How to start a conversation about suicide Jeremy Forbes
In 2013,
I had a life-changing epiphany.
I was a painter and decorator
in Castlemaine, a small
country town in central Victoria.
I’d gone to see Pete, who was renowned
for his workmanship with steel.
I’d gone to his shed to get
some steel edging for the garden.
This day, with hindsight,
which is a wonderful gift,
Pete seemed happier than usual.
Two weeks later,
I was painting a house
down the end of Pete’s street
when I heard the tragic news.
Pete had suicided.
Pete, like myself,
was a tradie, or a tradesman.
We do like to shorten things
in the Australian vernacular.
A tradie.
There was an expectation as a tradie.
You’re expected to be stoic.
You’re expected to be strong,
robust, macho.
You’re expected to be tough physically
and silent in the face of adversity.
There is a pronounced ripple effect
when someone suicides in your community.
Pete’s funeral was in July. It was winter.
The mood was bleak and somber
in the packed community hall.
It was a grieving community
who had no answers
to Pete’s suicide,
no answers at all.
As I wandered around between the tradies
and the community members,
I started hearing some tones
of another underlying tragic level.
I heard people talking
in that community hall
about the struggles
other people were going through.
The essence of the conversations
was contained in two words
that I heard several times:
Who’s next?
Who’s next?
That was the epiphany.
That was the moment
where I was standing in a community hall
in a place where
this Castlemaine community
had given me such support for 20 years,
this community had backed my work,
I’d played footy there,
I’d done theater there,
I was so grateful
for what they’d given me.
But I was standing there in that space,
and I was looking around
that hall as well,
and I could tell people in that hall
who were struggling with alcohol,
drugs, finance, gambling,
domestic abuse, bullying and harassment.
Yet because of my tradie culture
and that ignorant attitude
that we have in the tradie community,
I didn’t feel confident at all.
I didn’t have the tools.
I lacked the experience.
I didn’t know what to do,
but I wanted to do something.
I left the wake.
I hugged a few tradie mates and said,
“Please come and see me if you need to.”
But I didn’t know what to say
to them or what to tell them.
I had no idea.
I got a phone call two weeks later
from Catherine Pilgrim, my cofounder,
wanting to do something for the family.
We talked for a while and I said,
let’s do something
for the tradie community.
We love our town, we’re grateful,
let’s do something
for the tradie community.
So we talked a bit more.
What could we do?
An awareness-raising event. Awesome.
We’re talking about tradies.
How do you get tradies somewhere?
Can you get them to a hospital? No.
To a community health center? No.
There’s an ingrained culture
of being a tradie.
I thought, where is the perfect place
we can get the tradies together
where they feel socially included
and they feel comfortable
and they can share, they can open up
and talk about mental health
in the building industry?
Where can we have an event?
A hardware store.
(Laughter)
Yeah, that’s what I thought too.
I thought it was very clever.
More precisely, the timber yard
of a hardware store.
So there we were. OK, we’ve got the venue.
What else do we need?
What else do tradies love?
Food.
I know, we all do, but tradies love food.
Tradies especially,
and I’m a tradie myself,
we love egg and bacon rolls.
So we thought we’d supply
the tradies with egg and bacon rolls,
and there was the slogan:
save your bacon.
It’s a bit corny, but it sort of works.
And we also came up with a logo.
“Hope Assistance Local Tradies.”
Keep in mind, “HALT,” our charity,
had no money to begin,
nothing, not a single cent.
We had conversations.
This is a community issue.
It starts in community.
So we went around to the butcher,
we went around to the baker,
there was no candlestick maker,
there was an egg place
and there was some chocolate,
there was coffee, there was fruit,
but we went around and said,
“Hey, we’re doing
this awareness-raising event.
Do you want to contribute?
Because we haven’t got any money.”
Of course, nearly every person
we initiated the conversation with
knew someone that had anxiety,
depression or thoughts of suicide
or had suicided.
There was that unity,
that whole of community approach.
So we thought, that’s great,
we’ve got some food.
What else do we need?
We need the support services there.
A lot of tradies,
and a lot of men in general,
don’t necessarily know
where to go and get help.
I myself was one of them,
and this is what I talk about
at the HALT events,
that four years ago when I founded HALT,
I didn’t know I could go to the doctor
about my mental health
and get a mental health plan.
I didn’t know about community health.
I certainly didn’t know about Lifeline,
and I’ve called Lifeline three times,
and they’ve certainly
potentially saved my life.
I had to learn all these things.
Tradies need to know them.
We provided bags,
bags of information,
and I had quite a few tradies
say to me in the first year,
“Aw, this is a load of you-know-what,”
but those tradies I know
still have those bags in their Ute
or in their shed.
On November 10, 2013,
we had our event,
and interestingly enough, when I talk
about a whole of community approach,
that was our first event
in Castlemaine at Tonks Brothers,
and there’s a whole of community there.
There’s counselors,
there’s people who have
gone through mental health.
That first event set the scene.
Since then, we’ve had more events.
Interestingly enough,
it’s not only tradies
that are affected by mental health
or anxiety or depression or suicide.
We started working with TAFEs.
We started working
in the farming industry,
at councils, at secondary colleges.
We did events for the partners of tradies,
because often the tradies
would not go home to their partners
and say, “Guess what,
we talked about mental health,
and we’re going to do
this, this and this now.”
So we’re doing events for the partners,
who themselves may need help.
TAFEs are very popular.
For me, it’s really crucial to get
to these young, vulnerable men and women.
We’ve done events for men’s sheds,
so the high rate of suicide
is really high for older men.
We’ve done events for council
depot workers and tradies.
Interestingly enough,
nearly every single event –
and we’ve actually done now,
with very little funding,
150 events over four states.
So – oh please, thank you.
(Applause)
And invariably at every single
HALT event at a hardware store,
I have one tradie come up to me,
at least one come up and tell me
about his suicide attempt.
They’re not suicidal there and then,
they’ve worked through it,
but these men have never felt
they could share their vulnerabilities.
They’ve never felt they can
talk about their suicide attempt,
but the HALT events,
where there’s no expectations
for them to talk,
makes them feel comfortable
to start talking.
And it’s not just they talk
to me and tell me their story,
they actually now say,
“We feel comfortable enough
to talk with other men.”
I’ve had men stand up and say,
“I’ve never mentioned before
that I’ve had depression, but I have,
and if anyone else here
wants to come and speak to me,
I’m here to talk to you.”
It’s very empowering
and cathartic to do that.
We need a whole-of-community approach.
We give the tradies bags of information
from local and national support services.
It’s one of thing to tell a tradie
or someone at one of these events,
“You should go here, here and here,”
but we need the whole of community
to wrap around the idea
of suicide prevention.
We need those services,
and suicide doesn’t discriminate at all.
It’s not a 9-to-5 thing.
We need to do events before 9am,
which most of our brekkies are,
and after 5 PM.
That’s what we need to do.
It’s a whole-of-community approach.
We need to get into businesses.
We need to get into
sporting clubs, community clubs.
We need to get in there and train people
to understand about mental health.
Here’s some sobering statistics
just to give you an idea.
In 2016,
in Australia, 2,866 suicides,
very close to twice the road toll.
Globally, 800,000 a year
suicides in the world,
one every 40 seconds.
We need a whole-of-community approach.
We need to feel comfortable
in opening up the conversations.
Men I know find it really difficult
to open up conversations.
They certainly do.
If you’re going to open up
conversations, I tell the guys,
you need to find a comfortable place
to open up and have a conversation,
whether it’s at the pub,
it’s going for a walk,
it’s after footy.
Find that really comfortable place
to have the conversation.
Part of the ability
to have that conversation
is to understand what to say.
We’ve all heard about, “Are you OK?”
And I’ve seen it. I’ve done this.
“Are you OK?” “Yes.” “Are you OK?” “Yes.”
“Are you OK?” “Yes.” “Are you OK?” “No.”
What do I say now?
What do I say?
We need to equip every single person
with the ability to come forth
and be able to have that conversation.
We need to be able to listen.
I don’t know who
out there is a good listener.
I’m working on my listening abilities,
but it’s an art form
to listen and not judge.
Don’t make fun. If someone’s coming
to talk to you about mental illness
and anxiety and depression
and thoughts of suicide,
we need to respect that.
They want to trust us
that we’re going to hold that in tight
and not tell everyone.
We need to do that.
So we need to have conversations.
We need to listen.
And we need to start reducing the stigma
associated with mental health.
Companies are now starting
to have mental health days.
What a great idea.
It’s not just physical sick days,
it’s mental health days.
Things are changing.
We can add to that change.
I’m a life preserver.
I think we can all be life preservers.
The pain of regret
is far greater than the pain of hard work.
Thank you.
(Applause)