Suicide prevention needs specific fund, advocate says

A local fundraising campaign in Thunder Bay, Ont., could do for suicide prevention, what a specified fund has done for cancer care, says Scott Chisholm.

Chisholm is the founder of the Collateral Damage project, which works to prevent suicide by eliminating the stigma surrounding it and creating opportunities to talk about it.

He wants to see a suicide fund created at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation, similar to their cancer and cardiac funds.

"Who would have imagined 30 years ago, putting the words breast or prostate on a billboard, nobody would have imagined that possible" Chisholm said of the awareness initiatives the cancer fund has paid for. "Putting those words on a billboard, breaking the stigma, of breast and prostate, allowed early detection."

'We need to do something about it'

Statistics from the northwestern Ontario local health integration network show the mortality rate for suicide and self-inflicted wounds in the region are about three times the provincial average. 

A suicide fund "would be a statement to say we have the some of the highest suicide rates in the world, and we need to do something about it," Chisholm said.

A spokesperson for the Health Sciences Foundation said its fundraising initiatives are done at the direction of the hospital. 

Suicides often 'isolated' from hospital

Hospital administrators don't talk about suicide prevention as much as they should, said the interim president of the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, Dr. William McCready.

"Most suicide really doesn't occur directly related to hospital admissions," said McCready. "Very often suicide is an event that occurs in isolation from the hospital itself." 

Thunder Bay regional is currently training its mental health workers in suicide prevention techniques and does have discharge planning for patients who are admitted after a suicide attempt, he said.

McCready said a dedicated suicide fund could be useful in furthering the dialogue among health care leaders and the services available.

"This is an area that the health care system doesn't address very well," he said. "So any kind of fund I think would be helpful."

It's important that the fund be specifically for suicide prevention and not a more generalized mental health campaign, Chisholm said.

Suicide vs mental health 

People don't view mental illness as a killer and might not be motivated to contribute in the same way as they do campaigns for deadly diseases like cancer or cardiac care, he said.

"When we look at creating change, the first step I want to take is stopping people from dying," he said. "When it comes to cardiac, the first thing we want to do is teach people CPR because we want to be able to save lives."

"Suicide kills people, so we need to do something about it," he added.

Chisholm said he doesn't have all the answers about how a suicide fund could prevent deaths, but he said neither did Terry Fox when he set out on his Marathon of Hope.

"Terry Fox got us talking about cancer in kindergarten. He created the Terry Fox Foundation. He wanted a dollar [from every Canadian]," Chisholm said. "So raising money is critically important to do things, but more importantly it got us talking about cancer, it got us saying, 'what are we going to do about it?'"

A dedicated fund could do the same thing for suicide, he said.