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.