RU OK Day

This post talks about R U OK Day in particular, and suicide in general.

When the RUOk day rolls around, I inevitably see a stream of posts on my social media feed about how inadequate the day is. How meaningless it is to just ask someone if they’re okay and it makes people feel worse. How the problem is really more about a completely inadequate level of response to mental illness.

I have a lot of feelings about those posts. I recognise the real pain behind them, and I have nothing but sympathy and empathy. I’m listening. And when it comes to questions of mental health resourcing, I agree with you. But at the same time, I disagree with the thrust of these posts, profoundly and fundamentally. The thing is, RU OK Day is about preventing suicide. It’s not about fixing or managing mental illness long term. It’s about that moment when you can intervene, and draw someone away from a choice that there’s no coming back from.

I have trained in suicide intervention. Suicide intervention is like first aid. It’s CPR for suicide. Like CPR, the aim isn’t to fix things. It’s to keep someone alive long enough for help to arrive. And CPR saves lives. It really, really does.

Suicide is fundamentally an impulsive act. No matter how long someone has planned it, whether there’s a context of acute or chronic mental illness or not (and suicide can’t always be attributed to mental illness, but that’s another conversation) — ultimately there is a moment in which a person pushes through their instincts of self-preservation and acts. Suicide intervention is about interrupting that moment. About getting someone through that impulse, to give them a chance to do something different.

Some people you intervene with will die by suicide anyway. Some people, you can only really hold the water back for a little while before the dam breaks again. You can only lift them out of the water, you can’t prevent them jumping in again. But some people you save. And you save them by asking bold questions. Not even ‘are you okay?’ though that’s a good place to start. Questions like, “I have been listening to you talk, and I am wondering something — have you been thinking about suicide?”

That’s a hell of a question to ask, right? But it’s an important question, because sometimes people say ‘yes’. RU OK is about asking questions. About being willing to step forward and interrupt a moment, with care and concern.

Yes, I’d like to see more. I thoroughly recommend anyone who has the time, the money and the inclination to undertake ASIST training. It’s available in a few countries and it forms the basis of suicide intervention training for some phone counselling services (like Lifeline in Australia). If you can’t afford to do the course, your employer may sponsor it.

If you ask someone if they are okay, and they say no, and you don’t know what to do — that’s a pretty tricky situation to be in. But you know what? I’ve done first aid training lots of times, regular first aid training, and instructors have said over and over: doing something is almost always better than doing nothing, even if it’s not exactly right. I think that’s true of suicide intervention too. So doing something is better than doing nothing.And fundamentally, when it comes to helping prevent suicide — at a bare minimum, there’s nothing negative about someone giving enough of a shit to check in.

So this RU OK Day, I’d encourage you to sit with that thought for a while and see if it makes sense to you. And I’d really encourage you to check in with the people around you. Not just on RU OK Day, but every day, because RU OK Day is really an annual reminder to all of us to check in with each other regularly.