Mind’s Aftercare service is a peer and queer-led suicide support model which is grounded in community connection and solidarity. Suicide prevention efforts often miss opportunities for collective social action that create worlds worth living in for all (White, 2019). As an LGBTIQA+ specific service, ‘queering’ dominant discourses of suicide has involved stepping away from predictable registers of risk, individualised pathology and powerlessness (White, 2020). This shift requires service delivery models to rethink how to approach suicide in practice, including our concepts of relationality, consent, duty of care, governance, experiences of welcome, and what constitutes healing.
Mind’s Aftercare has developed significantly over the past 5 years from its inception and co-design as part of the National Suicide Prevention Trials to its current model, and has provided 1:1 care and group support with over 200 people living with thoughts of suicide. Aftercare’s learnings can serve as an exemplar for other services looking to courageously move away from pre-existing paradigms and implement peer and lived experience led programs in their own organisation or community. If we want to have revolution, we need to craft revolutionary relationships (Cade Bamabara, 1969). Peer and lived experience led approaches offer this genuine alternative.
This session will explore and share key insights we have discovered while attempting to hold fidelity to lived experience principles of mutuality, authenticity, integrity, intersectionality, staying within the boundaries of peer practice, and sharing power (LELAN, 2020). We will also include an update on our quantitative and qualitative evidence base for Aftercare, and reflections on the role of data requirements, epistemic justice, and accountability to community when measuring the impact of suicide prevention initiatives.
Cade Bambara, T. (1969). On the issue of roles. The Scattered Sopranoes,
delivered as a lecture to the Livingston College Black Woman's Seminar.
Loughhead, M, McIntyre, H, Hodges, E & Procter N. G. (2020). Lived experience leadership for organisational and systems change: a scoping review of concepts and evidence, University of South Australia and Lived Experience Leadership and Advocacy Network SA, Adelaide
White, J. (2019). Hello Cruel World: Embracing a Collective Ethics for Suicide Prevention. In Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention edited by Mark Button and Ian Marsh, 197-210. Routledge Press.