Horizon School Division (HSD) never ceases to amaze me.
Last week I had the pleasure of once again attending the Celebration Day at the Humboldt Curling Club, and while I wrote about the benefits of hosting such an event last year, it was something that happened during the day that caught my attention.
HSD was awarded with the LivingWorks Award for their work surrounding suicide.
Suicide is a major issue plaguing our society today, with a couple of high profile occurrences happening in the news over the past few months as Soundgarden signer and guitarist Chris Cornell took his own life in May and Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington took his own life in July, on what would have been Cornell’s 53rd birthday.
Suicide among Canadian youth is also a major problem, and one we need to be doing more to try and correct.
According to Statistics Canada in 2013 nearly 1 in every 10,000 children between the ages of 10 and 19 took their own lives.
That doesn’t sound like very many children but that is approximately 400 suicides a year, just in children aged 10-19.
That to me is far too many.
We are living in a society where mental health is finally starting to get the attention it should have always had, and part of the mental health discussion needs to be surrounding suicides.
This is where HSD comes in.
When presenting HSD with the award Danny Hiscock asked those in attendance to stand up if they had the LivingWorks training and approximately half of the staff stood up.
This is great to see because it shows that Horizon is taking suicide very seriously.
According to their website LivingWorks Education “is a suicide intervention training company that trains community helpers of all kinds to work in this intervention context.”
Being trained to have suicide intervention is extremely important as a lot of times you hear of people who said they should have seen the signs, or they should have asked when they noticed something was off.
Well now they have the means to actually follow through.
The youth are supposed to be our future. How can our future be our future if our present is not doing the necessary things to make sure they become our future?
We need to make sure that we take as many steps as possible to assist children who are having struggles in their day-to-day lives.
One way we can do that is through suicide intervention training.
HSD is on the right track, and it is nice to see.
