Getting proactive to deal with suicide

Dan Macleod doesn’t know how many suicide investigations he’s led or been involved with over the years, but the police officer wants to help.
“I have worked in communities where the number of suicides were really high and I grew tired of having to respond to investigating them,” said the OPP Staff Sgt. who is seconded to Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service. “It got to the point where I wanted to do more… I didn’t want to be reactive anymore, I wanted to help bring knowledge and awareness about suicide so the numbers would go down.”
It was shortly after 1998 and he had been brought in to work with communities in the Northwest Patrol of the OPP.
Macleod found himself being called in to investigate suicide after suicide.
“There was a point where I was called to investigate one suicide per month in one of the First Nations (it wasn’t a very big community),” he said. “In every situation I was touched by the grief from the families who were affected and I felt sorry for them, but at the same time, you have a job to do, a role to fulfill as a police officer conducting an investigation.”
There was even an instance where Macleod was called into one community to investigate a suicide and then had to return the very next day to attend to yet another suicide investigation.
“It was after that point that I took all the cases we had investigated to find commonalities so I could understand why people were doing this because I wanted to help the people, to get to them before they reached that tipping point,” Macleod said.
Around that time, Nishnawbe Aski Nation put on a suicide prevention workshop.
“I volunteered to take it,” Macleod said, adding it was a journey of discovery and an eye-opening experience. “Suicide is not about wanting to die. It is about ending unbearable pain that people don’t know how to deal with.”
He also said it’s a misconception people who attempt suicide are mentally ill.
“The research shows the overwhelming majority of the cases involve everyday people who have experienced personal loss after personal loss and it’s gotten to the point where they feel hopeless and helpless,” he said. “An example of this would be a person whose health is suddenly not good, they’ve lost their job and their long-term relationship has broken down … all around the same time. Sometimes they might feel so overwhelmed that they feel they can no longer continue and they might turn to suicide as a way of ending this overwhelming pain they’re feeling. But the thing is, if you get help you can get beyond this.”
Macleod said he’s learned much about the factors that lead people to suicide as well as how to teach frontline workers how to recognize individuals who are suicidal and how to get them help.
“We offer a two-day workshop on suicide prevention to give our officers and new recruits an understanding of the signs and signals to look for,” he said. “I really think it’s important to keep this kind of training going on a routine basis because frontline workers change every few years. Because the frontline workers deal with community members on a daily basis, they will know the community members individually over time and will be able to recognize some of the signals if they should become distressed, need help and so they will be able to respond accordingly.”
If communities would like Macleod to offer NAPS’s suicide prevention workshop in their community, they can ask their chief or crisis team to forward a request to NAPS.