Blog by Bianca Romanyk, CEO, Storm Skills Training CIC:
For me, preventing self-harm and suicide is about learning from hard stuff, heartbreaking stuff. It’s making sense of human complexity, and making meaning from incomprehensible pain. To learn and progress, we need to nurture a learning culture across the self-harm and suicide prevention community and beyond. A learning culture celebrates progress, embraces change, and continually strives for improvement. It doesn’t seek to apportion blame. It’s encouraging, collaborative, and seeks to understand. It’s realistic and offers hope.
I go to the National Suicide Prevention Alliance (NSPA) Conference to be amongst like-minded people. By being there we are taking action to prevent suicide and self-harm, so fewer people take their own life.
I love seeing familiar faces (some for the first time in three dimensions after meeting online) and meeting new people. Like previous years, it was a great opportunity to get a comprehensive picture of the range of suicide prevention activities happening in England. Some innovative and inspiring work making a real difference.
The NSPA delivered another fantastic event, offering a diverse selection of powerful talks, interactive workshops, and inspiring moments that ignited meaningful conversations about suicide prevention. You can view the slides for the plenary sessions on their website.
As the NSPA continues its invaluable work, I’d love to see more opportunities for facilitated workshops that foster true collaboration and innovation, with the NSPA leading the way. I’m imagining all facets of our community coming together to explore the current issues, record the conversations, and use them to inform the work of the Alliance. Others may not agree, but I think the annual conference is a great opportunity to do this.
As the self-harm and suicide prevention community, we must unify – especially in these difficult times. Acknowledging and valuing the many diverse components of our community - lived experience, research, services, third sector, statutory, education and training providers, the public, and beyond. This requires stepping into each other's shoes, applying compassion and kindness in our interactions, and realising that, ultimately, we are all in this together – to prevent people from taking their own lives.
"We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
