Conference Agenda

Since many people spend a significant portion of their lives at work, workplaces play a crucial role in suicide prevention. Meaningful conversations about suicide need to take place to provide support, resources, and hope to someone who may be struggling with thoughts of suicide.

Suicide Prevention in the Workplace is a recently refreshed universal guide for workplaces, created through engagement with experts and people with lived and living experience. It offers information to support worker mental health and suicide prevention and postvention, organized into sections tailored for employers, managers, co-workers, workers, and workers who engage with the public.

Having spent the last four years exploring the appropriateness of implementing outcome measures in suicide postvention support, I have reached three conclusions: (1) most outcome measures are appropriate, providing that (2) they are approached skilfully and compassionately by service providers and (3) that the information garnered by the outcome measure meaningfully informs the individual’s support. This flash talk will provide a 5-minute summary of my recently submitted PhD thesis, overviewing the four-part mixed-methods research project and the journey taken to arrive at these conclusions. Audience members will be encouraged to rethink preconceived notions about outcome measurement in suicide postvention.

As part of an artistic PhD, this qualitative study explores audience experiences of a video installation on facing suicidal thoughts and imagery throughout the suicidal process. Created by the presenting author and based on her lived experience with suicidal ideation, the work was shown in seven small-scale test screenings with 27 participants, followed by group and individual interviews. Preliminary insights show that participants responded to the work on emotional, aesthetic, ethical, and meaning-making dimensions, indicating how visual and narrative representations of navigating suicidality are received by various audiences. Note: The video-installation will be presented during ESSSB21.

Behavioural economics approaches (e.g., nudges, message framing) are rarely explicitly theorised in gatekeeper-focused suicide prevention interventions, even though prompts, simplification, and friction-reduction features are used under other labels. Building on Prospect Theory and behaviour-change frameworks, we will examine how message design can mobilise lay gatekeepers, such as family members, partners, and friends, who may be the only support contact and may influence pathways to formal care. We will conduct a series of controlled randomized online experiments testing public-facing suicide-prevention messages (e.g., gain/loss framing). Outcomes include self-efficacy, behavioural intention, and click-through (behavioural proxy), examining hope and anxiety as mediators.

This paper draws from my PhD (integrating narrative inquiry with writing as inquiry) to examine the ghosts that haunt the intergenerational suicide stories of my collaborators (participants). I think with Derrida’s deconstruction to examine the absent presences that irrupt out of and destabilise the well-rehearsed stories that often follow suicide; well-rehearsed thin descriptions, such as they were depressed. To illustrate this, I plug deconstruction into my collaborators’ stories to examine the moments that disrupt or unsettle what was said or remembered before. What is the story not being told? What are the ghosts that seem to haunt intergenerational suicide stories?

International suicide prevention strategies recommend responsible media reporting to reduce population-level harms, yet existing tools do not capture harmful features unique to online reporting. We adapted PRINTQUAL (a suicide reporting assessment tool for newspapers) for online news. Content analysis of 342 articles on the 2020 suicide of a British television celebrity identified features of poor- and good-quality reporting. Expert consensus determined items and weightings for negative and positive subscales, resulting in a new tool; the PRINTQUAL-web. PRINTQUAL-web enables systematic quality assessment of online suicide reporting and direct comparison to PRINTQUAL scores, comparing journalistic practice across online and print reporting.

Youth suicide is a complex issue in Canada, with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit youth disproportionately affected. This doctoral research explores how Métis understandings of life promotion can inform upstream youth suicide prevention. Through three objectives: (1) co-create shared conceptualizations of life promotion; (2) identify equity-oriented, systems-focused indicators to evaluate life promotion; and (3) generate recommendations for upstream suicide prevention. Grounded in my worldview as a Métis youth, this presentation will share the methodology and initial findings from the Healing our Youth Home study, a youth-led, participatory, metaphor-inspired Indigenous research approach rooted in Métis knowledges, community relationships, and equity science.

Lithuania has among the highest male suicide rates globally. Understanding male suicidality requires examining community contexts that shape masculinity. This study examined whether Sense of Community (SOC) predicts suicide risk directly and indirectly through defeat and entrapment in Lithuanian men. Using structural equation modelling (n = 510), family SOC was associated with lower suicide risk directly (β = -0.27; p = 0.005) and indirectly via defeat and entrapment (β = -0.21; p < 0.001), whereas friends` SOC showed no significant effects. Results underscore the protective role of family community in male suicidality in Lithuanian context.

Funding: Lithuanian Research Council (S-MIP-24-77)