Suicide

Not Quite There Challenge - Prompt: Share a story that never fully came together, along with what’s holding it back.

Not every piece reaches a finished form. This challenge makes space for work that is still unresolved. Share a story that never quite came together, along with what’s holding it back.

The gap might come from structure, clarity, scope, or something harder to define. Be specific about where it falters. What feels incomplete and why has it stayed that way. The focus is as much on the friction as the draft itself.

The plan was to have research from adults and teens on suicide when the training was over. No children came. There was a rap artist at lunch for entertainment.

I enjoy rap, especially from the culture! Could that have been for the teens?

There was many well-seasoned service providers in the room. Okay, they were getting close to retirement, and some may have already retired. The research happened right after a co-trainer, and I did a presentation on Trauma, grief and loss.

We didn't get finished with our slides, as we hoped to cover some important information that we wanted to comment on from the morning presentations.

So, our presentation didn't fully come together. I'm sure we had enough material and we did our best. We will see though when the evaluations come in.

We could talk about the topic for days, so one hour, really was not enough time to cover what we wanted to. That is why I will often have a booklet, as a handout that will handle other material that we would like to cover.

I didn't put one together for this. I started it but didn't get it done. I wasn't asked to do it, I just had done one for the last suicide conference we participated in. We were the main event for that one. We presented for the majority of the day.

I thought since that wasn't the case, it didn't have to happen.

We got as far as self-care in our slides which was a perfect way to end. It was about 10 slides in, of a 20-slide presentation. The beginning was trauma, and we followed a historical trauma presentation, so we had a few comments on that.

Working with trauma, grief and loss with Native American people was what we have experince with and is what we train on primarily.

The groups and questions went well. People cooperated with that session. There were good answers to the three questions. They will have some data for their research proposal.

The problem, as I saw it was, they had over 100 people registered, and many had to cancel at the last minute, including the teens.

So, the day never fully came together. I'm sure that they will do the best they can with what they got.

I heard comments like, "It is family secrets that keep our families sick and this is an example of that. People do not share a loved one's suicide if they can help it."

And, then I heard, "It is a small community, and everyone knows everyone else's business, so how does it stay a secret? Everyone knows and keeps it a secret?"

There was a professor that developed a tool for assessing suicide with Native American people. There are years of research yet, even though initial trials have been successful. He was disappointed that it will take so long, as he is certain it works.

The process of proving it is a best practice tool takes time, and in the meantime, people are dying.

A woman therapist talked about her son's suicide. He had been in the service and had ptsd. She showed a photo of all the psychiatric medications he had been prescribed over a short period of time. She said the medications didn't work, but he kept trying, until he was dead.

Her talk was a writing for healing and she shared some of her son's journaling and poetry. She said his material was shared and no one recognized his path to suicide, in his writing. She did a good job of sharing a tool to help providers in working with others.