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🎥 Video Description
⚠ Content Warning: This video contains discussion of suicide, suicidality, suicide attempts and bereavement by suicide. Please take care while watching and access support if needed.
Today, on his 45th birthday, Isaac Samuels launches Building the Space: Amplifying Racialised Voices in Suicide Prevention.
In this introductory film, Isaac shares why this campaign matters so deeply to him. As someone who has experienced suicidality, survived suicide attempts and lost people he cares about to suicide, Isaac reflects on the importance of ensuring that racialised voices are no longer absent from conversations about suicide prevention, mental health and bereavement.
Building the Space is a year-long campaign that seeks to amplify lived experience, gather community-led evidence and influence policy, research and practice. Through storytelling, dialogue and collective action, the campaign aims to ensure that the experiences of racialised communities help shape the solutions designed to support them.
At the heart of the campaign is a simple belief:
The people closest to the issues are often closest to the solutions.
How to Get Involved
There are many ways to support Building the Space:
• Share the campaign through your networks.
• Watch and share the videos.
• Follow the campaign journey throughout the year.
• Encourage others to engage with the stories and learning.
• Share your own lived experience where it feels safe to do so.
• Connect us with organisations, researchers, policymakers and community leaders.
• Become a campaign supporter, partner or collaborator.
• Host conversations and create spaces for learning and reflection.
• Help amplify racialised voices in suicide prevention.
Learn more about the campaign and how to get involved:
This is the first story in a year-long series.
More voices. More stories. More learning. More action.
Together, we can ensure that lived experience becomes evidence, evidence becomes action, and action becomes lasting change.
#BuildingTheSpace #AmplifyingRacialisedVoices #SuicidePrevention #LivedExperience #MentalHealth #AntiRacism #CommunityReporter #Bereavement #CoProduction
Transcript
The need for this campaign is so important. um as a racialized person um and as someone that has survived a suicide attempt or several suicide attempts, as someone that has been bereaved by suicide, um, it's really important that the racialized lived experiences really are centred in suicide prevention. This campaign is led by the heart. This is a really heavy subject, but there is joy, there's community, there is love and care that comes with all of this.
So the campaign is about everyday moments. of triumph, everyday moments of working and moving beyond really difficult things. So there will be a number of ways that I'll invite people to connect.
blogs, YouTube channels, stories, poems, and it's really using a diverse range of ways to communicate. I believe those closer to the problem are closer to the solution, so I have a 20 year history of trying to make a difference. And I've had some great people that have supported me, so I've got the co-production Collective that have really wanted to support me, the National Suicide Prevention Alliance, People's Voice Media who are really supporting the work that I'm doing because they believe in me.
They believe in wanting to create a world where racialized people, racialized communities, bereaved families don't have poor experiences because of their racial identity. I want this campaign to be one that means that when you are sitting there really struggling with your mental health and you feel like you might not want to be here, that you can see somebody like me or somebody that represents you and your experiences and it might help you move past those moments. I would want people that have been bereaved by suicide to understand that their voices matter too.
And there is hope, and the hope comes from connecting to people like us.
