Public Meeting Notice  Widening the Lens 101: Setting the Stage for Social Justice and Racial Equity in Suicide Prevention - webinar

This event is closed. If you have any questions, please contact the event planner directly.

Workshop description

Historically, the field of suicide prevention has primarily attended to the needs and concerns of white people. Most of the mental health clinicians as well as their clients are white and the educational efforts toward suicide prevention have been developed from a Eurocentric perspective leaving out people of color, their lived experiences, and perspectives.
However, people of color still die by suicide and have specific cultural understandings of mental health, suicide, and help seeking. In order to begin to address the disparity in efforts around suicide prevention, we need to widen our lens to include a perspective of social justice and racial equity. However, the burden of the work of racial equity and social justice cannot be done by people color alone, rather, it needs to be done collaboratively with white people who have an understanding of racial inequities and their impact on the lives of people of color, specifically in this case, around suicide prevention.

In this webinar, we will examine the question why do racial equity and social justice work in the context of suicide prevention? What does this lens bring to the work and what new strategies and approaches to suicide prevention and mental health emerge? We will use specific examples from the work of the MCSP Alliance for Equity and how that work has impacted the overall work of the MCSP in order to elucidate these points. We will also be introducing the Widening the Lens toolkit for inclusion of racial equity and social justice in organizations and activities.

Presented by

Pata Suyemoto, PhD and Jennifer Kelliher, Managing Director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Suicide Prevention.

A zoom link will be sent a couple days prior to training date.