The delivery and session content was excellent. Also much credit to you both for the natural manner in which you motivated and stimulated the attendees to provide their respective feedback, I would thoroughly recommend this course to all who are involved in suicide prevention and support. I believe support being the key word and so crucially important when families and friends find themselves tragically and traumatically bereaved when a loved one has taken their life. I had not fully realised how vital that first contact is when families are devastated by suicide, now I can adapt my role from counselling to one of support in such tragic situations. The counselling aspect can be offered further down the line should the bereaved need such, as Barry sublimely pointed out it’s not counselling these bereaved people are looking for, it’s someone to show them the way………. in other words ’a sat-nav’.
This marvellous training needs to be rolled out to support organisations like Cruse (National) who can then adapt their policies and procedures then filter this down to their respective regions accordingly. It’s a case of identifying the extent of support needs instead of focussing on counselling and trying to ‘fix’ traumatised individuals, Cruse has so many willing and experienced ‘foot soldiers’ to tackle suicide bereavement from a more practical perspective.