72 hrs is only the beginning.

4 Sept

Our novel approach to suicide prevention

There is no shortage of support available to people who are struggling. Many of the men who arrive at Save A Warrior UK have already been around the block. They have been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it. Not necessarily scars from battle, but from years spent trying to find an answer. Therapy, counselling, medication, courses, referrals, waiting lists, private appointments, starting again with somebody new and telling the story one more time. For some, those things have helped enormously. We are not here to diminish them, compete with them or replace them. But the men who arrive at Save A Warrior UK are still suffering, so we start somewhere different.

Coming home is not the same as leaving the service.

The uniformed services understand preparation, initiation, belonging and identity. What society is often less good at is homecoming. Leaving service does not necessarily mean a man has returned home internally. The uniform comes off, the job title changes, the structure disappears and the people around you move on, but the person underneath all of that comes with you.

This is also where our understanding of trauma goes further back than military service alone. SAWUK participants typically battle with hopelessness, a consequence of maladaptive survival traits formed due to childhood trauma. These traits, often exacerbated by a delay in the maturation of executive brain functions, can persist into adulthood. That sounds heavy, so here it is in plain English: things happen to us in life, and when difficult things happen, particularly when we are young, we find ways to survive them. We develop strategies that help us navigate our family, our environment and the world around us.

Those strategies can work. In fact, some of them work extremely well. But the strategy a child develops to survive childhood does not necessarily serve the man he becomes. We can become stuck in ways of thinking, behaving, relating and reacting that were built for a world that no longer exists. Then life happens on top of that: service, relationships, loss, responsibility, trauma, parenthood, grief, career, transition, addiction, failure and success. Eventually, the strategies that once protected us can become part of what keeps us suffering.

We provide the possibility of transformation.

Save A Warrior UK does not provide therapy. We are a peer-led, non-clinical suicide prevention programme for serving and veteran members of the Military and Emergency Services communities. We don't promise to fix anybody, we don't claim to cure anybody, and we don't do the work for the man in the seat. We provide the possibility of transformation.

The 72-hour residential cohort creates an interruption. It is an opportunity to stop, to look, to tell the truth and to begin examining the experiences, beliefs, behaviours and survival strategies that have shaped a life. Ultimately, the work begins to turn towards a much harder question: What am I going to take responsibility for now?

Our ultimate aim is to stop suicide and empower participants to take full responsibility for their lives. That does not mean taking responsibility for everything that happened to them. There is an important difference between responsibility and blame. We are talking about taking responsibility for what happens next, for the decisions we make, the relationships we build, the behaviours we continue, and the life we choose to create from here.

If you think you are fixed after 72 hrs, think again.

We have learned something fundamental about this work: you cannot spend 72 hours examining a lifetime and then simply send somebody home with a handshake and hope for the best. Life is still waiting for him. The relationships are still there, work is still there, the bills are still there, the triggers are still there, and the old strategies are still there too.

That is why the residential cohort is followed by a 500-day continuum of support and a suggested course of healing. The cohort creates the interruption, but the 500 days are about integration. Participants remain connected to a community of people who understand the work because they have done it themselves. There is structure, accountability, continued learning and the expectation that what was experienced during those 72 hours must eventually become something that can be understood, practised and lived in the real world.

The objective is not dependency on Save A Warrior UK. Quite the opposite. The direction of travel is towards personal responsibility, integration and, eventually, service to others. What happens during the cohort matters, but what a participant does with it when he goes home matters even more. The work has to leave the room with him.

There is no transaction between them and us.

There is another important distinction in the way we work: nobody pays to attend Save A Warrior UK. For some of the men who reach us, that matters more than people might realise. They may already have spent hundreds or thousands of pounds trying to get better through private counselling, therapy, courses, treatments and appointments. For some, the search for an answer has itself become exhausting.

At SAWUK, there is no financial transaction between the participant and us. We do not want his money. What we ask for instead is his honesty, openness and willingness, followed by a commitment to take responsibility for his own life. Our supporters, donors, fundraisers and corporate partners make that possible by funding the programme so that the man in the seat never has to. SAWUK remains free of charge to the participant because we do not believe someone's ability to pay should determine whether they can access the possibility we provide.

We come back for them.

There is an idea at the heart of Save A Warrior that has become more important as we have grown: We Come Back For Them. Those who have completed the work do not simply disappear. They remain part of a community. Some return to serve, some support the next man, some become Shepherds, ambassadors and advocates, while others quietly get on with rebuilding their relationships, their families, their careers and their lives. There is no requirement to become a poster boy for recovery. The work belongs to them.

But something powerful happens when someone who once needed a hand eventually becomes capable of extending one. That is how community becomes part of suicide prevention. The person who has walked the road understands something about the person standing at the beginning of it that cannot simply be taught from a textbook. It is why lived experience matters to us, why service matters to us, and why we believe 72 hours can only ever be the beginning.

Save A Warrior UK cannot promise transformation, and we would never pretend that we can. We can provide the possibility of transformation. We can create the conditions in which difficult and honest work can take place, hold the standard, and build a community around the man who is willing to do the work. Then, when someone else is still out there suffering, we can do what this organisation was created to do.

We Come Back For Them.