 Our next briefer is an associate professor of leadership at the Air University Leadership Institute. She has a Ph.D. in counselor education from Auburn University and a master of arts degree in counseling from the University of Maryland College Park. Her principal areas of research are suicide and resilience, and she is an international speaker and published author in those areas. With 24 years of teaching and clinical experience, she was invited to leverage her knowledge and social sciences across all levels of Air Force professional military education. She is a subject matter expert on her topics and works closely with headquarters, consulting, collaborating, and discussing curriculum content. She has contributed to developing policy, strategy, and standard operating procedures and routinely lectures across all organizational levels of both the air and space forces. Prior to her current position, she served for 10 years as a mental health consultant and trainer for leadership across the Department of Defense and proudly served as a military spouse for 20 years. Since joining Air University in 2015, she has held various academic positions and hails originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Chiefs, please rise and give a warm welcome to Dr. Mary Bartlett. Hello, hello. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. What a pleasure to be here with you this morning. When I was growing up, my parents taught me always to respect people, clergy, teachers, and law enforcement. And when I married into the Air Force, I was taught to always, of course, respect leaders, but in particular chiefs. Make sure you respect your chiefs. So it is a real pleasure to be here with you. I recognize the important role that you have that you're going into if you haven't yet started your role. And I have the honor of spending the next hour with you trying to convey some important information. Really, it's less than an hour because I want to make sure and try to leave some time for Q&A, but I want to let you know that at the end, if we do run out, I'm not rushing out. I will be available up front to respond to some questions. But in the next 45 minutes or so, I'm going to talk about obviously a very sobering topic, a topic that you will be heavily involved in. As you know, there's probably no one in this room who hasn't yet dealt with suicide, either an airman attempting suicide or the loss of an airman to suicide. It's a very sobering, provocative topic. And my goal today is not to give you charts and graphs and data and stats. My goal today is transcend the training that you've already had and hopefully to teach you something new. If you've heard me before, then I hope that you learn one new nugget. If you haven't, I hope that you will take away and grow from this and think about this information and as you need to reach out and hopefully get the support that you need from me or someone else. So what I want to cover is I want to first define the challenge. What is the challenge that U.S. chiefs are going to have in working through and continuing the discussion about this topic? I want you, I do not think that we can do good prevention, intervention or postvention unless a person understands the suicidal mind. You've got to understand what brings a person to that point that they would make this truly the most important decision in life, whether or not to live or die. I want to also spend a little time talking about postvention. All the things that leaders will do after an airman attempts suicide and or dies by suicide. So there's a gap area. I'm getting a lot of questions recently in the last couple of months. More focus on after I have an airman who attempts suicide, how do I reintegrate them back into the unit? And so hopefully we'll have enough time to answer some questions on that. But also I'm going to, I hope, give you a glimpse into the experience of what it's like to be a survivor of suicide. I think it's so crucial for chiefs to understand what is the person the survivor actually going through so that you can lead well your senior NCOs and your first sergeants and the frontline supervisors that you will be supervising who are going to be eyeball to eyeball with the person who's lost a 13 year old child to suicide. Again, I realize that there's no one in here that hasn't been touched by suicide in some way. And so if anything is, you know, this triggers anything for you, please come see me. Let's talk about it after. I myself have been touched by suicide as you can imagine. I've worked with many, many airmen and I've lost airmen to suicide. And then as a clinician in the civilian world, I've lost many clients to suicide. So I truly speak for my heart. All right. Now what the first challenge we have is helping people understand that there are three prongs to prevention. We've got the prevention, all the stuff that we hope comes from the left of the boom, right? Teaching our airmen grit, hardiness, fortitude, resilience, emotional intelligence and all that really good stuff. That's where we want to spend the majority of time. That's why I want you to spend the majority of your time. That's the prevention stuff. And of course, educating people annually about what changes in research how that's changed things and what we know about how to help people and prevent suicide, because we can prevent it. There's a lot of opportunity to prevent. And we do good intervention. What do we do with a person who's in that kind of psychological pain, but postvention? That's the third prong to this process. And we are now beginning to make the shift to understand postvention better and educate our leaders on postvention. Postvention becomes good prevention. If you don't do good postvention, there's the chance that you might not message things correctly after a suicide or after attempt. And it may lead to others who are vulnerable making a decision to die by suicide as well. So we also know that after you've lost a loved one to suicide, it's another risk factor added to the plate that might put you at a higher risk to think about or die by suicide. So I'm very pleased that in the last four years, the Air Force has made great progress on this issue of postvention. We have a long way to go. And again, just happy to present some of the information to you. I'm curious, I am curious, who here has not heard the word postvention? Okay, just a couple. Let me just assure you, I mentioned I was looking back last night at slidesets for this presentation I did back in 2017, 18, 19, 20. And it was interesting because when I'd asked that question, most of the whole room would actually raise their hand. So we are indeed making progress. All right. Part of the other challenge that you have, kind of twofold, not just doing your own self-assessment, but asking those you're leading to make sure that they're assessing themselves. This is the part of kind of teasing out for yourself and thinking about these are not questions we ask people normally to think about. What kind of a person do I think dies or kills him or herself? You have to know that this self-assessment is really crucial. Because if you don't reflect on and process through some of these questions, your biases will come out. Whether or not you ask a person about their suicidal thinking will be impacted, how you ask the questions and what you do with the information will be impacted. So if you have certain beliefs about suicide or a person who dies by suicide that can severely impact what you're going to do in the new role that you have as chiefs and how you lead people because people will be following your example. And these are questions that, of course, I want you in the new positions that you're going into to make sure your airmen are considering. Because we must debunk the myths. It is amazing to me that I've been working in the field of suicide for more than 20 years and we still have leaders who buy into myths about suicide that have been debunked 15 years ago. And it's those myths and these biases in the absence of assessing yourself and what your beliefs truly are about it, it is the absence of that that can make a difference in how we prevent suicide and certainly how we work with someone who's in that kind of pain. Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking just for 30 minutes in the leader development course and afterward gave some time, you know, a couple of students stayed on. It was a virtual thing. And this officer said, hey, listen, I want you to know I consider myself a fairly empathetic person. I do empathy well on all sorts of other crises or issues. He said, but have to tell you. And he was very transparent and I appreciated that. I don't do empathy well when it comes to suicide. I don't feel very empathetic to the person who attempts suicide or to the person who dies by suicide. And he said, and now as I'm getting prepared to go into squadron leadership as a squadron commander, can you help me with that? And I was so grateful that he asked the question because he was spot on. It's about understanding the suicidal mind to develop that kind of empathy. And so we talked about it, but those are some of the challenges. Here's another challenge. In 2017, a study was done across the Department of Defense to sort of check out why are service members not asking for the help that they need? So the results are posted here. I hope you can see them well. This was an interesting study. As you see, they identified six kind of core areas that are preventing service members from reaching out and getting the help they need when it's left of the boom before it becomes I want to die. Okay, so six different areas. Now, what's interesting is they replicated this study in 2019. Well, I guess I lied. I forgot to have these in here. So a little bit of data. In 2019, they replicated the study, and what they found is they only had five that they teased out instead of six. But look at the numbers. I wish I could show you them side by side. I can't, but the percentages went up. So it shows that except for one, the barriers that are airmen across the Department of Defense that our service members are saying exist and prevent them from reaching out for the help, we're not getting better. We're actually getting worse. And so we need to really work on that. And I believe some of the efforts at the Department of the Department of the Air Force are getting after that. Okay, so I think that that sort of helps you just put some context into what are some of the barriers. You're going to continue having this conversation, aren't you? You've probably in your entire career always had this conversation. Suicide is, you know, a discussion or a topic that permeates our culture. And so, again, a little context for what's the challenge that you're going to have in continuing these discussions and helping our airmen to understand that it's something that we need to discuss and it's something that they need more training on because we continue to make strides and get good research, find better research and complete better research every year. So, now, let me help you understand suicide. For those of you who still believe in the myths, for those of you who have lost someone to suicide, for those of you who have biases and beliefs, spiritual or familial, any kind of belief and misunderstanding, I want to give you a glimpse into what it's like to be suicidal. And probably the majority of you have already experienced this yourself. So, Ed Schneidman is the founder of the American Association of Suicidology and he had this, I love his quote, this is what suicide says. I can carry this far, I cannot carry it any further. I cannot go on any further. That's what suicide is saying. This is about a person who's 35, 45, going through a terrible divorce, loses his children in a custody battle. This was his or her foundation and they truly believe that they are better off dead than alive. They wake up, this is a person who wakes up in the morning and thinks it is easier for me to die than it is for me to get through the pain of the day of carrying this. Okay, so a little bit wordy here, but essentially what this slide is giving you is the information that you need to understand. It's a glimpse into that mind, the information you need. There are lots of different theories that explain suicide. The one that the Air Force and many of the other branches use is that by Thomas Joyner. And Dr. Joyner says there are three things that lead a person to suicide. Three components. The person feels a sense of burdensomeness. Now, these don't come in any particular order. They're very fluid. So that's what makes it a little bit nebulous. But they feel a sense of burdensomeness. When the person also feels a sense of disconnectedness. Now, this makes sense. If you feel burdened and you don't feel safe to share the burden, then you start to disconnect from things and people. Your faith, your social groups and your family. But also there's the component of having this acquired capacity to actually die by suicide. And this is why there's a lot of research on veterinarians and why their rates of suicide have increased and have been increasing for some time. Because they, like service members, are kind of at the death's door all the time. When you're in combat, you're at death's door. They are euthanizing animals every day. It becomes part of their acquired capacity to be around death and experience it. And this is one of the things that in this theory helps explain how a person gets to a place where they might actually choose to die. A person who is thinking about suicide is experiencing profound psychological pain. There is no one in this room who hasn't experienced pain. And I often say if your bias says you can't get through your self-assessment part, take the word suicide out and insert the word grief. Everyone has experienced some sort of grief. And this is a psychological grief that a person is experiencing. We have to shift our culture from believing that it's, that attempts our attention seeking to help seeking. This is about, again, a 45, 35, 20 year old airman who doesn't have the words to articulate the kind of pain that they're experiencing inside. And so I always describe it this way. What does a two-year-old do when he or she can't describe and articulate what they want? They have attempt, they act it out. That's help seeking. And parent, the parent is to help them find their words. And chiefs, I'm telling you, this is what you will be doing. You've gotten a lot of great information this week and you still have more to go. Learning strategy and learning about China and defense and all sorts of other things. And I'm biased, of course. But to me, there is no more important work you will do in your role as a chief than helping a person make a decision on how they're going to handle their psychological pain. All right? So for those of you who are more visual, here's another way of looking at it. When we, when you can get a person to talk about what they feel burdened by and what they're feeling, and how they're feeling disconnected, we can research shows. We can generally get a person to back away from dying by suicide. It's when we add that third component and all three are present that suicide becomes a real option. So the most important question I think you can ask in your very important roles is where does it hurt and how can I help? Never underestimate the importance of your role. Your role is crucial. People are looking up to you. And when you ask this question, where does it hurt and how can I help, you change a person's world and you may not even know it. So a little bit of defining what the challenges are going to be for you and your roles, helping you get a glimpse into the mind of a person who's thinking about suicide and now I'm shifting into defining postvention. I love this quote. I've worked with survivors for many, many years and the survivor said this to me. It's not hard for me to talk about it with others, but it sure seems hard for them to listen to it or to hear it. And she is, she was absolutely right because here's how it works. We can get our heads around losing someone by an accident. Accidents happen. We can get our heads around someone dying by cancer. We know this happens, but no one is prepared to lose a person to suicide, to lose their loved one to suicide. No one is prepared for that. And so you are the ones, the first sergeants are the ones and the front line supervisors who you're leading. We need to help them feel equipped to be able to help the 35 year old airman that has lost his wife of 17 years. So, you know, what happens when you lose someone to cancer, someone in the cul-de-sac, right, or in your neighborhood will bring a casserole to your house and say, I'm so sorry, John lost his battle with cancer. If there's anything you need, let me know. But when you lose someone to suicide, not only do you not get the casserole, but your neighbors go out the back door because they don't know how to talk to you. They don't know what to say. They don't know what to ask and they don't know what to do. And now you create an even bigger risk because survivors oftentimes feel lonely. And so we're, and of course losing a loved one to suicide puts them at a risk. So now we're checking the boxes even more. So knowing how to do this postvention is really crucial. All right, 2015 was the first time, 2015 was the first time I saw the word postvention in an AFI. And this is our newest AFI. And this is from 2019. And it actually gives you, if you haven't read this, I hope you have, it actually gives you the first formalized Air Force definition of what postvention is. And it basically says, again, what you're going to do to help a person after they've attempted or completed the family after they've completed and hopefully to prevent others from dying by suicide. All right, so why this increased focus? I sort of gave you a hint at the beginning. This is sort of taking a shift over the last four years. Many, many, many, many service members had never, and leaders had never heard the word postvention. And 13 years ago, I tell you, it was interesting when a wing commander would call me or a first sergeant would call me or a chief would call me and say, Hey, Mary, we've had a suicide. Can you come out and help us with some stuff? And I would say yes. And let me also discuss with your people the concept of postvention. And they would say, Hey, listen, never heard that word, don't know what that word is, got too much on a plate and don't want to know. Just do the prevention. It's so interesting that we're getting there. We're getting there. But we know that in 2019, the Air Force and its history had its worst number of suicides. Combined suicides exceeded accidents, natural causes, and combats combined. It was a bad year. And of course, the Department of the Air Force is making some real effort to sort of tackle this, if you will. We know that if you as a chief can help the triad or your squadron or whatever, wherever you'll be located as a chief, if you can help your leadership team not duplicate efforts, streamline it, and organize themselves, then we can do postvention more effectively. So most people don't know that postvention stuff, all the stuff that you've been doing as senior NCOs up through your entire career, this is not just shoot from the hip willy-nilly, do what feels good because it makes me feel good. There's actually a strategy to postvention and there are three specific goals. The first is, and this is what we're asking you to do, is help promote healthy healing. How can you heal a community of people that have been impacted by a death? Some in different ways, but how can you help them, how can you help heal that community so you can get back to pre-suicide operational status if we don't help people heal? So if you remember 20 years ago, the Air Force was not encouraging wing commanders to have a memorial for this person. Now not only Pendulum and Swung, now not only do we encourage wing commanders to have a memorial, we have an entire guide and a booklet or a whole handout on how to do memorial services correctly because we know messaging is crucial. And again, if you are not aware of what your biases are or if you buy into the myths, what you message can make the difference between whether or not someone else hurting in your area or your organization who's thinking about suicide may or may not. I'm not trying to put, it's not all on you. I'm just making the point that we need our leadership to understand that messaging is really crucial and how we message things afterward, particularly in our memorial services. So second goal is to reduce the risk of contagion. We don't want more people to die by suicide. We've got to reach the other vulnerable population. And then we need to link them to the right resources. And we have exploded in terms of resources. And I don't know if you caught that on the data slide, the one data slide that I showed. One of the barriers to care is that service members are saying, now there's so much out there. I don't even know where to start. So Wing had a suicide less than a month ago and I got a call. And the Wing commander was in it. The chief was in it. You know, first sergeant and the violence prevention integrator. And she was, I love transparency. I love it when people are real. And she said, Dr. Bartlett, you know, could you just, there's so much out there. I am the person that leads suicide prevention on the installation. I am overwhelmed right now. Just tell me which three pieces of information or resources are the best for us to use to guide our postvention effort. We also know that we've got to take care of you. Because despite our efforts, we know that leaders often experience still shame, accusation, guilt, and may not receive the support that they need. So I am here to make sure that you are supported as you go through this as well as others. All right. I'm hoping you can see this. This is a glimpse. Oftentimes I'm asked, well, how long does this postvention stuff go on? Right? All right. It seems like it goes on for maybe 30 days after the memorial. But that's not true. What makes postvention so unique is that you don't need to know the person who died by suicide to be impacted by it. It has a profound ripple effect across, you know, the organization. And so even if you didn't know the person, it conjures up unresolved grief. You cannot separate out spirituality from suicide. It is the most existential decision a person will make in their life. And so this is a graph that came out in the Defense Suicide Prevention Office produced in 2020. It's a new booklet. It's posted on the resilience web page for the Air Force. Page 25 shows you, because these are the questions I could ask. Who's involved in this postvention process and for how long? Now, I want to just draw your attention. This is one of the best graphics I've seen so far to describe it. But please note it goes out to 180 days. Isn't that interesting? Because the impact of suicide, as you know, if you've lost someone, goes well beyond 180 days. Now, this does not mean you're going to be talking about suicide every day for 365 days. But it does mean that you're aware of the culture and the environment and the pulse of what's going on across your organization. You're going to have three kinds of people after a suicide. You're going to have the group of people that come into your organization that were not there when the suicide occurred. You're going to have the group of people who were there and have moved on and have made, you know, they've resolved this internally. And then you're going to have the group of people who are still not, still in pain over the experience. And you need to find a way to appeal to all of them. To the first group, it is, you weren't here when this happened, but we need you to be a good wingman because we have people who are hurting still from the loss of that person. For those who were here and you're moving forward, this is great news. I'm so glad. I hope that we have helped you heal and grieve to get you to that place. But you still have peers and wingmen who are struggling. I need you to be there for them. And then to appeal to those who are still struggling for a whole year and say, for those of you who are still struggling, know that we're here for you. People heal in different ways and at different rates and we're aware of that. Let us know what you need because they might be your vulnerable population. So this is a glimpse into the experience of a survivor. These are things that people just don't think about. That when you get a call and you are asked to come home because there's been an incident at your house and the sheriff is there, you drive as fast as you can. You get to the house and you are told that your 13-year-old son has died. And all you want to do is go in that house and hold your child. And you are told you can't because it is now an investigation scene. These are things we just don't think about that the survivor goes through. Or this is another thing where I always like to tell chiefs and first sergeants, you are crucial in this recovery process because if a person has gone through a very bitter divorce and now there's a funeral and the other spouse says don't come to the funeral, do not show up at this funeral. This is where you can step in. This is where your power and your capacity in the role that you have, you can step in and say, hey, I understand this is going on. How about if in two weeks from now we have a graveside service and you tell me who the six people are that you want to be there and we'll make it happen. That's powerful. That's helping promote the first strategy, the first goal of postvention. Promote healthy healing. Promote it. And be aware that this is not your typical kind of loss and it's not your typical kind of grief. And so most of you are probably trained to know that in grief there are five basic stages that have been well researched, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Your people, your survivor is going to go through these stages. And in addition, and this is why we need to better educate on postvention, in addition to that, this is what they're experiencing, a myriad of other emotions that you my friends will be handling. You will be leading and supervising the first sergeant who's going to be face to face talking to the person experiencing this. So the loneliness, the shame, the guilt, the frantic search for meaning, why did my husband die? Why did my person die? So you need to understand that this is what makes postvention a little bit different and why we need a little bit of extra education on it. So there are long term goals for survivors. This is a glance into this is where you're helping your people in your units and your organizations get to that are survivors. You want to get them to forgive their loved one who died by suicide, get over their anger, get past the anger that is pretty typical and accept the mysteries of the unknowns. Because we as a culture, not only do we not do grief well or anger well, we don't talk about this kind of stuff because we don't want to discuss the reaction to it. So these are the long term goals that you and those that you're leading are going to try and help that person get to. These are the goals for you. We need, as you know, and in the guidebooks that we have now, we know that leadership visibility after any crisis is crucial because you're like parents. Our leaders are like parents that your presence means something, gives us strength, gives your airman strength and purpose. And if they see you coping okay, but grieving appropriately, then they too can reach that. But we need to make sure that that leadership is visible. And this is, I think, again, where chiefs come in when there's a suicide and you're working with the squadron or whatever it might be to decide which leaders are going to walk through, you may be the ones that have to say, hey, sir or ma'am, are people, my people don't have a relationship with so and so. And I think a better person to have eyeball contact with them is such and such. I mean, you voice your opinion, let them know, be thinking about how to help your people grieve safely. You don't want someone who's not authentic. You don't want someone who's not transparent. You don't want someone who has verbally bought into the myths and the biases and spoken about it to dissuade people from reaching out for help. That's not the person you want walking through the unit, right? All right. And then, of course, it is absolutely crucial to make sure that you are giving thought to what I call the peripheral people, the people that don't normally get the support that they need, like the people in casualty response that responded to your suicide, the people in mortuary or the person in mortuary affairs that took care of all the events and the details, if you will. The first airman's suicide I had was at Ariya Mildenhall and the wing commander that was 25 years ago, a wing commander decided to hold a memorial. And so three nights later we had the memorial. I walked into the chapel and I saw this young girl standing off into the corner. She could not have been older than 19. Clearly it was her first duty station and it was overseas, very young. One afternoon I said, how did you know so and so? And she said, I didn't know so and so. I said, well, what brings you to the memorial? And she said, I'm the photographer for public affairs that was asked to take pictures of the scene. And I said, how are you doing? And she said, not well, ma'am. I have not slept since I took those pictures. So be thoughtful of the peripheral type of people that are involved in this postvention effort. It can impact and again the ripple effect is profound. All right, but I would be remiss if I didn't in hoping to give myself a little 10 minutes to answer some questions, I would be remiss if I didn't also talk about taking care of you and how what your role will be in taking care of your leaders, right? It might be the chief that says to the squadron commander, hey, I know that you go running every day five miles and you haven't done that in five days because I see you on the path. How about if we go again starting tomorrow? Taking care of leaders because it's all, I'd be surprised if there wasn't someone here, not everyone has experienced suicide. You know those first seven to nine days, 10 days, it's like a rocket ship. I mean, as soon as a suicide happens, your whole life is kind of turned upside down and you still have to do your day job, but you start your day job at seven o'clock at night because during the day, you're doing the postvention care. So we also need to make sure that we're taking care of you. You will be having, as you know, conversations with people who lost someone to suicide 15 years ago, but this suicide has conjured that pain back up and you're the ones that they may come to to ask for help. I wanted to make sure that I always include a slide on resources. There are many more. This is a snapshot. These are some of my favorite and they include their resources for both prevention and postvention. Of course, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors deals with all kinds of airmen loss, family loss, right? They have an actual separate division that focuses just on suicide death. Many people don't know that. So I want to always make sure that you feel empowered as you take this on in your next role and move forward and that you feel equipped. And then I've been teaching for long, long, long time so I know to come prepared. If you don't have questions for me, don't worry, I have questions for you because if I ask you questions and you give me some information, then I can do my job more effectively and help those that you're leading. So I'm not wedded to these questions. We've got about 10 minutes. I know that you're anxious to leave and go have lunch and I apologize that I'm standing between you and that. I think the last thing I want to say before we get into the Q&A, I always like to end with this. Some of you might remember, what's his name? The Las Vegas, Wayne Newton, right? Wayne Newton is a performer in Las Vegas. He was about 184 when I was 6 years old. He's about 294 now. I don't think he's ever going to die. But I love this because he was quoted once in a magazine as saying, if I come to you and I ask you for some money and you give me some of your money, that's all you've done is give me some of your money. But if I come to you and I ask you for some of your time and you give me your time, then you have changed my life. You are life changers. You are hope brokers. And so I want to say before we go into the Q&A, thank you for giving me your time and changing my life. And thank you for the work that you're going to do to help strengthen and build resilient airmen. So with that, I am ready and prepared to entertain your questions. I'll remember it. Well, I'd like to say this. I don't work for the Department of the Air Force. I don't work for the Pentagon and DAF. And I don't work in operations at A1Z. I simply try to advise them in the work that they do. So there might be some questions I may not be able to answer. So, and if there are, don't worry, I'll get you answers. Okay. Thoughts, I would say thoughts, comments, questions or feelings because I'm a therapist and I can handle feelings. Hey, good afternoon, ma'am. This is CMassard Dustin Hughes from Fort Gordon, Georgia. So, I took over as a squadron SCL for my squadron in November 2019. Excuse me, November, November 20. And then on January 13, 2021, we had a suicide in our squadron. So, my question is, in regards to support for the family afterwards. So, the boss and the first sergeant and I, we had plenty of conversations afterwards on how long should we continue to contact the family. The spouse was a key spouse, right? So, there was obviously a relationship there that was there beforehand. And my wife is a key spouse as well. So, my wife maintained, you know, communication afterwards as well because they had developed a relationship. But that's often the question that I talked to other leaders throughout the Air Force. How long had they maintained that communication? Because at some point in time, right, you have to let go. And because a member, you know, the spouse, and the member is not a, they're not in the unit anymore, right? So, there has to be some, there's got to be a point where you just let go and things go on. So, I just wanted to get your take on what you think is the right amount of time. And I know it will be different for every situation, but I'd like to get your thoughts. Thank you. Right. You hit the nail on the head. It is different for each situation. It's dependent on the kind of relationship you had with the person, how involved that family member was with the unit, how you seem them adjusting, if they're reaching their long-term goals. And so, rule of thumb for me when I'm, when I'm teaching first sergeants is put a note or something that pops up on your phone for up to a year. So, at the six-month point, even if the family has moved back to, you know, their hometown, and they're no longer on the installation, near the installation, at six months, send them just a, hey, checking in on you, I'm still healing. I'm wondering how you are. You might do that for, I'm sorry, key holidays. This is your first Christmas without Chris, and I'm wondering, and just don't want you to know I'm thinking about you. So, it doesn't even have to be a question that requires a phone call or follow-up, but just I'm thinking of you. And I would encourage doing that up to a year. Now, one thing I've learned about survivors is they're very, very good about letting you know what they need. I'm sorry, about telling you whether or not they are able to talk about it. So, when you go up to a survivor and say, hey, I want to check in and see how you're doing, they will usually say, I can't talk to, I can't do it today, or they will say, thank you for asking, because I so rarely get asked about Beth. I so rarely get asked. So, it really is dependent on your relationship with the family, their relationship with the organization, what your experience with suicide is, and how you have rolled through it and knowing what someone else might need. There's no steadfast date, you know, and some survivors are angry at the Air Force. And so, they may not want you to follow up, and they'll tell you. One thing I also know about survivors is that, unlike a person who has lost someone to cancer, you can't go up to them and say, tell us what you need. In the case of survivors of suicide, you have to tell them what you will do for them. So, maybe in this case, as you're reaching out to the families and trying to decide what they need, you can say, I will be, as they're moving, I will be in touch with you at least once a quarter, just until we get you through the first year, so that you know, I'm still thinking about Benjamin. Does that help? All right. I've got time for one more question. Good afternoon, ma'am. I'm C. M. S. R. Mbossi from a Barksdale Air Force base. Barksdale? Yes, ma'am. So, I've seen that you're, we're well versed on a lot of things that we kind of do to help prevent. I'm sorry, can you just, could I, thank you. Awesome. I'm sorry, I'm a little sick. I couldn't hear you for two days. Okay, so I know, I know. I feel your pain. No, no worries. So, basically, since you're well versed on a lot of things that we do to help prevent suicide, I know a lot of the, a lot of the people they deal with their first-line supervisors a lot. My question for you is coming from, from my level, what are some of the things that we can do in addition to provide that additional information to our NCOs and our first-line supervisors to have more prepared and actually can pick on things more so, so they can be more helpful in this situation. Okay, so the question is, how do we as chiefs now help our front-line supervisors to help those who are survivors? Well, yes, but from your perspective, I know from my, how I feel I want to approach it, but I would like to get your perspective because you're an expert. So, what would you say that we could do more in the Air Force to help those front-line supervisors to be more aware of possible suicide situations? Wonderful question, love it, and wish I had about 30 more minutes. All right, right off the top of my head in less than a minute. We need to help our front-line supervisors understand that they're, we know that there's the checklist. That's why title is beyond the checklist. The checklist is perfunctory. We need to help them understand that there are resources out there to help them. They're not powerless. They're not, not being supported. There is stuff out there. We need to make sure that they know about the resilience website so they can look at that information. We need to make sure that we're taking care of them, that recognizing that if they're day in and day out, eyeball to eyeball with a survivor or with someone who's at risk for suicide, that we're making sure that they feel connected and empowered to take care of them. So it's providing the resources, it's having the discussion, checking in with them, and I would say, let me think, resources, checking in with them, and advocating. Because when you advocate and you listen to them, when I teach at the NCO Academy, right after I write everything they've said down so that I can take their voice and make sure someone hears it. And in your case, listening to what they have to say and what they are telling us, we don't have this, we need this, I don't understand this, and then making it happen or taking it to the powers that be that can make it happen. That's the best advice I have in less than 60 seconds. I hope that helps, would love to talk more with you offline. I do, I have five more minutes, so my clock is round. Great. It's an easy one. It's actually two things. One's a statement and one is a question for you. C.M.S. Sergeant Ashnett Young from Shaw Air Force Base. I want to say that I really appreciated your brief. My mother committed suicide when I was 15 years old, and my brother was seven, and we actually split. I went to live with my aunt, and he went to live with his dad, and it caused us to handle it differently. But some of the things, actually the majority of the things that you said on there, I still see in my brother, and I'm 43 years old. So I say this because when I joined the military, I was not open to talk about it. I was ashamed. But then attending, of course, our mandatory suicide awareness briefings that we have, it helped me overcome some of it. But I say to all of my peers in this room, if you hear someone in a training talk about suicide, oh, why do we have to do this again? Nip it in the bud, because I had that several times in my career, and it wasn't just airmen. Sometimes it was senior NCOs and stuff. So us coming from diverse backgrounds, you don't know people's story unless you get out and talk to them. And in a crowded like this, you don't know people's stories. We can't approach everyone to get that connection. So it is our job to nip it in the bud, pull them to the side, or whatever, or just stay it out loud. That's not what we need, because we don't know who has been through it, and we don't know who is actually having those thoughts at that time. And I've seen it go, you know, uncorrected, especially when I was an airman, and I didn't think I had a voice to say anything to someone else. So that's all I have to say about that. But my question is, do you think that our education and prevention that we get in the military, do you think that that is helping airmen hide their signs? Hide their signs? Yeah, like if we talk about it, we're helping them learn to be better at disguising. And hiding it, like giving away your things, you know, when I came in, it was if you see someone giving away their things or acting a certain way, then they could be, you know, suicidal. So do you think in your opinion that teaching sometimes those type of things has actually made it worse? I don't. My answer is no, I don't. Because research continues to show us that those who talk about suicide or are present with some of those risk factors, they actually want to talk about suicide. And so while it can, and I can't say it, you know, without doubt, there are some airmen that will take that information, say, okay, this is how I can disguise it. But the reality is most people that are thinking about it want to be asked about it, even when they're displaying, even when they're not displaying the signs. And that's what makes it so important to make sure that you are learning people's stories and that you are talking about suicide. Look, there by the grace of God go I, I do not know what will break me in my life. But if I had had children and my child died in an accident, I told my husband put me on watch because it wouldn't matter how reasonable I am and how much I love you, I will want to die and be with my child. So conveying that kind of a message when that's what I was saying, that's part of the challenge is that you're going to have airmen that say, why do we have to do this again? Well, the reason is we get new research and new, new, identify new risk factors every day. So to answer your question, no, I don't think that we're with that by educating people about suicide. I know the direct opposite is true. It is by educating people that we help people understand we can prevent it and we don't want you to die. Is there a, you know, a minority of people that might log that information say, we've got to get better at hiding that? Absolutely. But research shows that most people that are thinking about suicide actually want to be asked about their death, about the possibility they don't people, most people don't want to die by suicide. They want their psychological pain to end and they do not know how to do it. They've come up with this, this conclusion. And we need leaders to look at that person, open the dialogue, even when you don't suspect it's there and say, hey, we all, we all have a breaking point. And if, and if you're there, please come, please talk to me. I would rather work with you through this crisis than lose you. So I hope that answers your question. Okay. All right. And Barksdale person, I really do want to visit with you because I had a great conversation with General Cotton last week and he's doing some taking some new initiatives I'd like to share with you. Okay. So thank you all very much. Enjoy your lunch, enjoy your afternoon speakers. And again, thank you for your time. Bye bye.