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.