The Blueprint for Change
Who are the missing experts in suicide prevention?
The ones who have been there.
The Blueprint for Change is an initiative to include missing experts in the field of suicide prevention by engaging diverse voices of people with lived experiences around suicide. It brings together marginalized and historically excluded minds and hearts for co-empowerment with a focus on the intersections of suicide, social injustice, public health, human rights, and community love.
The Blueprint is generated out of the 2022 Oklahoma City Roundtable and the 2023 Living Beyond Suicide Summit in Golden, CO. It is focused on solutions and recommendations on how suicide prevention and postvention is understood and addressed via the power of suicide lived experience storytelling.
This Blueprint for Change serves as a mobilizer of the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention 2024 and “The Way Forward” Policy Paper developed by the Suicide Attempt Survivors Task Force of the National Action Alliance, and the contexts of their historical beginnings.
Delegates at the SPRC sponsored Suicide Experiences Roundtable in Oklahoma City, 2022
BACKGROUND
Almost 70 years of suicide prevention work and research have undoubtedly helped many individuals survive encounters with suicidal intensity and suicide grief. These efforts, however, have not halted the upward trend in suicide death since the launch of the first National Strategy for Suicide Prevention in 2001.
Recent increases in suicide death among youth, people of color, Indigenous peoples, women/femmes, and LGBTQAI2S+, underscore the fact that what has been performed to date does not often address the pain and experience of marginalized communities.
Approaches to support people experiencing suicide as well as those impacted by suicide loss have been driven by the same academic voices focused on white males, the highest rate group - leaving many communities unheard, unseen, and disempowered in spite of disparate suffering.
The many ways that the legacy of capitalism, racism, scientific materialism, colonialism, and mental health’s ostracizing stigmatism manifest at both individual and collective levels requires active livingry in love, societal justice, and liberation towards a more hopeful and compassionate future.
A new way of knowing, framed in terms of “understanding and addressing” suicide safer living (as opposed to ‘preventing suicide’ through exclusive ‘expertise’ intervention) is needed now– to disrupt the conventions of limited expertise, address the failures, and correct the manifested inequities that have arisen in broader social context as well as within the field of suicide prevention.
The Roundtable 2022 and
The Living Beyond Suicide Summit 2023
In 2022, the Suicide Experiences Roundtable brought together people with lived experience to discuss what needs to change in the field of suicide prevention. The following year, the Living Beyond Suicide Summit expanded on these ideas, bringing together survivors, advocates, and policymakers to create a more inclusive, supportive, and effective approach.
Key takeaways from these gatherings include:
Suicide should not be treated only as a medical issue. It is also a social, emotional, and community issue.
Prevention efforts need to be more inclusive and welcome perspectives from people who have lived through suicidal thoughts, attempts, or loss.
The way we talk about and respond to suicide needs to change to focus on healing, connection, and empowerment rather than just crisis intervention.
“If we focus on the smallest voice, everyone is elevated.”
— Melanie Eley
The Blueprint for Change will be produced as a zine and 12 short films around suicide survivor’s stories. Visual artists pair their talents with storytellers in order to show the vibrancy in finding life beyond suicide. A workshop in November will facilitate the storytellers, as well as the visual, performing, and culinary arts to be recorded and included appropriately. The mixed media produced in the workshop will be displayed in participating galleries beginning with Sights by Sounds Gallery in Whittier, CA.
The primary audience for The Blueprint are those with suicide related experiences. It extends community and care towards those who endure feelings of isolation, despair, and otherness. It will reach those who can fearlessly, empathetically, and compassionately understand and support someone with suicide experiences, such as family, caretakers, clinicians, and policymakers.
Art by Tybee Maitri
Community love is at the heart of this project.
Your voice matters and is needed in this important work.
Do you have a lived experience story you would like to tell and feel safe and confident in telling? Are you an artist with lived experience? Are you interested in supporting and/or advocating?
We welcome you and hope that you’ll join us.
