By the Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention
safeTALK is a program designed to help you help others in crisis. It provides the tools and training to help you identify someone in crisis, as well as key information on how to best address someone who is having suicidal thoughts.
Why should I attend a safeTALK training?
In only a few hours, you will learn how to provide practical help to someone with thoughts of suicide. You can expect to leave safeTALK more willing and able to perform an important helping role for someone with thoughts of suicide.
How does safeTALK help prevent suicide?
safeTALK prepares you to be a suicide alert helper. You are aware that opportunities to help a person with thoughts of suicide are sometimes missed, dismissed and avoided. You want persons with thoughts to invite your help. You know the TALK steps (Tell, Ask, Listen and KeepSafe) and can activate a suicide alert. As a part of the KeepSafe step, you connect persons with suicidal thoughts to persons trained in suicide intervention. Helpers trained in suicide intervention complete the helping process or connect the person with more specialized help.
Why use safeTALK to learn to become alert?
A carefully crafted set of helping steps and the use of creative educational processes make it possible for you and up to 30 others in your community to leave safeTALK willing and able to be suicide alert helpers. safeTALK is the result of some twenty years of work on learning how to develop useful suicide prevention abilities in a short program.
What happens at safeTALK training?
Expect to be challenged. Expect to have feelings. Expect to be hopeful. See powerful reminders of why it is important to be suicide alert. See how to activate an alert. Ask questions and enter discussions. Learn clear and practical information on what to do. Practice the TALK steps. Conclude with practice in activating a suicide alert.
Why is safeTALK for everyone?
Most people with thoughts of suicide go unrecognized even though most are directly or indirectly requesting help. Without safeTALK training, these invitations to help are too rarely accepted, or even noticed. With more suicide alert helpers, more people with thoughts of suicide will get connected to the intervention help they want. Suicide alert helpers are part of a suicide-safer community.
For Nevada Veterans Advocates
If you are a Nevada Veterans Advocate and you are interested in attending safeTALK training, let us know. Email
loftisj@veterans.nv.gov.
Contacts for the Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention:
Rick Egan
Janett Massolo
