Folks, you might like to know that today is World Suicide Prevention Day. As part of the activity, you’re encouraged to light a candle at 8pm and put it in a window in memory of survivors and those we’ve lost. That kind of token awareness-raising is well and good, but I’d personally strongly encourage you to support your local suicide prevention hotlines, do whatever you can to limit access to the more common means of suicide, or even just pass the word along on your blogs.
Most suicides can be prevented. It’s not always a matter of needing to “see the signs”, as none of us are trained psychologists; however, knowing that the best mitigating practices involve public health measures and evidence-based prevention initiatives, we can make inroads. The ways to make such inroads, is through both science, and politics. If you can raise political awareness that this needs addressing, wonderful. And if you can produce studies and increase the body of human knowledge with regard to how and why suicides occur, and how to prevent them, so much the better. Knowledge is power; forewarned is forearmed.
As George Hrab says, “everything alive will die someday”. But why seek to hasten it? This life is the only one you get. Suck the marrow out of it.
