When we walk up to somebody if you’re in a combat zone and they’ve been wounded you look at it you see that they’re bleeding. Alright, you’re gonna go up there, you’re gonna apply first aid and we all go to self-aid buddy care. We’re taught how to care for somebody when they’re wounded. Alright, so once they’re wounded we’re gonna go up, we’re gonna apply first aid but then the next thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna get them help, we’re gonna call the ambulance, we’re gonna get them to a competent medical authority. Alright, so we’re gonna realize that they have a problem, we’re gonna take immediate action at that point and we’re not gonna let go of that wounded person until they’re in the hands of a competent medical authority.
Well, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do from a suicide prevention standpoint. The trouble is as Doogie reinforced and said really good last year in his message, a lot of the wounds aren’t visible. Okay, it can be people who are deployed or it could be some things happening at home. So the first case in this is we have to walk up and ask somebody are you wounded and the cool thing is from a statistical standpoint they will tell you if they are. They’re gonna be honest. They’re gonna let you know. So step one Ask, two provide that first aid and the last is get them to a competent authority in this case not a medical authority but a mental health.
Every single state you can move on this little interactive map and click and there’s 56 states and territories and most everybody’s going ‘wait, there’s 54’ but we have Deep Freeze and the Readiness Center in there also. So there’s 56 specific other websites that this is gonna direct you to. The next is what is the target demographic. This is a .org website. It’s accessible from home. It’s accessible to family. So we’re looking at trying to talk to spouses, to family, not just to the guardsmen, not just the service folks. We have lots of different folks that were trying to reach with this message because intervention training isn’t just us. It’s our families, support organizations and other people and it can be anybody anywhere that can reach this website.
There is some online training right now. It’s a short introductory course with the concepts and principles. We’re gonna be robusting that. We’re gonna come up with innovative ways and distributed learning to get the message across on how to do suicide intervention. Social networking, for those of you that do this, yes, you can friend the Wingman Project. Alright, you can tweet about it, alright. So those things are available right there and it has a large following on the social networks.
