September is Suicide Awareness Month and September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day. Two words (awareness & prevention) that describes the ability to reduce the amount of people who feel alone, utterly alone. Yet we continue to see a rise of suicide. According to WHO – about 800,000 people die by suicide every year (August 2017). For every death by suicide, 6 people are directly affected.
Today in Canada 11 people will die by suicide , another 210 will attempt to end their lives today. For each death by suicide approximately 7-10 grieving survivors will be greatly impacted . Therefore today, there will be between 77-110 grieving survivors and the greater risk of ending their own lives.

Suicide isn’t a trend, it has become an epidemic of feeling unwanted, worthless, hurt and the pain is now unbearable.

We have broken silence that this is a problem, a serious problem. We broken the silence that help is needed. We broken the silence on the risks and what to look for, but we have yet to take another big step, follow ups with our grieving survivors. We tend to forget those who are affected. When a fellow peer ends their life, we grieve, we support and we move on and continue to support the immediate family, but who supports the ones who survived, who are the ones to hear them out, who are the one to hugs them , way after their peer has passed.

We have amazing initiatives but what we often lack due to crisis overload we forget the Follow Up! So today and every day thereafter we’re asking our grieving survivors young and old – ARE YOU OKAY?