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.