Centre aims to prevent suicide
Looking back seven years, Stephen Hansen remembers knowing that something needed to be done about an increasing trend of suicides on Calgary’s transit system.
There had been a number of deaths in 2011 along the CTrain line, several of which were suicides. Hansen, then-manager of safety and security for Calgary Transit, felt it was something the transit agency needed to address, both with the public and internally with employees.
“Transit’s a predominantly male organization and lots of times … men are more reluctant to talk about the softer side, or the feelings side, of things,” he said.
So Calgary Transit partnered with the Centre for Suicide Prevention and two other organizations to address the problem.
Through its Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) program, the Centre for Suicide Prevention offered a workshop to the transit agency’s front line employees to help them know how to respond to people at risk, including their co-workers affected by what they were experiencing.
“People who have the ASIST training ... not only know how to deal with individuals who may be thinking about suicide, but also are in the position to support front line employees who experience this kind of situation themselves,” Hansen said.
“We were able to offer people two things: language and licence. Language to be able to speak about what it was they were experiencing, but also the licence to raise issues or concerns.”
The Centre for Suicide Prevention, one of this year’s beneficiaries of the Calgary Herald Christmas Fund, is a non-profit branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
Although it has long been offering its ASIST workshop — which focuses on suicide intervention and prevention skills — to individuals and organizations across the city, executive director Mara Grunau says she’s hoping more workplaces will get on board, much like Calgary Transit did many years ago.
“Anyone can be privy to the invitations that the person at risk is putting out,” Grunau explained. “The best way to prevent it is not to send people to the hospital. The best way to prevent it is for us to all have a certain level of first aid.”
But there’s a unique statistic associated with suicide, she said. It disproportionately affects men. There are three male suicides to every female suicide, and twothirds of suicides in Alberta are committed by men aged 40 to 60.
“They are usually much quieter about it, as in they’re more reluctant to ask for help,” said Grunau. “We want to focus directly on men. We’re failing our men. We need to somehow reach them.”
To do so, Grunau is hoping to involve as many workplaces as possible across the city in the centre’s ASIST workshop.
“The biggest barrier is stigma,” she said. “If you talk about it, they’re uncomfortable. They might even recoil. We try to brush it under the carpet … So what the workshop does is it tries to help people understand ‘where are you at? What are your beliefs about suicide? How do your beliefs affect your attitudes and how do your attitudes affect your actions?’
“You practise your skills and you learn how, in a practical way, to listen and not solve the problem.”
A similar initiative in Australia called MATES in Construction — inviting men to become more aware of suicide prevention — showed that although men may not seek help for themselves, “they will seek help for a buddy,” according to Grunau. She said that model can be applied to Calgary ’s workplaces, with a special focus on Calgary’s male-dominated corporate scene.
Grunau added that the suicide last year of respected Calgary investment banker George Gosbee “woke up a lot of people and shook our downtown.” But she said it’s unlikely a man in Gosbee’s position would ever walk into a counselling centre on his own.
“Because of all kinds of ways we’ve socialized men, they think it’s a risk to their career, they wouldn’t make the time, they don’t want to be vulnerable or ‘weak,’ they’re very determined to be stoic and strong and just soldier on,” Grunau said.
“So what we want to do with this project is approach where men are. We want to start by looking at workplace. Men spend a lot of time in the workplace. How can the workplace create more of a welcoming environment, or even just more awareness of what men might be struggling with?”
For workplaces interested in having their employees take the ASIST course, trainers will run workshops on site. Individuals interested in taking the training can also visit the Centre for Suicide Prevention’s headquarters, where it regularly offers the course.
“You leave with the confidence that, ‘OK if somebody says it to me, I’m not going to panic,’” Grunau said. “‘I’m not going to ignore them. I know what to do. I know I don’t have to fix it, but I know the role that I can play.’”