Despite increasing national conversations around suicide prevention, young people with lived and living experience remain significantly underrepresented in the design, delivery and leadership of community responses. Too often, youth are referenced as an at-risk cohort without being meaningfully present in the spaces where prevention strategies, services and policy are shaped. This presentation explores how youth voices, youth-led design and youth-informed approaches can shift suicide prevention from consultation to authentic community action, and what becomes possible when young people are trusted to help shape the responses intended for them.
Delivered by THEIRS (Talk, Hear and Help, Educate, Inform, Refer and Support), a youth-led suicide prevention organisation based in North-West Tasmania, this interactive presentation combines lived experience insight, audience reflection and youth-led practice to challenge how delegates understand trauma, invisible burden and support.
The presentation highlights how lived and living experience has informed THEIRS’ youth co-design model, with examples of youth-led initiatives that have strengthened safety, connection, community engagement and access to conversations about suicide prevention. It demonstrates that when young people are empowered to shape responses, prevention becomes more relevant, responsive and effective for those who are often least reached.
THEIRS uses the metaphor of backpacks to explore the unseen weight many people carry across their lives including trauma, silence, exclusion, unmet need and emotional exhaustion. These burdens are often invisible until they become overwhelming. Through this lens, delegates are invited to reflect on not only what people may be carrying, but on the responsibility to ask, listen and respond earlier.
This presentation offers a clear challenge to practitioners, policymakers, funders and community leaders. If we are serious about preventing suicide, we must move beyond speaking about young people as a priority group and instead resource, include and trust them as active contributors to the solutions.