Preventing suicidePreventing suicide
All In The Mind
Each year, around 3,000 people in Australia die at their own hand. More young people die by suicide than in car accidents, and Indigenous Australians are more than twice as likely to take their own lives. Hear some of the latest thinking in prevention.
30:20•7 Oct 2018
Preventing Suicide: Systems, Smartphones and Culture-Based Healing
Episode Overview
- Shifting suicide conversations towards hope and recovery can give people in pain a reason to hang on.
- Urgent crisis care centres with peer support and graded levels of service may reduce hospital stays, costs and distress.
- Screening tools and smartphone-based programs can help identify suicide risk and offer support even when people don’t speak up directly.
- Geospatial mapping and means restriction enable communities to target high-risk locations and design local responses.
- For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, strong cultural identity, connection to Country and community-led strategies are central to staying alive.
“Without autonomy, you don't have resilience. And that is so important with suicide prevention.”
How do people find hope in the darkest times? This episode of All In The Mind looks straight at suicide prevention, pulling together hard statistics, fresh service models, digital tools and deeply personal stories. Host Lynne Malcolm talks with David Covington, a leader behind the Zero Suicide approach in healthcare.
He challenges the usual focus on death and instead argues for “stories of hope and recovery”, sharing how an urgent crisis care system in Phoenix moves people away from long, traumatic hospital waits and into warm, living room–style centres, with peer support and graded levels of care. You’ll hear how this ladder-style support can resolve many crises safely without locking people away.
Professor Helen Christensen from the Black Dog Institute explains why suicide prevention has to work on many levels at once – health services, communities and long‑term prevention in young people. She outlines how GPs can be helped by screening tablets in waiting rooms, and describes digital tools like the online “Living with Deadly Thoughts” program, the ibobbly app for Indigenous communities, and RAFT, which supports people on their phones after an emergency visit.
The episode then turns to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide, with social epidemiologist Dr Vanessa Lee linking today’s high rates to intergenerational trauma and racism. Her story about her son’s suicidal thinking is raw and practical: she talks about reconnecting him with culture through teachings from her grandmother, time on Country, and affirming his identity.
For her, denying culture is “basically handing them a card and saying, here, go and take your life.” This honest mix of evidence, innovation and culture-based healing might leave you asking: who could you check in with, and what small action could you take, today?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.