On Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and what forty years of working with human beings has taught me about the power of being genuinely present for one another.

Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is in crisis, please contact the Canada Suicide Prevention Service at 1-833-456-4566 (available 24/7), or text 45645 between 4pm and midnight ET. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In an emergency, please call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room.

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September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

I have been writing and speaking about leadership, human development, and the full spectrum of what it means to be genuinely present for one another for over four decades. In all of that time, no subject has required more care, more honesty, or more of my genuine heart than this one.

I want to offer this piece in that spirit, with care, with honesty, and with the genuine belief that the right conversation, at the right moment, with the right quality of presence, can change a life. I have seen it happen. More than once. In more settings than I am at liberty to name.

That belief is why I am writing this today.

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The Reality — Named Honestly

Suicide is not a rare or distant phenomenon. It touches every community, every industry, every family demographic, and every corner of the human experience.

In Canada, approximately 4,500 people die by suicide every year, roughly twelve every day. For every death by suicide, research suggests there are approximately twenty attempts. Behind every attempt, there are family members, colleagues, friends, and communities whose lives are permanently altered by what they have witnessed, what they have lost, or what they feared they were about to lose.

In the workplace, the numbers are equally significant. Mental health conditions, including those associated with elevated suicide risk, are now the leading cause of disability claims in Canada. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy over one trillion dollars annually in lost productivity.

But these are not primarily economic facts. They are human facts. They are facts about real people, in our families, in our organizations, in our communities, who are carrying more than they can carry alone, in silence, in the hope that no one will notice or that it will somehow resolve itself.

It does not always resolve itself.

And it does not have to be that way.

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The Silence Problem — The Most Dangerous Factor

In the years I spent working professionally in environments where human risk and human resilience intersect, one thing became clearer to me than almost anything else:

The silence around mental health struggle, and specifically around suicidal thinking, is often more dangerous than the struggle itself.

Stigma teaches people that their pain is a weakness. That admitting to struggle is a liability. That asking for help is an imposition. That the thoughts they are having are shameful rather than symptomatic, indicators not of a broken character but of a human being under a load they were not designed to carry alone.

And so people go quiet. They perform wellness. They show up and function, sometimes remarkably well, while carrying something beneath the surface that is slowly and silently becoming unbearable.

What breaks that silence is not a program. It is not a policy. It is not a poster on a wall or a mandatory training session, though these things have their place.

What breaks that silence is another human being asking a genuine question and staying present for the honest answer.

It is, in the end, always a conversation.

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What The Research — and Experience — Shows Actually Helps

Over decades of working with individuals, teams, organisations, and communities on questions of human wellbeing and leadership, and drawing on the best available research in this field, several things consistently make a meaningful difference.

One: Ask the question directly.

One of the most persistent myths about suicide prevention is that asking someone directly whether they are thinking about suicide will plant the idea or make things worse. The research does not support this. In fact, the opposite is consistently true, asking the question directly and without judgment relieves isolation, reduces shame, and opens the door to help.

If you are concerned about someone, you are allowed to say: “I’ve noticed you seem to be carrying something heavy lately. Are you okay, really? Are you having any thoughts of hurting yourself?”

You do not need clinical training to ask that question. You need genuine care and the courage to stay present for whatever the answer is.

Two: Listen to understand, not to fix.

The impulse when someone shares something painful is to reach immediately for a solution. To offer reassurance. To minimize. To redirect toward the positive. These impulses, however well-intentioned, often communicate the opposite of what they intend, that the person’s experience is too much, that it needs to be managed rather than heard.

What most people who are struggling most deeply need first is not a solution. It is the experience of being genuinely heard by another human being who does not flinch, does not deflect, and does not rush to make the discomfort go away.

Stay in the conversation. Ask more than you tell. Let the silence between sentences breathe. The presence you offer in that moment is itself an intervention.

Three: Create cultures where it is safe to struggle.

In the professional settings where I have seen the most meaningful reductions in self-harm and crisis, and I have been privileged to witness this in sustained and measurable ways across a significant period of time, the common factor was never a single program or a single conversation. It was the deliberate, sustained cultivation of a culture in which human vulnerability was not treated as weakness.

Where leaders modelled the willingness to acknowledge difficulty. Where checking in on colleagues was a normal and expected part of professional life rather than an intrusion. Where asking for help was understood as a sign of self-awareness rather than inadequacy.

Culture is not built through policy. It is built through the accumulated experience of thousands of small moments, the check-in that was genuine rather than procedural, the leader who admitted they were struggling, the colleague who noticed and said something.

Four: Know the resources and share them without hesitation.

The most effective prevention happens before crisis. But crisis happens, and when it does, having immediate access to the right resources is critical.

Know the numbers. Share them freely. Put them in your email signature this month. Post them in your workplace. Mention them in your community meetings.

In Canada: 1-833-456-4566, Canada Suicide Prevention Service, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

By text in Canada: 45645, available 4pm to midnight ET.

In the United States: Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.

The act of sharing these numbers is itself a communication, it says: this is a place where we talk about hard things, and where we look out for one another.

Five: Follow up.

One conversation is rarely enough. The person who shared something difficult last week is still carrying it this week. The colleague who seemed to be struggling last month did not stop struggling because the conversation ended.

Following up, simply checking in, without pressure, without agenda, communicates something essential: I have not forgotten. You still matter to me. The conversation is still open.

This is perhaps the most underestimated act in prevention. And it costs nothing except the willingness to remember and to reach out.

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The Leadership Dimension — Why This Is Every Leader’s Responsibility

Leadership, in the Full Spectrum Leadership understanding, is not a role confined to the boardroom or the executive suite. It is a quality of presence brought to every human encounter, in organizations, in communities, in families.

And in no context is that quality of presence more consequential than in the conversations that surround mental health and human struggle.

Leaders set the cultural tone. When a leader checks in genuinely, models vulnerability with appropriate courage, and treats human wellbeing as a genuine organizational priority rather than a compliance requirement, the people around them receive a powerful permission: it is safe to be human here.

When leaders look away, stay silent, or treat wellness as someone else’s department, the people around them receive a different message: keep it together and keep it to yourself.

The culture of an organisation is, in no small part, the accumulated consequence of which of those two messages gets repeated most often, by the people at the front of the room.

Full Spectrum Leaders understand that their own wellbeing, their inner landscape, their emotional regulation, their willingness to be genuinely present, is not a personal matter. It is a leadership matter. And the wellbeing of the people they lead is not a human resources matter. It is their matter.

This month, I invite every leader reading this to make one specific commitment:

Check in with one person in your life, in your team, in your community, in your family, about whom you have had a quiet concern. Not a procedural check-in. A genuine one. Ask the real question. Stay for the real answer.

That conversation might be the most important leadership act you take this year.

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A Closing Word

I have been involved with this subject in professional settings for many years. I have seen what happens when organizations choose to build cultures of genuine care and open communication around mental health. I have seen the numbers change. I have seen people survive crises they might not have survived in a different environment.

And I have come to believe something deeply:

Suicide prevention is not primarily a clinical matter. It is a human matter. It is a relational matter. It is a leadership matter.

It is about whether the person sitting next to you, in the office, in the community hall, at the family dinner table, feels genuinely seen and genuinely held by the people around them.

You do not need a credential to offer that. You need presence. You need courage. And you need the willingness to ask the question and stay for the answer.

That willingness, multiplied across every relationship, every team, every community, is how we change the numbers.

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

Let it begin with one conversation.

— Peter Comrie Full Spectrum Leadership Inc. Okanagan Valley, British Columbia

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Crisis Resources, Please Share Freely

Canada: Canada Suicide Prevention Service: 1-833-456-4566 (24/7) Text: 45645 (4pm–midnight ET)

United States: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (24/7)

International: International Association for Suicide Prevention: https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/

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If this piece speaks to you or to someone in your life, please share it freely. The conversation it might start is worth more than any metric.

Let’s Keep Talking!

Peter Comrie
Co-Founder and Human Capital Specialist at Full Spectrum Leadership Inc.
Reach out to me at peter@fullspectrumleadership.com

Or connect with me here to book a call!

Reach me on Linkedin; https://www.linkedin.com/in/petercomrie/

TAGS: Suicide Prevention, Mental Health, Leadership, September, National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, Community, Wellbeing, Full Spectrum Leadership