SUICIDES are a tragically common call out for Wodonga’s ambulance officers but their team leader says it could take just one simple question to stop someone killing themselves.
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“Are you feeling like committing suicide?”
Mike Fuery and his staff attend more than 50 incidents of self-harm each year and about half- a-dozen suicides.
While he believed there would always be people who choose to take their own lives, others could be saved.
He said it was a matter of being able to connect “the gap” between people who believed they were alone and the services which make them realise they’re not.
And, he said, it’s up to you and me to ask the question: “Are you feeling like committing suicide?”.
“Once they’ve answered, then they’ve responded, they’ve made that connection,” Mr Fuery said.
“The agencies that are out there are doing a fabulous job, like Lifeline and beyondblue ... the difficulty is just bridging that gap.”
Mr Fuery said a headspace centre in Albury-Wodonga would be a great way to make this connection for young people, even if it’s a matter of them just knowing there’s someone there to help if they ever needed it.
For ambulance officers, it’s hard to put suicide any higher on the scale of horrific things they have to deal with — including the sudden deaths of young people on sporting fields and the aftermath of brutal assaults and nightmarish car crashes.
But Mr Fuery acknowledged there was a sense of futility in these suicide cases — cases he said transcended generations and socioeconomic groups.
“There are some cases that you go to, particularly if they involve young people, and depending on the methods used, you can’t help but be affected by the plight of this person,” Mr Fuery said.
“You just think if only you had been able to speak to someone the outcome would have been vastly different.”
