On Friday evening at the Cook County Community Center, presenters Jillian Gribben and Scott Chisholm presented SafeTALK training.  Jillian is a registered social worker and safeTALK and ASIST trainer. She is a Mental Health Strategist at Confederation College in Thunder Bay.  Scott Chisholm works for Collateral Damage. More information about Scott’s work can be found here: http://leftbehindbysuicide.org/about/

According to Jillian, “The goal of safeTALK training sessions is to make communities be suicide safer”.  Anyone over 15 years of age can participate in this training. On any given day in a community, 1 in 20 individuals is thinking about suicide.  Those numbers are alarming. Jillian stated that open and direct dialogue is key. During the training, Scott stated that “The vast majority of suicide is not about dying.  Rather, It’s about making the pain go away.

An alert helper has four tasks that they can do to assist someone in need of help:

• Tell
• Ask
• Listen
• Keep safe

This training was open to not only members of the EMS community, whose lives are impacted tremendously by calls they get for suicides, but also for the general community.  To learn more about safeTALK and how you can become involved, please visit their website: https://www.livingworks.net/programs/safetalk/