Suicide prevention group hosts 3 events next week

A Brandon suicide prevention group will host several events this month for World Suicide Prevention Day, with the theme “changing the narrative” — encouraging open conversation about suicide and reducing stigma.

“We have to be kind and supportive in every way, shape and form because it could be ourselves or someone that we love that are struggling, and we want to make sure that people know that they’re not alone,” Brenda Lacerte, the Suicide Prevention Implementation Network’s board chair, said Friday.

SPIN, which Lacerte described as a network of community partners and individuals that work together to promote the “protection of life” and prevent suicide, will host three events in Brandon on Sept. 9 and 10.

On Sept. 9, SPIN will host a three-hour SafeTALK training session from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Brandon University.

While the spots are full now, the training was open to anybody 15 years old or older and is meant to prepare people to identify if someone is having thoughts of suicide and connect them to suicide first aid resources.

The next day, SPIN will host its annual event from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the A.R. McDiarmid Civic Complex at 638 Princess Ave. There will be an opening prayer followed by words from Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett and greetings from MLAs.

Ashley Cornect, who is SPIN’s administrative, promotions and outreach worker, said there will be activities centred around messages of hope, with this year’s focus being 1,000 reasons to live.

During the event, SPIN will give out five awards of excellence to individuals or community organizations who were nominated for doing an “exceptional job in the world of suicide prevention,” Cornect said.

Lacerte said there will also be a performance of a small excerpt from the play “Every Brilliant Thing” by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe.

“There’s a narrator who … tries to show his struggling mother, who’s having thoughts of suicide, that there are reasons to live all around us in everyday life,” she said. “During the course of his youth … he tries to share all the reasons that he hopes that his mother can take in order to choose life instead of suicide.”

Lacerte said that’s where the focus on 1,000 reasons to live comes in, adding that she would like to have a board with 1,000 reasons to live posted at the event, and said the reasons could be as simple as something like ice cream.

The third event takes place at 7 p.m. that evening, when the group will meet at Errol Black Park and hold a ribbon-tying ceremony on the First Street Bridge. Cornect said they have yellow and orange ribbons to tie on the bridge to recognize those who have died by suicide.

She said SPIN picked the First Street Bridge because the group is in the middle of an advocacy initiative to get protective barriers — like the ones on the 18th Street Bridge — installed.

“It’s been kind of on our radar for a long time that the bridges really should both have those,” Cornect said. “(For) the 18th Street Bridge, luckily they added them when they did the renovation, but the First Street Bridge, we just haven’t gotten there yet.”

She said the protective barriers are important to prevent people from jumping or even just to reduce risky behaviour on the bridge.

Lacerte said she hopes these events offer people hope and the strength to choose life instead of suicide and to know that there are people who care about them.

“We want to make sure people know that they’re not alone.”

» sanderson@brandonsun.com