Today (September 10) is World Suicide Prevention Day. 

The theme for the day is "Working together to prevent suicide" and that's exactly what Kim Titus, the Director of the Thumbs Up Foundation of Airdrie, a group advocating for positive change for mental health, believes needs to be done.

During AirdrieFEST on Saturday, the foundation was giving out candles at its booth.  The candles are to be lit tonight and placed in a window to show your support for suicide prevention.

Titus says, "I hope people will take a candle, any candle, whether they got it from our booth or just one that they have in their home, and put it in the window, and light it at 8:00 pm, just to show their support and their awareness for the need for suicide prevention and the discussion.  It's symbolic but if you're moved enough to do it, it also means there's enough awareness within to be motivated to take action."

Titus says that suicide devastates families.  She's learned that from personal experience.  Her 31-year-old son Braden took his life after going off of anti-depressant medication cold turkey.  Titus realizes that people often come to her or her husband because they feel a bond.

"They intrinsically know there's a need to bring this out to save more people.  They know you're safe because you're intimately aware and familiar with suicide and so they really want to connect because there's a brotherhood in it that we really don't want to be a part of, but we understand it and we want to be able to create that awareness and understanding on a broader, deeper scope."

Titus describes the effect of suicide on a family as crippling.  She explains, "We as a family are healing from Braden's suicide but we will limp the rest of our lives, both individually and collectively."

Suicide is the number one preventable death in the world and Titus says increased knowledge and understanding about suicide will make a difference in the number of suicide deaths.

"We don't use the words education and awareness anymore, we use knowledge and understanding which is at the heart level.  Once we start to increase that kind of level of collective understanding and sharing about the devastation and the preventability of suicide, that's when we can really get some momentum and some legs too, what we call, the resiliency revolution to make some much-needed changes into this ever-increasing number of suicides that are happening."

Titus says the people who contemplate suicide are "as individual as snowflakes, the same as the rest of us." The thoughts or the act is where the similarities lie. 

"There are many roads that lead to those kinds of thoughts, from feelings of isolation and aloneness, sometimes it's medication as in Braden's case it was adverse effects of medication.  I think we do a disservice when we try to put it in boxes and define it.  We need to let it unfold and let the stories and the people themselves feel safe enough to come out and talk about their darkness and their loneliness and their isolation and their need for help and their need to connect.  It lies within us to create that environment for the help to come through."

Titus believes we all need to get back to connecting on a heart level.  When that happens, she says, we'll see real change in suicide rates.

"That's what's going to change the world.  With increasing cyber-space and all of that, we're connected, but we're not connected.  That's at least, on some level, at least in my heart, a part of the contributing factors in increases in suicide and mental health overall.  Because of feelings of isolation and aloneness and all of that."

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