Weekly News Roundup Mar. 9-15, 2024

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Featured:
Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families collaborates with Veterans and Family members in developing suicide prevention resources – Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families
March 13, 2024
Centre for Suicide Prevention and Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families have developed a suite of Military and RCMP Veteran and Family suicide prevention resources. Mara Grunau, Executive Director of Centre for Suicide Prevention, said, “Veterans, Veteran Families and communities all have a role to play in building resilience and preventing Veteran suicide. If you’re worried about a Veteran, have an open, non-judgmental conversation. If they’re considering suicide, connect them to help.”
Check out the resources

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As a caregiver, I was rarely invited to funerals. Still, I mourned deeply from a distance – CBC
March 13, 2024
This article is written by Lana Cullis, a vocational rehabilitation counsellor with a community mental health team in Vancouver. Cullis helps her patients find and keep work while living with a serious mental health diagnosis. In this article, Cullis talks about what it’s like for her as a counsellor to lose a client to suicide. Cullis says, “Doctors, nurses and counsellors can sometimes feel like outsiders. We are not likely to be invited to societal rituals that help with the grieving process… We are positioned uniquely in relationship to our clients: we hear the dark struggles, deep fears, hopeful desires and hard-won successes. We may see individuals more often than their families, especially when individuals are estranged from their families or live apart in different communities.”

Finland managed to halve its suicide rate – here’s how it happened – The Conversation
March 13, 2024
Finland’s suicide rate peaked in 1990 with one of the highest suicide rates in the world – 30 per 100,000. Finland “responded aggressively” and implemented a national suicide prevention strategy. Their strategy reduced suicide rates by 50%. There were several initiatives and factors that contributed to this decline. Some initiatives include: educating health and other care workers, conducting a nation-wide research project to collect suicide data, educating media in responsible suicide reporting, and restricting firearm access. Other factors that could have contributed include that, during this time, antidepressants were made more widely available, as were cellphones (the availability of easy communication may have reduced loneliness).

Suicide-prevention initiative trains people to provide care within their own communities – Globe and Mail
March 12, 2024
**Paywall** This article highlights the Roots of Hope initiative in Nova Scotia. Roots of Hope is a community-based and led suicide prevention initiative. Roots of Hope has a framework that can be tailored to individual communities. It began in 2017 in the Burin Peninsula, and has been adopted by 18 communities since then. Laureen Rushton, who lost her son Lucas to suicide in May 2021, got involved with Roots of Hope Nova Scotia after her son’s death. As part of her work with the program, she shares Lucas’ story with schools and communities to break down the stigma surrounding suicide.

Opinion: It is not wrong to memorialize a teen who died by suicide in a high school yearbook – Globe and Mail
March 12, 2024
**Paywall** Carson Hoyt, 15, died by suicide June 13, 2021. His parents have requested that he be mentioned in his high school’s yearbook for the class of 2024. The school and district refused their request. Andre Picard responds to the story in this article, saying, “Suicide contagion is a real phenomenon, but also a complex and controversial one. The main concern, or fear, is that the glorification of suicide could lead to copycats, especially in emotionally charged groups such as teenagers. But there is a world of difference between memorializing someone and glorifying their means of death.”

After the pain of my brother’s suicide, I fell in love with the silence that came with freediving – CBC
March 10, 2024
Noah Deszca lost his brother Josh to suicide in 2012. Deszca says they were “exceptionally close” and that his brother’s death let him to “a year of intense internal struggle.” That was when Deszca found scuba diving and, eventually, free-diving. Deszca says, “There’s a meditative quality in the commitment to diving on a breath-hold. The water demands everything, all my energy and focus. I have to be present. I take a final deep breath at the surface and, for an instant, I let go of everything. Some days, I long to fill the emptiness my brother left behind with words that were left unspoken, with the faces of my children he never met, with the joyful resonance of every family milestone that he’s missed in the last 12 years.”