Jaletta Desmond is a survivor of suicide loss and a founder of Davidson LifeLine. She also teaches suicide prevention and, along with other DLL volunteers, recently taught QPR to students at Hough High School and Community School of Davidson.
Teaching suicide prevention classes is both a privilege and a burden, personally speaking. To stand in that space and be on the front lines, trying to save a life…I can almost imagine what it feels like to be an emergency room nurse, law enforcement officer, or EMT.
It is a privilege to be a warrior, fighting against the second leading cause of death in adolescents and young adults, ages 10-25. This lethal enemy is invading the thought-life of roughly one in four middle school and high school students.
And, yet, standing there I am fully aware of the fallen one behind me. The one I couldn’t protect. The one to whom I asked a Question (many), tried to Persuade with my then-limited knowledge, and did every Refer I knew to do. I didn’t know the evidence-based suicide prevention protocol, QPR. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I had been very annoyed by one of the phrases that was used to promote QPR, “Ask a question, save a life,” which was recently removed from the newer materials. My daughter was asked hundreds of questions by her loved ones and mental health care providers but she didn’t answer them in a way that helped us save her life. Maybe we didn’t ask them correctly.
The field of suicidology is including loss survivors as advisors around language and approach because they recognize that we are, unfortunately, the “lived experience experts.” The first time I heard that phrase I almost choked on it. With time, plus hours of additional training and education around postvention and grief, I came to understand that, yes, I am a lived experience expert. I wish I weren’t.
I don’t want anyone else to become a lived experience expert in suicide loss. I wish that were possible.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it is. At least not yet.
I’ve learned as a peer support specialist about the many, many folks who are terribly good actors. Their loved ones tell me how they simply didn’t see it coming, that the person seemed happy (mostly), never saying anything about being suicidal. These loved ones were often blindsided, engulfed by grief and guilt that haunts them for months or years. Suicide loss can bring its own special brand of traumatic, complicated, and alienated grief.
An army of QPR trainers do the best we can to fight the possibly impossible fight because saving one life is a victory. We stand in front of a room—often teenagers like my daughter when she died ten years ago—and fight against hopelessness.
You may think you’ll never be touched by it. I hope you are right. Still, you never know who might be struggling at work, church, on your pickle ball team, or even at home.
Davidson LifeLine invites you to think about taking roughly 90 minutes out of your life to try to save someone else’s. Learn the behavioral and situational clues we don’t notice because we don’t know about them. Learn about the indirect and direct verbal clues, the signs and symptoms. Learn how to ask the Question, how to Persuade and how to Refer.
Learn how to try to save another person’s life and save dozens of people from becoming “lived experience experts.”