- Title
- The ripple effect, silence and powerlessness: hidden barriers to discussing suicide in Australian Aboriginal communities
- Creator
- Heard, Todd R.; McGill, Katherine; Skehan, Jaelea; Rose, Bronwyn
- Relation
- BMC Psychology Vol. 10, no. 23
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-022-00724-9
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Background: Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for Aboriginal Australians. There is an urgent need to actively engage with Aboriginal communities to better understand these issues and to develop solutions together to prevent deaths by suicide in Aboriginal communities. Methods: Utilising a qualitative, thematic, cross-sectional design, we conducted focus groups in three communities in the Hunter New England area in New South Wales (Australia) to explore the perceptions and views of Aboriginal participants in relation to discussing suicide. Results: The key themes found to influence discussions about suicide in Aboriginal communities included the sense that suicide is a whole of community issue, the ripple effect of suicide deaths, silence about suicide and the impact of this silence, and being powerless to act. Participants described a reluctance to have discussions about suicide; feeling they had limited skills and confidence to have these sorts of discussions; and multiple and interrelated barriers to discussing suicide, including shame, fear and negative experiences of mental health care. Participants also described how their experiences maintained these barriers and prevented Aboriginal Australians from seeking help in suicidal crises. Conclusion: Future initiatives should address the interrelated barriers by supporting Aboriginal people to build skills and confidence in discussing suicide and mental health and by improving access to, and the experience of, mental health care and psychosocial and community-based supports for Aboriginal Australians. We suggest trying to address any one of these factors in isolation may increase rather than decrease suicide risk in Aboriginal communities.
- Subject
- Aboriginal; suicide; attitudes; barriers to discussing suicide; qualitative; preventions; SDG 3; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1475886
- Identifier
- uon:49684
- Identifier
- ISSN:2050-7283
- Rights
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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