My lived experience is rooted in living with suicidal ideations, depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Facilitating Alternatives to Suicide support groups really opened my eyes to the stressors that lead to suicidal thinking. Taking what I learned from the peers around me I expanded that model into If You’re Talking, There’s Time, which now provides peer support five nights each week. Through years of listening to people’s stories, I have come to believe that access to meaningful resources is one of the greatest missing pieces in suicide prevention. As I often say:
“As long as suicide prevention focuses on whether a person lives and not on how they are living, we will continue to see increases in the number of people who take their own lives each year.”
