Suicide prevention plan a positive step
City’s new proposed prevention strategy is ‘ baby steps’ in the right direction
On Wednesday, Edmonton city council’s community and public services committee will field an unusual request.
The city administration is asking councillors to add $1.39 million to the spring supplemental operating budget.
That, in itself, is not so unusual. But administrators aren’t asking for money for a road or park. It’s asking for the extra funding to launch a municipal suicide prevention strategy.
The question is — is suicide prevention a municipal responsibility?
No one can doubt the tragedy of suicide is real.
According to the city’s report, 214 people died by suicide in the Edmonton health zone in 2015. (Not all those deaths took place within city limits. Alberta Health Services defines the Edmonton zone as including everything from Morinville to Thorsby to Fort Saskatchewan to Kapasiwin.)
Of those who died, 148 were male and 66 were female.
The number of those who took their own lives pales in comparison to the number who tried to kill themselves.
In 2015, according to the same city data, attempted suicides and intentional self-inflicted injuries accounted for 2,365 emergency room visits in the Edmonton zone.
That signifies an extraordinary amount of emotional anguish for thousands of Edmonton families each year.
How, though, does a municipality reduce those numbers?
In 2016, the city unveiled its first version of a suicide prevention strategy. That earlier document, which was full of aspirational rhetoric about the “vision” of a “suicide-free Edmonton,” offered few concrete suggestions for preventing suicide.
But since then, the city has met with many provincial departments, not-for-profit agencies and front-line social services providers. And it has come up with a much more sensible, concrete set of suggestions for things the city could do to help, without overstepping its jurisdictional bounds.
“It’s very much a collaborative, community-based plan,” said Jenny Kain, the city’s director of family and community supports.
“The key role of the city will be to co-ordinate and convene.”
Instead of making empty promises to eliminate suicide, the new document focuses on more realistic “deliverables” — simple things such as adding suicide prevention information to the city’s Link YEG mobile app; practical things, like funding and offering more evidencebased suicide prevention training programs; and downright charming things, like creating more men’s community groups to reach out to middle-aged men — the group at highest risk of suicide.
It also suggests the city could do much more to co-ordinate among all the different not-forprofits that deliver mental health and addiction services, to steer people to the right help.
Kain said the $1.39 million would be rolled out over three years.
These are bite-sized ideas, projects that fall within the city’s wheelhouse, as the level of government closest to the community.
Of course, such ideas by themselves aren’t going to solve the problem of suicide.
All the apps and training classes and men’s bonding activities in the world won’t save someone in the grip of a true bipolar psychosis, or someone suffering from a deep depressive episode.
There’s virtually nothing in the report about the really big things we need to do on a provincial scale to improve mental health care, such as opening more psychiatric beds in Alberta hospitals, increasing access to in-patient addiction treatment, investing more in supportive housing, or improving access to medication for those without drug insurance.
Those are the huge gaps — no, gulfs — we need to fill. And these are things that can’t be fixed at a municipal level.
City councillors can’t make Edmonton a suicide-free zone. Such promises were always delusional and self-defeating.
What a city can do is to help make the community we have a little more connected, a little more supportive, a little less alienating.
City resources can help guide people in crisis to help — and can, perhaps, help people to help themselves, before a crisis comes.
Ward 6 Coun. Scott McKeen, who has written and spoken frequently about his battles with depression and suicidal ideation, describes the city’s suicide prevention strategy as “baby steps” — but steps in the right direction.
“We have to start the conversation,” McKeen said.
“It’s been taboo to talk about suicide. We sent a message to people who were suffering that this was too shameful to talk about.
“The more we can give people space and room to reach out and say ‘I’m feeling this way,’ the more lives we’ll save.”