In honour of suicide awareness day on September 10th, POW spoke to the founder of The Jade Project to find out what more can be done to support those who are suicidal in order to prevent any other family from suffering the loss of a loved one.
Suicide is often made difficult by the stigma attached, and people find it difficult to speak freely about it; we hope that publishing this article opens up the conversation about suicide in order to support those who need it most. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among people in Merseyside, with two people dying by suicide each day. Every life lost to suicide is a tragedy.
Suicide does not discriminate, meaning suicide can affect us all. As many as one in five people will have thoughts of suicide in their lives – it is a serious public health problem.
Hello, my name is Tracey Roberts, and I’m the founder of The Jade Roberts Project. The project is in honour of my beautiful daughter Jade who sadly took her own life at the age of 26. Jade had anxiety and depression for many years and was sadly never referred to a mental health service that could help her.
Jade was beautiful inside and out. She was caring, considerate, had the most beautiful smile, an infectious laugh and was the life and soul of the party. However, she constantly worried about other people and their problems. I believe that this was Jade’s way of hiding her true feelings.
When I lost Jade to suicide, I had two choices. One of them was to totally give up, as the pain was too much for me. My other option was to raise awareness of suicide prevention so that no other parent had to go through what I was going through. I didn’t want another family going through the pain that my family has experienced, and I thought if I could raise awareness and prevent this from happening to anyone else, then it was worth fighting for. It was a tough decision, I was heartbroken, but I went with the latter, thinking that Jade would want me to help others, and so I decided to set up The Jade Roberts Project.
Our mission is to support people who are in suicidal crisis, and our ultimate purpose is to prevent suicide.
After losing Jade, I spent a lot of my time in the library researching suicide. I came across the ASIST training (applied suicide intervention skills training), the world’s leading suicide intervention training programme, and attended the 2-day training. LivingWorks ASIST has been empowering people to provide skilled, life-saving interventions for over 35 years.
Since then, we opened our doors to the community on November 21st 2022. We are a non-clinical support project based in Tuebrook, Liverpool. We have created a safe and welcoming environment to help you stay safe and offer support to women and men experiencing suicidal crises. We work on a voluntary basis, including myself, supporting those who need support by connecting them with our counsellors and offering them holistic therapy. At present, we have thirteen counsellors on board with virtually no waiting times, so our service users can gain access to support right away. At present, we are open four days a week.
We believe death by suicide is preventable, and at The Jade Roberts Project, we want to make sure that support is available for everybody and support them to find hope for the future.
Since we opened, we have supported over sixty women and have completed thirty suicide interventions, keeping these women safe. At the project, we offer intervention, prevention and postvention. Our aim is to improve woman’s mental health and wellbeing.
In addition, our counselling and holistic therapies are also available to anyone who has been bereaved by suicide. We recognise that it isn’t just immediate family that can be affected by suicide – Up to 135 people can affected by just one suicide loss. Our holistic therapies help to reduce symptoms of depression, stress and anxiety in both the person suffering from the suicidal thoughts and the people around them.
We are a new project relying on fundraising and donations to keep our doors open and provide training for the team. Our website has a Go Fund Me page where you can donate to our project.
We have also done fundraising within the community and had great support from the local supermarkets, who allowed us to come into the store to raise funds and promote the project. We aim to break the stigma around mental health and suicide.
In the future, we hope to offer ASIST training at The Jade L Roberts Project, but we will not stop there; we also aim to travel to other organisations to teach the ASIST and make lasting changes across the UK.
Contact Us:
109 Rocky Lane L6 4BB
0151 245 5671
info@thejaderobertsproject.co.uk
www.thejaderobertsproject.co.uk