Came out A New Idea

God this is the first time I finished a book in a very short time and gave the book good understandings, hope from now on I can read like this - really efficient.

Notes of the book 'New Approaches to Preventing Suicide':





Mainly this book talks about a new approachment - high suicide risk factors assessment in A+E Departmant and primary cares. Several risk factors for suicide have been figured out by professionals, patients who have been noticed are belong to the risk group will be suggested to take assessment to categorize their risk (from low risk to very high risk), correspondingly, actions which focus on the specific categories of risk have been got ready to adopt to the suicidal people.

This is a very good and efficient pre-suicide preventing intervention. A&E department may be the first or only place that many people at risk of suicide can turn to in order to seek help. Although the interventions are not necessarily the sole preserve of mental health staff, the advent of mental health liaison teams has increased opportunities for A&E departments to more effectively recogise suicide risk and deliver appropriate interventions. However, many problems exist in this methods, the most significant one is the communication problem.

The only evaluating way for A&E staff is interview - asking people questions. However, suicide intent is the issue that professionals find difficult to ask about, because it is sensitive and offensive. Possible suicidal people may also find it hard to talk due to feeling ashamed or embarrassed. So people might be lie or avoid key points when they talk to professionals face to face. Consequently the result of the evaluation usually unacurate that cause professionals' wrong decision. Because problems in applying risk factors to identify suicide are formidable, and decision analysis involves assigning a probability to each potential clinical outcome. These probabilites represent the clinician's 'best guess' about how likely a particular outcome is, and are based on clinical features and data from relevant clinical studies. However, the use of decision analysis to evaluate risks in psychiatry has its problems - the evidence to guide us in certain situations simply does not exist.

According to the above analysis of the communication, I came out a new idea: to design a efficient communication system which help suicidal people to tell story without hesitant instead of face to face interview. But I'm not sure what will be the system like, so I need to talk about it with Mike tommorrow.

Websites I've Researched on

An Example of CVV (Suicide Prevention Centre)

Help Yourself (advertising campaign)

A Example of Suicide Prevention Project of 'Choose Life'

Issued: 10 September 2007
STRICT EMBARGO: 10.15hrs, Monday 10 September 2007
*NOT FOR ADVANCED PUBLICATION OR BROADCAST*

MORE THAN 700 REASONS TO SHATTER THE SILENCE AROUND SUICIDE

The Proclaimers Pledge to Support Suicide Prevention Week

Suicide claimed more than 700 lives in Scotland last year. Scotland’s silent killer still leaves a trail of devastation and often remains a hidden issue that people are scared to talk about. To mark Suicide Prevention Week (10-16th September 2007), Choose Life, Scotland’s national strategy to prevent suicide, is shattering the silence around suicide by unveiling a bold artwork that aims to bring suicide firmly into the open and highlight that “talking and listening can save lives”.

Featuring the faces of nearly 500 people from all over Scotland the large scale 20 x 10 feet collage spells out the word ‘SUICIDE’, which was unveiled to the public today by Charlie and Craig Reid of the Proclaimers and Shona Robison, Minister for Public Health.



The sea of faces includes people from all walks of life, as well as The Proclaimers, radio presenters, the First Minister, Deputy First Minister, Minister for Public Health and other politicians and personalities, who are all helping to lead the way in encouraging people to talk more openly about their feelings and make time to listen to others.

Lifting the lid on our emotions can help prevent everyday problems overwhelming us and help build our resilience for coping with difficult and challenging times and events in our lives. The image therefore sends out a clear message of hope, demonstrating that Scots are uniting in their support of suicide prevention.

Shona Robison, Scotland’s first Minister for Public Health said:

“Helping people break the silence to talk about suicide and its prevention is vital for Scotland’s overall health and wellbeing. Although the figures since 2000 suggest there may be a downward trend emerging, each and every suicide is a tragedy. We know that in many cases suicide can be prevented if people get the right help and support to see a way out of their situation. That is why it is so important to talk about our own feelings and the difficulties we face, and also to listen to others, not just this week during Suicide Prevention Week but at all times”.

Caroline Farquhar, Head of Implementation at Choose Life, added “There is a myth that talking about suicide and its prevention makes the problem worse, not better, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Being open and honest about our feelings, including those around suicide, and having people to listen without judging can actually save lives.

We see the collage as a work in progress; a kind of living artwork. Suicide prevention is everyone’s business and we want many more people in Scotland to submit their photographs and pledge their support. With every picture we receive, the collage will grow and suicide will become less of a taboo.”

Charlie and Craig Reid said:

“We are supporting Suicide Prevention Week 2007 because the work being done by Choose Life is of vital importance to individuals and families throughout the country. Talking about the subject of suicide is one of life’s great taboos. We believe the courageous work of Choose Life and its modern approach will save lives”.

People around Scotland will be able to see the artwork this week as the collage tours the country on a travelling billboard, driving home the message that talking and listening can save lives. The tour will visit East Renfrewshire, Greenock Midlothian, Wishaw, Kirkintilloch, Helensburgh, Paisley, Aberdeen, Angus, Dundee and Edinburgh. The collage will then return to Artworks, a community arts project based in Glasgow for people from homeless or disadvantaged backgrounds, where it was created and where additional photographs will be added as they arrive.

Further information on suicide prevention, including how to strike up difficult conversations, top tips for effective listening and details on how to sign up to the ‘Talk. Listen. Save Lives’ pledge can be found on the Choose Life website: www.chooselife.net/spw

Choose Life also offers training to anyone wanting to learn more about how to spot the risk of suicide and signpost people to the right help and support. For information about training opportunities or for further information and resources, visit http://www.chooselife.net/

If you need to talk about your feelings you can contact one of the following:
§ Samaritans : 08457 90 90 90; www.samaritans.org
§ Breathing Space on 0800 83 85 57 (6pm-2am); http://www.breathingspacescotland.co.uk/ .
§ Living Life to the Full: http://www.livinglifetothefull.com/ offers free online support and information about life skills which can help tackle life’s difficulties.

Development of My Initial Idea

I'm thinking to find a solution to encourage more suicidal people to ask for help from professional counselling organisations. I came out a question, as a counselling organisation, how to promote its service from passive to active, I mean how to find out will-be clients (suicidal people) actively instead of waiting someone who wants to gain helps come to ask passively.

There are two points can be developed, one is from the angel of suicidal people--- influential design which might be change suicidal people's mind and push them to ask professional helps instead of solving problems by themselves until they commit suicide.

The other point is the counselling itself. Design a method or a service which might help professional counselors to find out who is suicidal or who need help.

Integrate my initial idea (increase suicidal people's fear of death and get rid of any would-be suicide equipments) and these two new ideas together, I developed an idea which is to build up a systematic service system for counselling organisations.

Suicide people would like to choose a way which quick and less painful to kill themselves, and what they are afraid is failed suicide, because if they alive from a failed suicide, their living condition will be more miserable than before, for they suffered the pain and might be will suffer disable or other sequela in the rest of life. So if I design a information on/in most popular suicide tools and suicide places to tell suicidal people how terrible if they kill themselves by using such tools/methods and show the failed suicide figures/percentage which caused by using such equipment, and the results after a failed suicide, as well as illustrations/photos which show the scary picture after a suicide/failed suicide, then people might be hesitate to use the tool/methods which they think is perfect for suicide before, so they might be give up (such as the way of coal gas) or seek to other ways to commit suicide, but as same as the former one, such information is on other tools as well. So at this moment suicidal people might be hesitate to kill themselves because they don't want to suffer greater psychological and physical pains if they fail to die, even it just happened in a very few cases, but they don't want take the risk.

Meanwhile, the helping line number and website address is also on the equipments and the billboard, in order to give people chance to ask for help immediate when they hesitate, desperate and confused. If possible (I mean if this idea is accessible) the councelling organization will arrange a couple of well-trained professionals in the hotspots such as bridge, cliff, the top of architectures, shelves in shop/supermarket/pharmacy which selling would-be suicide tools/equipments to seek and observe who is suicidal and talk to them actively in order to persuade suicidal people to accept the professional guide and therapy.

Evidences of my idea (examples of failed suicide afterwards):

"Experts believe that for every suicide there may be up to 100 failed attempts. However, people who have survived a suicide attempt will not necessarily walk away unharmed. One of the biggest problems is with tylenol/paracetamol. More than 50 per cent of young women who attempt suicide do so by taking an overdose of these painkillers. They often do not know that the drug takes four hours to be absorbed by their body.

If they get to hospital quickly, doctors may make them eat a mix of gooey black charcoal to remove the poison. Unlike in the movies, stomach pumping, in which a hose is forced into the stomach and the contents sucked out, is rare. Not only painful, it can also cause death through stomach acid getting into the lungs.

If the overdose took place much more than four hours before, patients are hooked up to an intravenous drip for 32 hours, to help flush out the poison. They will later need specialist treatment. Tylenol/paracetamol is toxic to the liver so they may even need a liver transplant.

Without enough transplant organs to go around, a suicide attempter may be less likely to get one than a person with liver disease. This means a certain number of people will die within a month of taking the overdose.

Another less common problem is permanent paralysis - loss of the ability to move or feel. Thins can happen to people who have survived jumping from tall buildings or deliberately crashing cars. Some people have even survived after shooting themselves in the head. They usually have brain damage, or partial paralysis like someone who has suffered a stroke. Their faces are usually disfigured or destroyed."
(Claire Wallerstien, 2004, pp. 34-35)

Bibiolography

Claire Wallerstien, (2004) Need to Know Teenage Suicide. United Kingdom: Roger Coote Publish

Got an Idea on My Project

By thinking of pre-suicide factors and barriers, I got an idea which is to increase people's fear about death.

I am thinking if we can get rid of all the quick and 'comfortable' suicide ways/methods, and make suicide tools look more terrible and inefficient to kill people, then when suicidal people exploring which method of suicide can kill themselves fast and less painful, but the answer will be: none.

I mean just like the coal gas way, when people cannot find a proper way to commit suicide, they might be give up to do it. Besides, those tools/equipments not only cannot kill people successfully but also make suicidal people is afraid of using them, so from the psychological angel, people might believe if they commit suicide, they will be suffered huge pains and probably fail to kill themselves, that means, their life will be more miserable than before.

So my research question might be:
a. How can design create great barrier towards suicide?
b. How can design combines with psychological methods to increase suicidal people's fear of death?

Questions

A suicide prevention example that Mike told me on Thursday has confused me for several days. The case is decades ago in Scotland, the suicide rate reached at the highest peak in the UK, the reason is tons of people utilized coal gas to kill themselves, and this was the most efficient and less painful way to commit suicide --- people will definitely die two minutes after they switched the gas on and put their noses near the drain tap. After finding out this problem, the Scottish Government stopped to use coal gas and began to provide natural gas instead, then during the following years, the suicide rate in Scotland dramatically decreased.

I confused why people didn't choose other ways to end them up? Is it because other ways are more suffering and risky than the coal gas way, so after the most appropriate suicide way were not exist anymore, suicidal people would rather to live than utilizing other ways which may very painful to kill themselves.

Another suspicion is I found a practical guide to teach people how to suicide successfully online, I wonder the existing meaning of such websites. Everyone knows that suicide should be prevented not to be encouraged, but such suicide guide is pushing the suicidal people into a extremely dangerous situation.

It is very exhaustive and made me felt terrible and scary. I believe I am a healthy person without any wrongs in my mind, but if I got such uncomfortable feeling after reading the guide, how about the suicidal people? It is really a bad thing to exist.
http://www.satanservice.org/tokus/suicide/guide/
Be prepared when you decide to read it.

Got an Example on Pre-suicide

Suicide prevention package in the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, USA.

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10283

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bridge

'Suicide prevention groups in Australia are putting up foucus around bridges and other jump from. Similar projects have been completed at suicide 'hotspots' such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, USA. Researchers say these barriers create delays, which may make a suicidal person change their mind or give rescuers time to reach them.'

---Claire Wallerstein (2004) Need to Know Teenage Suicide, Oxford.

This case study reminded me to think about suicide barriers, but I have no idea so far. I brought a couple of books today, so read them first.