AP
by David Crary
13 Apr 13

They look intently at the camera, some impassively, some with smiles, all of them aware that they've just shared with an online audience a most personal story: Why they tried to kill themselves.

By the dozens, survivors of attempted suicide across the United States are volunteering to be part of a project by a Brooklyn-based photographer, Dese'Rae Stage, called "Live Through This" — a collection of photographic portraits and personal accounts.

It's one of several new initiatives transforming the nation's suicide-prevention community as more survivors find the courage to speak out and more experts make efforts to learn from them. There's a new survivors task force, an array of blogs, some riveting YouTube clips, all with the common goal of stripping away anonymity, stigma and shame.

"Everyone feels like they have to walk on egg shells," says Stage, who once tried to kill herself with self-inflicted cuts. "We're not that fragile. We have to figure out how to talk about it, rather than avoiding it."

Such conversations are proliferating.
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"Survivors have a unique perspective on what life's like down in the deep, dark hole," writes Sabrina Strong, executive director of Waking Up Alive in Albuquerque, N.M. "We found our way out... We're not afraid to crawl down in the dark hole with someone else."

Seeking to encourage those types of contributions, the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention — a federally funded public-private partnership — has formed a first-of-its-kind task force comprised of prevention experts and survivors.
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"Nobody can speak to the issues, the sort of agony, even the decision-making that goes on when you're actively suicidal so much as somebody who's been there, and can relate to all that's going on in a nonjudgmental way," Vega says in a recent video. "That's the sort of magic that will make a difference."
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What's new in the past couple of years is a broader phenomenon — a surge of collective projects by survivors, corresponding with a keener and more systematic interest by prevention experts in their potential contributions.
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Historically, prevention specialists made relatively little effort to seek input from people who tried to kill themselves. Experts say treatment often was — and in some cases still is — condescending, and at times harsh and punitive.

"The attitude was that if a person tried to kill themselves, they were irresponsible, they were not people we could trust, and we knew what's better for them," said John Draper. "There also was some concern that they might kill themselves if we engaged them."
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http://bigstory.ap.org/article/more-...mpts-speak-out