Stephen Smith
There’s a lot that motivates me to be involved in the National Community Association of People with Experience of Suicide. I have listened to hundreds of stories told by people who have experience of suicide (thoughts, plans & actions). Many of these stories tell of how people have experienced a lack of understanding and harm from the community, friends, family, and suicide prevention services. I have experienced this myself.
These stories have highlighted to me the following:
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The reasons we no longer want to be in this life are diverse and currently poorly understood.
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We do not have spaces where we can safely tell each other our stories, and learn from and support each other.
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Even our current approaches to suicide prevention can result in increased stigma and discrimination leading to harsh and lonely trajectories.
For me, my soul will rest easier when:
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Stigma and discrimination against people with the experience of suicide (thoughts, plans & actions) is significantly reduced.
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We have less reasons to be distressed by our experiences of suicide and can more easily develop lives worth living.
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Our human rights are actively promoted and respected.
Lindy Zillman
My desire to be involved in NCAPES stems from how the experience of suicide has impacted on my life and the chance for me to offer something that may help contribute to reducing the incidence of suicide in this country. My personal experiences and the search for contentment have been ongoing and over many years. Like many others I meet, our experiences are deeply personal, difficult to talk about and something you would not wish upon anyone.
It is my passion through my work at NCAPES to offer, with others at NCAPES, the opportunity to create a platform for community engagement whereby ordinary people from all over the country can share, learn, support and hopefully inform the decision makers, about how we respond to suicide and what can be improved.
The fact that valued members of our communities, believe that suicide is the only response available to the life situations they face, must be addressed. At NCAPES we can engage with communities to seek answers to enable the right support and services are available. This change of approach comes from a clear headed, genuine and authentic approach which must made and valued.
Being involved in NCAPES this gives me some comfort and reassurance that we are on the right path to more people being able to feel a sense of contentment rather than despair.
Roma Aloisi
I am involved in NCAPES because I value contributing to meaningful work and helping create positive structural reform and outcomes.
Being involved gives me the opportunity to learn and support a community that matters to me.
Terribly fecund, its impact. A legacy of trauma. Intergenerational. Intersectional. Its smash broke open pandora’s box. Silenced truths of identity, privilege, discrimination, and abuse of power spewed forth.
A brutal wisdom. Run as I may, it menaces me, compels me, transforms me. Rages me into advocacy. I’m different, perhaps a better person. A horrid gift. A gift incomprehensible. A gift inescapable. It beckons, no demands, that I speak the unspeakable. That I in turn, rupture the status quo. That I provoke the scary bear of entrenched inequity, power and privilege, and endure the fated harms they will foist upon me. They say we measure a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable. Is not suicide the primordial scream of the most vulnerable? The voiceless, the traumatised, the disenfranchised… Those, who feel most intensely the cracks, the canyons of this world’s brokenness. Is not suicide a mirror? Dare we be brave enough to confront our hearts of darkness, to listen to truths so radical, they shatter our realities and the world, towards restoration?
I am involved in NCAPES because I value contributing to meaningful work and helping create positive structural reform and outcomes. Being involved gives me the opportunity to learn and support a community that matters to me.