. What I think is really unique about the entire model is it takes the conversation around suicide prevention away from that pointy end of crisis and actually starts thinking about prevention from a public health perspective. So how are people supported within their communities?

How are they supported within their workplaces? How are they living high-quality lives? How are their communities living high-quality lives so that they're not reaching that more pointy end? But when people are in distress, how are we actually making sure that the system is wrapping around them and responding to the people around them, so that the support that they receive is effective and caring? When we think about suicide in communities, we're very rarely thinking about it through a health lens, and we're very rarely thinking about it through an interventions lens.

We're thinking about it in terms of issues around access to employment, support with parenting and childcare. We're thinking about it in terms of transport. We're thinking about it in terms of who gets access to resources and who doesn't, who experiences violence and who doesn't. My message for people who are wanting to make a difference and are willing to come to the table and collaborate around suicide prevention is have brave conversations. Don't be afraid to discuss what's not working. Once we have a better understanding of that, we'll be able to have the language to develop solutions, and the solutions are there. They're in our communities, and deeply listening to those communities is essential. And the other thing I'd say is don't give up. It's a really difficult job, and the benefits of this work are often not seen for years, or you take one step forward, you take two steps back. But hold your nerve, and if we keep having the conversation, eventually we'll start seeing better experiences for people.

The National Suicide Prevention Office developed the National Suicide Prevention Strategy over a number of years. Not on its own. We developed it with a whole lot of input from people from all around the country. In particular, we did it in partnership with our Lived Experience Partnership Group and with our advisory board. So these are made up of people with a whole lot of diverse perspectives on what's needed in suicide prevention, often bringing their own experiences from various different areas of life. And they really helped us enormously to develop the strategy so that it was appropriate for everybody and really spoke to everybody's experiences. The national strategy helps to get us all pointed in the same direction.

The idea being that if we're all pushing in the same direction together, then we're much more likely, with combined efforts, to make progress, which is obviously super important. But it can't happen purely at a national level. There'll always be things that need to happen at a community level.

Each community is slightly different. It has different needs, it has different issues. It also has different assets and opportunities, different strengths, things that it's already doing really well. So for the national strategy to actually be realized, in terms of its objectives, we really need people to take it at a local level and think about how they would realize it in their context. Thinking about what they can do, what they can't do, what they need help with, but leveraging the benefit of we're all pushing in the same direction and knowing that that's an evidence-based way to actually reduce the impact of suicide. When I've worked at a local level, the most important thing has always been the relationships, and it's actually the same at a national level. But there's something magic about working at a local level, really working for the community in which you reduce the impact of suicide. When I've worked at a local level, the most important thing has always been the relationships, and it's actually the

same at a national level. But there's something magic about working at a local level, really working for the community in which you live and working with people that you interact with in all sorts of ways. So that's the magic, I think, of working at a local level.

There's a whole lot of things that you can do at a local level that you can't do at a national level. So while we're trying to, through the strategy, provide that kind of shared direction and that reassurance that if you do these things and head in this direction, you're on the right track in terms of what the evidence says. Really, you have to tap into what the local community needs are and what they can and can't do. One of the things that was most important in my experience of working locally was where we got to difficult points in the conversation, we were just committed to stay in that conversation until we worked out where to put the next step. It's always going to be difficult, and there'll always be things that are super hard to navigate or barriers that seem insurmountable. But as long as you are committed to just staying in there and continuing to work on it together, hearing from different perspectives, you will find a way through, and I think that can only be done in local communities.

It was never the intention that any one person, any one organization, or even any one community would look at the strategy and think that they're responsible for doing all of it. That's never been the intention. In fact, it's required that you have a whole lot of different people It was never the intention that any one person, any one organization, or even any one community would look at the strategy and think that they're responsible for doing all of it. That's never been the intention. In fact, it's required that you have a whole lot of different people contributing in order to realize the strategy in its complete form. And so I would recommend that as a community, just to look at what's in the strategy. Pick the things that resonate with you the most. Maybe start with something you already feel like you've made some progress on and continue with that momentum. Once you've made some runs on the board, you can maybe then tackle the next things, but you don't have to do it all at once. But I do think that most people will find that a little bit of progress breeds more progress and more progress, and you'll find that the momentum builds, the energy lifts, the belief lifts, and all of a sudden, you can do all sorts of things that you didn't think you could do before. So for those of you who are in the room, those of you who are listening to this, honestly, we just want to say from the bottom of our hearts, we're so grateful that you've taken on this challenge, that you're getting together, you're making the effort to actually have some of these conversations and really work through this together. This could not be realized on a national level if communities weren't taking it up and running with it. So deep gratitude for everything that you're doing in the hard times, as well as when you start to feel the magic of the conversation flow through and you start to see some benefit.

The only other thing I would suggest you do is while you are talking about what you could do better, et cetera, and maybe what is going well now even, just keep thinking about maybe people you've known who have struggled with suicidality and just keep in the back of your minds, would this have made a difference for them? If you get to the point where you think it would, then I think you're on the money.

My name's Gill Townsend, and I work for Beacon Strategies. My role in the collaborative is as the lead of the backbone team. When the strategy came out, we really liked it. It reflected a lot of the things that across Far North Queensland in our collaborative that we'd been talking about. And we knew about the amount of work that had gone into the strategy. We'd been part of submitting information for the strategy and inviting people to submit. So, we wanted to make the strategy live for people in our collaboratives. We ran three sessions. So one, like an introduction, two, diving deeper, looking at the objectives, and then three, touching on the outcomes framework. And then with those, we did one online and one face-to-face. So in all, in that we did six sessions. And we designed them in a way that people could interact with each other. So you mentioned the human bingo. We did play human bingo with the objectives. So we put the objectives on a card, and invited people to move around the room and talk to each other about what the objective meant for them and where they saw their work in the objective. So for us, it hit a couple of things. It got people talking about the objectives, and it got people talking with each other and then exploring where they had similarities. Firstly, we were surprised about how interested people were. We had groups of 25 people in the room, then we had another groups of 12 or so online, or more online, each time. Some people came to every session. Some people just dipped in and out. Some people came then brought more people along. 

And from the beginning, some of the feedback back was, "Wow, this is a roadmap. I can use this." The first session we did was we almost played like a puzzle game with the domains and the objectives. So we put them all on cards, and then the domains and the objectives, and then we put them around the room on tables and got people to sit and talk about what that meant for them, and then feedback, workshop style, and got people moving around the room. So, to break down the intimidation is if you look at it one piece at a time, that's what we did. I think when you look at the document as a whole, it may not stand out that way.

But when you're invited to look at it in relationship with another person, then it starts to be quite meaningful. So people could relate to all of the objectives. One of the things that people said to us throughout the sessions that we've held is that you can hear the voice of lived experience throughout the strategy. And I think that it's important to make sure that the voice of lived experience is not a sidebar, and that it really is infused in all of the work that we do in this area.

Jordan Frith:

The Outcomes Framework is an amazingly ambitious piece of work and a really natural progression from what the strategy talks about in terms of those prevention support and critical enabler domains. So the Outcomes Framework uses the same model to conceptualize what a suicide prevention system could look like. Where it differs from the objectives in the strategy is the Outcomes Framework thinks more about what are the things that we need to measure and that we're either currently measuring or need to be measuring that are really meaningful for communities. And that's another place where lived experience was really heavily involved is thinking if we got to decide what good looked like for us, what would that be? And then developing and developing and developing until we have this framework that can support better monitoring and implementation of the strategy. 

Pino Miglirino: 

The outcomes and the beauty of the outcomes, they're not just behavioural measures or performance measures or activity measures. And I was part of those discussions in the formation of the outcomes, and what I really appreciated about those was how can we make those outcomes so simple to understand? So if you present the Outcomes Framework to even a group like here, it comes across as really daunting. But when you break it down, it basically says, am I being able to live a life where stresses are reduced? Am I, if I am in a difficult situation, able to access services? Do I know about the services?

Have I been able to benefit from the services? So you actually, in a way, the outcomes measures almost need to be framed around or considered around an access and equity type approach that I should know what's available. I should be supported so that I don't get to a point of vulnerability or suicidality. When I am there, I should have no impediments to getting support, and those supports need to be culturally adapted so that I feel comfortable, and ultimately, it's actually providing me the support I need to deal with the issues that I have and move away from suicidality. 

Nicholas Procter:

When I think about the relationship between the strategy and the Outcomes Framework, it tells me two things. Firstly, it tells me about the work that should happen on the ground for people in distress to support them to a better place, whatever that place might be. But it also tells me that if that's done well, that person in distress, their family, their network, their kinship, their ties, has been listened to, and listened to with compassion, with person-centered approaches and thinking that is culturally appropriate, that's age appropriate, that's gender appropriate, that meets their needs now and in the future. So it's a coming together for me of these two things to be able to open this up for the lives of people in service delivery, design, organization, but also for the lives of people in distress and the people that are important to them.

The National Strategy and the Outcomes Framework can't exist without each other. So the National Strategy provides a really clear picture of where we're trying to head, whereas the Outcomes Framework provides us with a really clear measure of how we're tracking towards that. And the Outcomes Framework, in a way, will also help hold us all accountable as to whether we're staying true to the intention of the National Strategy and what areas we need to improve in.

I'm Elizabeth Peyton, and I'm the project lead for Everymind's Mindframe program, which supports people to communicate about issues like suicide, mental health concerns, and alcohol and other drugs. We support people who want to talk about an issue like suicide. Primarily, we do support the media who are talking to the most people and the most often about these issues. But we also support people who might be supporting the media as well. So that might be giving an interview or sharing information with them, or it's for people who might be doing their own types of public communication. That might be through social media channels, through podcasts, or other types of public-facing community events. So our program is based on a whole heap of evidence that looks at the impact that public communication about suicide has in the community. So some ways of talking about suicide publicly can actually be quite harmful. For instance, it can increase suicidal behavior in the community, increase suicide deaths or attempts. But we also have some evidence emerging that shows that other ways of talking about suicide can be preventive or positive, whether that's reducing stigma or reducing suicide rates as well. There's some important things to remember when we're talking about suicide. If we're talking about suicide deaths, we should always frame those as a tragedy. We know how we talk about those deaths can really impact people who've been bereaved by suicide, as well as those in distress. So we want to make sure we're using language that doesn't glamorize a suicide death, for example, making it seem like a solution to the problems that person was experiencing. We also want to make sure we're taking care about how we talk about that person. We don't want to use language that makes it seem like they're a criminal, that they're selfish, or that they're stupid, for example.

So that type of language we have to take care with. When we're talking about suicide death, we also need to make sure we're not sharing details about suicide methods, or if a person has died in a public location, not giving details about those either. When we do share those details in our communication, we know that it can increase attempts or deaths using those methods or those sites. If we want to prevent suicide, we can't just talk about suicide deaths, though. We also need to hear other types of stories, stories of survival, which can be really important for people in distress to hear. So we want to hear stories of how people have gotten through a crisis, what worked for them, what helped them get through, what services they used, the people that they spoke to, the things that helped them survive. Those kinds of stories can also model that behavior to those that are in distress and need a way through. It helps them to know that it's possible to get through that crisis. So when we combine all of these stories, when we've got a real diversity of stories around suicide, those can play a really powerful role in suicide prevention. So we have a whole lot of resources to help people navigate how to communicate about an issue like suicide publicly.

That includes some resources for people with a lived-in living experience of suicide called Our Stories Matter, and lots and lots of different tips for how to go about telling a story. We also have language guides, the words to use or not use, things that can help other people in the community feel that it's safe to talk about what they're experiencing. You can access all of those resources on the Mindframe website at mindframe.org.au. We know from the evidence that how we talk about suicide is incredibly important. It can have positive impacts, but it can also have negative impacts. So having language or communication guidance in this toolkit is a really good foundation for communities to have these important discussions about suicide while they're implementing the National Suicide Prevention Strategy locally.

Chaya Vogelpoel-Rainbird:

Thank you so much for coming together. Thanks for reading the strategy, looking at it, not putting it on a shelf to be ignored and gather dust.

Thanks for having candor, being honest, and open with discussion. Don't go away from this and then not think about it again, but also don't go away from this and mull over it to a point where you distress yourself. Be inspired for change, don't be disheartened, and look after yourself. Without your self-care and everyone else's self-care, the future isn't going to change. 

Ben Brien:

For anyone that's involved in lived and living experience work and, for example, trying to bring about change in suicide prevention in their community through the work of this strategy, through the work of the toolkit and the information, I would say three things around self-care. Know yourself, your time, and value yourself, your experience, and be really mindful. I always encourage folk to think about, "Is the work that I'm doing meaningful?" And really don't contribute more if something isn't relevant. Be very conscious of your own time. The other part I would say is to really speak to peers, connect with your friends, connect with your peer colleagues. Self-awareness and connection to other people is really important. And the third one I would say is it is okay to not be okay when it comes to some of these things. For me, a lot of the time, we also have an imposter syndrome.

People are doing great work. I'm not maybe as refined or articulate as I need to be, and I think that's important. It's okay to be conscious of your self-care. Myself as a person, with lived and living experience of suicide, if I have a really crap day, I've provided a lot of lived experience contributions, and I want to go home, and I want to eat a whole Domino's pizza, and I want to watch a really crappy movie and recharge, that is completely okay because at the end of the day, it's lived and living experience, and it is okay to be human, and self-care looks different for each person. I think that's what is most important for people is to take care of yourself.

Alex Hains:

One thing I would ask of you, if you don't mind, is to let us know how these conversations go, good or bad. We would really appreciate hearing how you find the strategy, what does resonate with you, what doesn't, where your conversation goes. And if there's anything in particular you think that we could do at the National Suicide Prevention Office to support your community or communities like it to make progress, then we'd be all ears. So please do let us know how it goes.