I enjoyed the speaker on Thursday. I thought the powerpoint made it a little more boring than expected but that is only because I had a very similar suicide awareness program presented to my organization the week prior. As a matter of fact, Katie Baird was supposed to help facilitate this program, seeing as she is certified in this area and our organization wanted someone from Varner House present. However, Katie was out of town and we found a man named Patrick from the LGBT & Ally Education program who just so happened to be certified in suicide prevention as well.
I think the way Patrick presented was more effective than the way Katie presented, and for this reason, Katie didn't impress me much. Patrick started out with a view videos from the "It Gets Better" campaign and then had the group (which was larger than 40 people) pair up and discuss our reference points with one another. It became deep and slightly emotional and I'm not advocating that for a classroom in which people don't know each other well but I will say the next activity Patrick did was very productive. Patrick, then, did role playing with the president of our organization and I think that put everything in perspective for me. We all were supposed to pay close attention to the questions Patrick was acting and what he said in reaction to our president. I think this was the most helpful part of the presentation. Then, lastly, Patrick had us discuss our forms of resiliency and how these can be effective when one is contemplating/thinking about suicide and I also found this helpful.
I wish Katie had discussed resiliency and made this subject seem more applicable to each of our individual lives. It's one thing to read statistics and hear that this topic is more prominent in our lives than we once thought but it is another thing when one can envision their friends coming to them with thoughts of suicide. Katie made it seem more like she was talking at us, rather than trying to help us if we are ever in the same situation. I did think it was helpful and important to talk about and I'm glad you brought her to class.
If you're interested, here's a video from the It Gets Better Project. It's Kermit the Frog!
Personally, I thought that Katie did a pretty good job with her presentation about suicide. However, I feel that the methods that Patrick used with your organization would have probably made the issue of suicide seem much more "real" to the audience. I also thought that it would have probably been more beneficial if Katie had shown the videos during the presentation rather than at the end when we were trying to fill out evaluations. I don't know about everyone else, but I know I couldn't multitask so I never got the full message of her videos. Either way, the presentation was informative and reminded me about how problematic the issue of suicide is throughout society especially among the 18-24 year olds.
ReplyDeleteWow, Patrick sounds awesome!
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