Touch is not on the menu at this time due to the directive to socially isolate. But touch can be felt in ways other than the physical. I watch the news each night and feel incredibly saddened to see the queues outside the Centrelink offices all over the country. To hear the fear and sometimes desperation in the voices of those interviewed. Many who have never been out of work are now faced with horrendous uncertainty as they line up with hope in their hearts.
I’ve listened to the stories of people who are directed to go on-line only to find it impossible, so then they feel forced to line up with so many others, flouting the required social distancing. We are facing increasingly desperate times, and many of us feel totally powerless to do anything to help.
Most of us have quite a list of people in our phone contacts — many we don’t really connect with on any regular basis — but at sometime they were important enough for us to put their name and number in our phone. It may be a person we connected with at a conference, a colleague from work or simply someone we had something in common with for a short space of time.
If each of us made one phone call to someone on that list we could potentially make a difference to them. Many people around us are struggling but manage to disguise it — we are a very clever race. Time and again I hear stories of how a happy, the life of the party or such a funny person who ‘suddenly’ ended their life.
In my book Coping With Suicide – Signs we Missed and Strategies to Use in the Aftermath, I talk about tipping points. A tipping point is something that may be considered as the last straw that may lead someone who has previously only been considering suicide, to take final action. Some events or circumstances that may act as tipping points are:
- Recent trauma or life crisis such as:
- loss of a job
- financial hardship or problems
- Unexpected changes in life circumstances.
These are just a few, but in the light of what is happening around us at present, could be momentous for some.
So if each of us make that one call, we could potentially make a difference to someone’s life. And as I said when I wrote my book — we may never know — but at least we showed we cared and that could be all that is needed. #copingsuicide #thoughtleader