Get Ready to Tell Your Lived Experience Story about Suicide
What you'll learn
- Students will be able to understand the pros and cons of telling their story and how best to gain benefits and avoid unintended consequences.
- The importance of suicide awarness and prevention, and how to formulate your lived-experience into a story.
Requirements
- Time and energy needed for self-reflection to examine the way that suicide or suicidal intensity has affected your life.
- Have the time to dedicate to digesting the videos and allow space for emotions to be tapped into.
Description
In this course people who have had personal experiences with suicide learn to prepare for safe and effective storytelling about how they lived through it. Lived experiences with suicide include grieving a suicide loss, living through a suicide attempt, living with suicidal thoughts or feelings, or being a caregiver for someone who has been suicidal. The lessons contained here help people weigh the benefits and consequences of disclosing your story and how best to prepare yourself for the often hard work of developing a safe and effective narrative.
Who this course is for:
- People with lived experience with suicide (suicide loss survivors, suicide attempt survivors, people who live with suicidal intensity, their caregivers and allies) are encouraged to take this course. The lessons here will help anyone who self-identifies as having a personal experience with suicide who also is interested in exploring whether or not telling their story is right for them.
- Those that have lived experiences around suicide loss survivors and those living with a mental health issue.
Instructor
As a clinical psychologist, mental health advocate, faculty member, and survivor of her brother's suicide, Dr. Spencer-Thomas sees the issues of resilience, mental health and suicide from many different perspectives. Known internationally as a gap-filling change agent, she works to bring innovation and a framework of social justice to "elevate the conversation." In 2016 she was an invited speaker at the White House and in 2017 she gave her first TEDx talk on "Stopping Suicide with Story."