Donovan and Faith Thomas: Helping people choose life
DONOVAN Thomas admits that the first time he encountered someone who was suicidal he had no clue how to deal with it.
The experience — in 1986 when he was a volunteer at a juvenile correctional institution — resulted in him travelling from Annotto Bay, St Mary, to Kingston “to be taught how to help people who are suicidal”, he said.
Since then, helping to sway people from taking their own lives has been a passion for Thomas, who now holds a PhD from Columbia Theological Seminary in Ministry, with a specialisation in Teen Suicide Prevention.
“I was conducting research when I discovered one in four of Jamaican teenagers indicated that they seriously thought of taking their own lives,” Dr Thomas told the Jamaica Observer last week. “I said, as a youth worker, and as a Christian youth worker, we should find answers. I finally did my doctoral dissertation on confronting suicidal propensity among Jamaican teenagers, and within a year or two I published the book Confronting Suicide, Helping Teens At Risk.”
“Somebody asked me how difficult it was to write that book and I said ‘it wasn’t difficult at all, I was searching for answers, I wasn’t really writing a book’. I didn’t know I was writing a book at the time,” Dr Thomas explained.
Driven by his need to help people, Dr Thomas and his wife Faith, in October 2008, founded Choose Life International (CLI), a faith-based non-governmental organisation which helps people live physically, emotionally and spiritually, the entity explains on its website.
“There are too many people who simply exist, going through the motions of life …without peace …without fulfilment …without purpose. We have a God-given vision and passion to help change this,” the website adds.
“Our passion is to help people live,” Dr Thomas emphasised. “Almost on a daily basis we encounter people who have attempted [suicide], people whose family members have attempted or at times regrettably, people whose family members or friends have completed suicide.”
Choose Life International operates with what it describes as a ‘Fourfold focus’ under the acronym SAME :
Saving lives: Suicide prevention and grief counselling;
Alignment with divine purpose: To help people rise above their past hurts and pains, to forgive and live fulfilled lives;
Missions: To help churches develop structure, strategies and priorities that will empower them to be more proactive in world evangelism, leading and hosting international missions teams; and
Evangelism: Emphasis on using strings to do demonstrations while sharing the gospel. This focus targets teens and young adults.
Over the 10 years, CLI has helped hundreds of individuals and has seen the need to expand its programme into schools.
“We are big on prevention, and what I find is that many times we are not proactive, we react to something. Someone goes through a crisis and we build a bridge instead of building the bridge before. So one of the things we are doing is offering emotional assessment of grade 7 students, and we’re saying we can actually identify signs of vulnerability to [suicide] before the crisis arises,” Dr Thomas said.
“We’re seeing where that is helping in some areas. For instance, we did all grade seven students, 300 students, from one school; one student got a transfer, went to another school. We didn’t know he went to the school, and the school sent him to us. When we realised that he was from school ‘A’ and asked for his emotional assessment, we realised that the same things that they sent him to us for, were the same things that this child needed help in [at the first school],” Thomas said.
Last Friday, at a World Suicide Prevention Day Seminar held by CLI at Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton said that his ministry, in partnership with CLI, is to establish a mental health/suicide helpline to provide support to people in need of assistance.
The helpline, 1-888-NEW-LIFE (1-888-639-5433), will be toll-free, providing 24-hour assistance to people with mental health issues seeking help.
According to Tufton, the helpline will ensure that people have ready access to a support team, particularly people suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts.
The helpline is a welcomed development for Dr Thomas, who last week presented the Observer with police data showing that on average at least one suicide is committed every week in Jamaica.
“In the very year that Jamaica celebrated its 50th anniversary of Independence I looked back at the stats from 10 years prior to that, and I discovered that an average of 50 people took their lives every year for the previous 10 years. The highest we have seen in this nation, recorded in any one year, is 80, and that was 2000,” he said.
“We want to also acknowledge that suicide in this nation and other nations is under-reported,” he said.
“Every threat must be taken seriously. Every time somebody says, ‘I feel like I want to kill myself’ the threat can be overt or subtle. Subtle like, ‘I may not be here again’, then a threat moves to a plan. The more detailed the plan, the more closer the person is to the suicide act. Then, sometimes people live under difficult conditions and they want to escape those unpleasant realities,” Dr Thomas said, explaining that one of the warning signs is withdrawal from friends and family.
He also said that people who are suicidal prepare in various ways. “We had a mother who was giving away her child as preparation to go kill herself,” he said. “I had an 11-year-old who said ‘If sex is all that they say it is, I want to taste it before I go kill myself’. We have seen where a 14-year-old took his Xbox from his parents’ house to his friend’s house before he took his life, and so forth.”
Another of the moving examples he gave was that of a mother who called CLI and said she was going to kill herself because she didn’t have any food to feed her children.
“I literally took some food from the kitchen, went up the hill and exchanged it for the rope she was going to use to hang herself. So that’s as practical as we get. There was another lady who called and she was going to kill herself because of frustration, because her man left her and all the pickney dem and she didn’t know what to do. We were able to work with her to help her buy some chickens. We bought the chickens in Kingston and they [were] delivered [to her] somewhere in Manchester. She raised her chickens [sold some] and with that, raised hope. So we’re involved in some very practical ways to be able to help people to choose life,” Dr Thomas related.
He described Choose Life International’s model of intervention as bio-psycho-social-spiritual, which involves regular consultation with medical doctors.
“One day I consulted with four psychiatrists about what to do with an 11-year-old who attempted suicide. There are times when we have to call the police to come and help us to get someone to the hospital. We have a policy that if somebody is suicidal we’re not going to let them out of our sight until they get help. And anybody who comes to us who is suicidal, if they’re not willing to make a commitment to stay alive for the next six months and get therapy, then we’re not letting them out of our sight,” Dr Thomas explained.
“Sometimes we negotiate and the commitment time comes down to as little as two weeks. But we call police, we call family members. We have also had to call the police and the mental health professionals to say there is somebody down at the waterfront who is talking about killing himself, can you pick them up for us. Sometimes we send taxi to pick them up… So there are some very practical things that we’re doing. We are in this because we feel a sense of call to it. We are helping people to live,” he said.
“One of the things we do is help people to recognise what some of these signs are so they can intervene or help in some way,” Faith Thomas offered. “Many times when we talk to the family members of persons who took their lives, what we find is many of them they say they didn’t see any signs. And many times there are warning signs that someone is suicidal, but persons who see these signs do not recognise them as such.”
Added Dr Thomas: “Our passion is to help intercept young and old before they make that final jump or pull that trigger for the final time. Our desire is to help people live.”