As a part of my work with the SWBHP, I wrote this article in September 2021 to encourage people to attend a film screening and community discussion as a part of Suicide Prevention Month.

When I moved to Dodgeville four years ago, I found that nearly everyone I met knew someone who had died by suicide. I’m a suicide attempt survivor who advocates for suicide prevention, so people often felt comfortable enough to tell me about their family member or friend who they had lost. The more conversations I had, the clearer it became that everyone had been touched in some way by suicide. The first year I lived there, someone I knew died by suicide and two other people confided in me that they had had thoughts of suicide. This issue is touching all of our lives and it’s not going away. We need to talk about it. The lives of folks in our community depend on it and seeing the documentary film “Wake Up” is an excellent way to start that conversation.

The power of this film is that it depicts not just the severity of the problem, but also the ongoing grassroots efforts to solve it. It’s a story of tragedy, but also one of hope. When I go to see a film about suicide, I know I will leave in tears – the topic is too close to me, the devastation too real. When this film ended, I did end up in tears: not from the tragedy of suicide, but from the journeys of recovery that gave me hope. This documentary tells the stories of suicide loss, but it also tells the stories of suicide attempt survivors who do suicide prevention work. To hear from people like me who have transformed their pain into powerful prevention efforts moved me. It reminded me that telling my own story mattered and could make a difference.

It took me three years to talk about my attempt after it happened due to the shame I felt. It is still hard for me, as I write this, to share my story so openly and publicly. But telling our stories makes a difference. What I appreciate about this film is how well they explain where suicide comes from, and how they depict the mindset of a person who is suicidal. It is my hope that everyone who can attends this free screening, so that as a community we can better understand why people attempt and what we can do about it. And for other attempt survivors, I hope that they will see how critical telling our stories is to suicide prevention efforts. These stories are all too familiar to our communities, but they don’t have to be. We ALL need to ‘wake up’ and start talking about it, as soon as possible.

Watch a preview for “Wake Up: Stories from the Front Lines of Suicide Prevention” here: https://www.projectwakeup.org/project