Learning How to Assess Suicide

Thirty-three participants from across the public service attended a workshop today where they learned how to conduct assessments on suicide.  Every year, as many as thirty-six Belizeans die by suicide.  What the Community Rehabilitation Department has sought to do is train the trainers in an effort to detect suicide ideation and provide the necessary resources for persons to get help.

 

Onando St. Bernard, Counseling Coordinator, C.R.D.

“We are providing a train the trainers training on suicide assessments and safety planning.  So the reason why we are doing this is that we want to train as many people as possible to go out there and train people on how to better assess for suicide and creating a safety plan.  So the participants that we have today are people from the different government offices, the different ministries and what we’re trying to do is that we’re trying to make sure that we’re looking after our government’s staff.  So many of these participants do also include counselors, social workers, doctors, the P.N.P. nurses.  What we want them to do is we want them to go back to their offices and train their staff, so that they can provide the support for their staff and also for the public that they serve as well.  So it’s twofold in that sense, right.  So that they’ll go back, train their staff and then their staff will be better, they’ll have more knowledge on how to better assess and do those safety plans for their staff and then also for the individuals that they serve.  So it’s three parts, we’re going to train them on how to do the assessments, how to do the safety plans and then also on how to connect them to the counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists who are the individuals who will then take on the safety plans, things like that and continue on working with those individuals who are showing suicide ideation or suicide intent.  All these are very important because if you look at the numbers, the statistics, at about thirty-six individuals on a yearly basis, more or less who commit suicide and so we want to bring that number down.”