Listen to thisDrawing upon child and youth care practice, research and teaching experience, I examine the tension between ‘readiness’ and ‘unpreparedness’ in navigating the complexities of practice, including within the context of suicide intervention. The learning pathway lined with competencies, credentials, may initially evoke feelings of confidence in practitioners as they enter practice. However, over the past 2 decades I’ve learned 4 major things about readiness that form the basis of this article.
First, to be: In order to be with young people contemplating ending their lives, we need to ready ourselves for relationships. Second, to be well: Being well is comprised of past, presence and future. Third, to be well prepared: Professional learning is intertwined with personal learning. Fourth, we need to be well prepared for certain uncertainty in child and youth care practice.
Keywords
presence, complexity, uncertainty, suicide
Ready: Preparing for certain uncertainty in child and youth care practice
Ready. Ready for school, ready for winter, ready for trips, ready for marriage, ready for leadership, ready for children, ready for a job interview, or ready to go. Ready. From our childhood hide-and-seek games (“Ready or not, here I come?”) to our retirement (“Are you ready for retirement?”), we live lives marked by readiness. We are asked, and ask, if we are ready. Ready-ing has much to do with evaluating ours, and others’ preparation when we are struck, sometimes literally, by context. At times our preoccupation with readiness is misguided. We ignore the context in which we are located.
To illustrate, imagine the context of winter in Quebec, Canada, a winter that lingers long and buries walkways in three feet of snow. A small child stares wistfully out the window with visions of building a snowman, designing a fort, making snow angels, or slip- sliding on her sled. Her hands make palm prints on the cold glass. She turns to her mother and asks, “Can I go outside?” Her mother immediately formulates a checklist evaluating readiness for play outside. Sweater? Check. Neck warmer? Check. Warm socks? Check. Snow pants? Check. Jacket? Check. Mitts? Check. Toque? Check. Boots? Check? The mother asks, “Are you ready to play in the snow?” The child squeals with delight and runs for the front door. Turning the doorknob, the mother opens the front door. Cold air rushes in competing with the warm heat from the furnace on the inside.
The thermometer reads -29° Celsius and there is a sheet of ice covering everything impeding construction of snowmen, forts, or snow angels. Visions of creative play soon turn to intuitions of looming disasters as her intuition kicks in. Foreseeing her child’s plastic sled barreling down the hill out of control and crashing into a tree, or her child slipping on the icy driveway cumulates with the potential of broken wrists and hours in the walk-in clinic. A car up the street catches her eye and she watches it fishtailing and sliding as it makes its way along the road. She closes the door. “Not today, honey. Its brutal out there.” Tears ensue. Through the big crocodile tears her daughter pleads, “But it’s always brutal! We never get to play outside!”
Have you seen this? Have you been there before? When your diligent efforts to ready yourself still rendered you unprepared?
Twenty-five years ago, I launched into the field of child and youth care as a live-in group home houseparent caring for pre-teen and teen boys. In my privilege and whiteness, I arrogantly believed I had the answer for resolving their stories of instability, abuse, pain, poverty and trauma. I had the passion and calling Stuart (2013) talks about for helping others and the compassion to persist in my commitment to the youth I served. I believed that passion and compassion were the only ingredients in the recipe for readiness. I held fast and firmly to this belief. Yet within a short time, I realized I was so unready for practice. Like opening the door to a frigid winter’s day, I was struck silent by the destructive and self-harm behaviours, the pain of internal wounds that oozed out as violence toward others, and the directed response to restrain and physically hold the bodies of these youth to prevent destruction of property or injury to themselves or others. This did not feel like the ‘help’ I had envisioned.
With my beliefs about readiness for child and youth care now in a shaky place, I hit the books. I sought credential after credential, motivated by the need for certainty in my practice. I worked continuously in multiple roles and settings, as part-time, live-in, overnight, full-time, relief, contract, in residential care, schools, crisis shelters, with foster families, in outpatient mental health, and as a supervisor. I drank the Kool-Aid of this readiness pathway that was lined with experience and multiple credentials, holding fast to a belief that that would prepare me. I would be prepared for child and youth care practice. I would be prepared for the next challenge, the next crisis, the next role. I would be prepared for anything. I would be prepared.
And then, I encountered the messiness of suicide (White, 2012). There was Charlie, a 160lb 13-year-old boy who struggled with regulating his emotions and impulses and repeatedly tried to hang himself on the closet rod in his bedroom. Or Delia, a bright 20- year-old who waved and smiled one night as she exited the homeless shelter before jumping off a bridge 3 blocks away and dying in the hospital the next day. Or Sylvia, the mom I was driving home after facilitating a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy group who repeatedly said she wanted to ‘go home’, a cryptic message of distress that she was thinking about suicide.
Decades of research on suicide have led to protocols, risk assessment tools, and lists of warning signs. Standardized suicide prevention gatekeeper suggests that we can be ready for that young person who says they want to die. We are told social isolation is the cause, so we strive to connect. We hear depression is the cause, so we medicate. We identify certain groups of people are at-risk, so we screen everyone in that group. We say poor parenting is the cause, so we intervene with parents. Yet young people still die by suicide, 100,000 of them, globally, every year (World Health Organization, 2008).
Does Readying Lead to Preparation? Does Preparation Lead to Prevention?
The questions I’ve wrestled with in my research hold this tension of getting ready. I explored our ‘readying’ efforts in child and youth care education and suicide prevention education (see for example Ranahan, 2018; Ranahan, 2016), and practitioners’ feeling and experiencing unpreparedness in practice (Ranahan & Pellissier, 2015a). I re- examined our learning processes (Ranahan, revision submitted), and capturing the complexity of suicide prevention in community contexts (Ranahan & White, 2019). Along my path, I learned 4 major things about readiness that I will take up in the remainder of this article. First, to be: In order to be with young people contemplating ending their lives, we need to ready ourselves for relationships. Second, to be well: Being well is comprised of past, presence and future. Third, to be well prepared: Professional learning is intertwined with personal learning. Through experiential learning opportunities, identity as a child and youth care professional is developed and interprofessional collaboration is optimized. Fourth, we need to be well prepared for certain uncertainty in child and youth care practice.
First: To Be
In order to be with young people contemplating ending their lives, we need to ready ourselves for relationships. Despite the wealth of books and videos on relationships, reading and watching does little in the way of our preparation to actually sit with those who want to die. Consider for example the renowned ‘still face’ experiment between an infant and their caregiver (Tronick, 2009). The caregiver sits directly in front of her child, initially there’s eye contact, smiles, excited sounds, facial expressions, the child responds giggling, gesturing, and reaching. The caregiver is instructed by the researcher at a certain point not to respond. Her affect is rendered flat, expressionless, and motionless. The infant is confused and attempts to engage the caregiver, pointing, smiling, and reaching. The caregiver offers no response. The infant screeches loudly, cries, arches their back, and their face reddens; clearly they are in distress. The caregiver is instructed to shift from a stoic state, and returns to offering smiles, melodic sounds, eye contact, and attunement. The child calms, anxiousness wanes, and connection is regained.
Our work as child and youth care practitioners – what we are readying ourselves for – is to be in a dyadic relationship. This is a relationship unfolding and emerging in embodied interactions similar to that of the ‘still face’ experiment. This is not a new idea I’m suggesting but is foundational to every aspect of child and youth care work. Krueger (2004) spoke of this idea years ago as a dance, of being in sync, and adjusting and re- adjusting as the interaction unfolds.
In the context of my research on suicide intervention, child and youth care practitioners have told me that to be is this dyadic, shared experience. Being with young people contemplating ending their lives is characterized by presence and connectedness, time, attachment, caring for the young person beyond the crisis at hand, and coming alongside them (Ranahan, 2013a). Those elements of child and youth care practice are likely no surprise to members of the child and youth care community. We’ve been chatting about ‘the other 23 hours’ we spend with kids beyond their 1-hour therapy sessions with psychologists or psychiatrists since Trieschman, Whittaker, and Brendtro wrote The Other 23 Hours (1976).
Importantly, presence is the lifeblood of being with the dying, or those thinking of ending their lives (Ranahan, 2017). To be in those moments, in those interactions is an embodied experience. It requires knowledge of one’s Self, a willingness to explore, challenge, critically examine our ideas about self, about others, and about practice.
Indeed, this is part and parcel of being reflexive, an essential component of ethical praxis (White, 2007). All too often in suicide interventions, our relational practice is seemingly hijacked by rigid organizational protocols that outline notification procedures of who is to be informed when the so-called ‘s-word’ (i.e., suicide) is spoken (Ranahan, 2013b).
Now I am not saying that the lone practitioner ‘going rogue’ should negotiate suicide concerns as a solo endeavour. I am suggesting that suicide is best negotiated in the context of a relationship with the young person, where connecting and decision-making is a collaborative effort. Child and youth care practitioners have found this to be very difficult in practice at times – where they are ‘readied’ with suicide intervention skills in workshops or professional development opportunities, and then told to refer the youth on to formal mental health care providers, whether they are accessible or not, or whether they are known to the youth or not. For example, in my research with child and youth care professionals who have encountered young people who are suicidal, one youth worker shared their story with me of following a protocol to inform a mental health crisis team after a youth disclosed that they were thinking of suicide (Ranahan, 2013b). Learning that ‘others’ were on their way to respond, the youth became angry, asking ‘Why did you call for them? You’re the only one who can help me!’ Another practitioner said they call the police when a youth is suicidal as this expedites access to a psychiatrist at the hospital. Yet another practitioner reported she followed the protocol and called the crisis outreach team but got a busy signal. These stories shared with me by child and youth care practitioners illustrate how our current responses to defer and refer, disrupt the youth’s desire for us to be with them. As such, we must be ready to just be.
Second: To Be Well
What does it mean to ‘be well’? Between 2015 and 2017 I worked with a community development scholar Warren Linds and a leisure sciences scholar Felice Yuen on an arts- based project exploring Indigenous young people’s perspectives on wellness in Saskatchewan that was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Ranahan, Yuen, Linds, 2017; Yuen, Ranahan, Linds, & Goulet, 2019). Despite the grant being directed specifically towards youth suicide prevention, we entered the community with a wellness and life promotion focus. The community we were working with asked us to do just that. They asked that we move away from problems and deficits and focus on being well and wellness. Informed by the current literature, we investigated the themes of healing, life, ceremony, relationships and hope using theatre, video, photo collage, and story telling. This ground-up, localized approach was culturally sensitive and appropriate, privileging Indigenous ways of knowing where young people shared their experiences, their knowledge, and understandings of wellness in a flexible, dynamic and natural manner. For the young people involved in these workshops, wellness held temporal qualities such that a connection to the past in the present fosters hope and vision for the future. Images created by the young people represented moments in time that held past, present, and future simultaneously: a sunset, a tree, or a winding path. While awareness of the now – the moment-by-moment interaction – may be how presence within the helping relationship is described by many helping professions, young people in our study reminded us that the present moment we are in, is influenced by past and future.
Further, being, belonging and active engagement in activities and relationships were key to wellness and life promotion for the youth participants. This is a holistic approach encompassing social, emotional, physical and spiritual features, where resilience is positioned – not within individuals – but located within the ecological context.
Third: To Be Well Prepared
To be well prepared connects experiential learning, professional identity development as a child and youth care worker, and skills in interprofessional collaboration. Studies by Peters (2003) and Ruth and colleagues (2013) suggest that the current landscape of suicide intervention education is quite limited, often only offered in higher education based on faculty expertise and interest. Unfortunately, professionals are often left to acquire suicide intervention skills “downstream” (Oordt et al., 2009, p. 22), and at times this is provided as a response to a death by suicide. When offered, and likely in the context of brief, standardized workshops aimed at positioning child and youth care workers as gatekeepers or referral agents (Ranahan & Pellissier, 2015b), suicide interventions are set up as standalone conversations structured by pre-determined questions (Ranahan, 2016; Ranahan & White, 2015).
How do we learn about suicide and suicide intervention? In a discourse analysis I conducted on youth workers’ talk of their practical experience with young people thinking of suicide, participants recalled their initial encounters of their first suicide intervention (Ranahan & Pellissier, 2015a). These early career experiences, as identified by youth workers occurred when they were ‘green’ or ‘novice’ in the field, were experiences characterized by ‘not knowing’, feeling stuck, or immobilized. Participants identified that encountering suicide was a situation that served to a barrier, as “one of the harshest wake up calls to reality”, transforming an idealized ‘helper’ identity to a profound awake understanding of the so-called ‘trenches’ of youth work practice (p. 18). These early practice experiences served as touchstone stories (Strong-Wilson, 2006) throughout their career – as one youth worker described, “The first time that this happens, it becomes kind of a story in your mind I think, and it follows you” (p. 17).
But what if educators were to incorporate learning about suicide intervention into pre- service child and youth care programs? The pathway to preparation for child and youth care practitioners must be marked by an experiential approach to pedagogy. As Jickling (2009) explains, “experiential understanding adds flesh and life to the bones so often polished smooth and white by analytical thought” (p. 168). Experiential learning certainly is not new to child and youth care educational programs. Experiential learning, within the context of safe and supported learning environments, connects the personal to the professional, and links learning exercises and activities directly to practice. When I was a faculty member in the child and youth care program at Vancouver Island University, students and I wrote about this as a métissage where an embodied approach to learning within the classroom environment worked to evoke vulnerabilities, requiring learners (and teacher for that matter) to take a leap of faith while holding a deep commitment to the process (Ranahan et al., 2012).
How does this learning process unfold? Recently I examined the implementation and subsequent application of a mental health literacy curriculum designed in collaboration with child and adolescent psychiatrist, Stan Kutcher (Dalhousie University) with 3 groups of youth work students at Concordia University (Ranahan, 2018; Ranahan & Alsaieq, 2018; Ranahan, revision requested). I gathered over 60 unique sources of data from 13 students including interviews, reflection papers, and creative artifacts. Experiential activities were embedded in the curriculum including opportunities to engage with young people with lived experience of mental health issues and practitioners who were actively working in the field, as well as traveling to services and sites off campus where practice occurs. I also included creative activities such as art making, video recordings and reflective exercises to invited embodied ways of knowing within learning activities. Key findings from this study suggested that the process of enhancing mental health literacies and professional identity development are intertwined. Content knowledge and interdisciplinary fluency – both in terms of valuing one’s professional identity and role, and in understanding the contributions of other professionals – allow for more flexible and improvisational responses. It also offers a view of child and youth care as part of a larger system of supports, and a movement towards actively promoting change within organizations.
Child and youth care workers as advocates, social innovators, or change instigators is a far cry from my earlier work, in which some practitioners described suicide intervention as ‘not my role’ or passing the buck to professionals with quote “bigger screening tools” (Ranahan, 2013b, p. 146). Indeed, to be well prepared is not solely an individual-level socialization into the discipline of child and youth care, but a broad understanding of how child and youth care ‘fits’ within and among care for children, youth, families and communities. We need to move from perpetuating professional hierarchies, competition and leveraging professional capital, to – as Gharabaghi (2008) suggests – being able to clearly articulate our role, the purpose of our therapeutic activities, while holding interdisciplinary fluency.
Fourth: To Be Well Prepared for Certain Uncertainty
So how do we do this? How do we ready ourselves for this? Mann-Feder, Scott and Hardy (2017) suggest that child and youth care “has become a diverse community and learning to live in and with that complexity seems to be a necessary process” (p. 9). Thus, to be a child and youth care practitioner, researcher, or educator is a challenging venture. Child and youth care is not only a diverse interdisciplinary community, but also a divided community, marked by inconsistencies, tensions and continuous reference to an emergent status with little on the horizon to lock our gaze to, or to keep us steady through the switchbacks of practice.
Charles and Garfat (2009) suggest that child and youth care is one of the “poorest of the poor” professions (p. 24). Alsbury (2011) identifies the field’s “perpetual struggle” for professionalization (p. 132). White (2015) states “we are always working in the midst of struggle and contestation, where the security and certainty of our professional knowledge is always at risk of coming undone. In other words, professional identities and practices are always problematic, always precarious” (p. 506). Our field is marked by high turnover of workers, where the passion that is our intrinsic motivation to work with young people for little pay, is unsustainable and often exploited or eroded by limited opportunities to flourish. Where embarking upon a career in child and youth care is a risky endeavor marked by precariously low paying employment opportunities, limited upward mobility, lack of recognition of credentials, vulnerability to burnout, and encounters with young people, systems and intergenerational trauma that can certainly leave a youth worker’s emotional bandwidth depleted as they swim in the muddy pool of struggle, contestation, risk, tension, poverty, and depletion. Child and youth care practice is certain uncertainty.
And then there’s suicide, where certainty is sought, valued and legitimized through protocols, best practice guidelines, and regimented lines of interprofessional communication. Suicide prevention is typically thought of as a concern or problem located within individuals (White & Morris, 2019). The individual has the problem. The individual is suicidal. We thus watch for warning signs of distress, in individuals. We assess individuals as high, medium, or low risk. We lock up individuals in secure environments to keep them from harming themselves. Individuals are given a diagnosis – depression, anxiety, or bulimia. These observational, assessment, and diagnostic practices suggest the presence of certainty. The problem of suicide can be contained – locked up, secured, and certain. When I moved from British Columbia to Quebec 8 years ago to take up a faculty position at Concordia University, I was shocked – not only by the winter – but by the common and routine practice in the residential care system of sending young people who were suicidal to a secure unit 2 hours north of the city. Like a safety deposit box at a bank, youth who expressed suicidal behaviours or thoughts of suicide were managed in a locked and secure manner, a façade of certainty.
How we define a problem, makes available certain solutions (White, 2012). What if we labeled contexts, systems, institutions, as uninhabitable? Life-preventing? Death promoting? What if we looked at communities – as opposed to a sole focus on individuals – as life giving? What is it about our communities, our organizations, or our work settings that promote life?
I learned about the importance of community and context over the past 3 years working with Jennifer White on a focused ethnography of the implementation of suicide prevention gatekeeper training in the province of British Columbia (Ranahan & White, 2019). In response to rising suicide rates, the British Columbia Ministry of Health provided the BC Division of the Canadian Mental Health Association with $3 million to implement two standardized gatekeeper- training programs developed by LivingWorks Inc.. Suicide prevention gatekeeper training is typically thought of as a part of a larger suicide prevention strategy (Isaac et al., 2009). Gatekeeper training is designed to enhance participants’ capacities and skills in recognizing and responding to a person in distress or suicidal crisis and refer them to formal mental health care when needed.
Through this study, I learned about the importance of bringing context, as Hawe, Bond and Butler (2009) suggest, to the foreground, instead of it being background or as a secondary consideration. Each community held its own history of, and relationship to, suicide prevention work. Some communities had experienced a death by suicide, which served to mobilize community efforts towards life promotion activities. Others, who had experienced a death, identified that “it’s a little late to go in and do suicide-awareness training” (Ranahan & White, 2019, p. 47). Some communities were not focused on suicide as a problem and identified other factors that were inhibiting life – making the community uninhabitable. For example, a participant shared a story of facilitating a suicide prevention workshop and being interrupted by a young man attending the workshop who eloquently located the problem of suicide within a greater context stating, “‘You know how they say that suicide is about mental illness? It’s not about mental illness, it’s about having nowhere to go’” (p. 48).
Indeed, context matters. Some communities in the province were only accessible April to October as mountain passes were impassable during the winter months. Being known, word of mouth and handshakes worked well to facilitate participation in gatekeeper training, yet simultaneously confidentiality and anonymity concerns inhibited participation in small towns “where strangers are few and personal information seems to belong to everyone” (Wilson-Forsberg & Easley, 2012, p. 281). Further, during the 2017 wildfires the gatekeeper training initiative ground to a halt for a period of time part way through the 3-year effort. That summer, there was a 70-day Provincial State of Emergency and displacement of 65,000 people. Certain uncertainty.
As the standardized suicide prevention gatekeeper training workshops hit the ground, and were rolled out in these unique community contexts, those charged with implementation pivoted away from a sole focus on training and hitting the target of 20,000 trained, to creating opportunities for awareness and healing. They improvised by crafting 1-hour lunch and learn sessions at various organizations, and offering a community gathering and walk around a lake lit by mason jar lanterns to create opportunities to start the conversation about suicide. Practicing with certain uncertainty requires improvisation, pivoting in new directions, and creating opportunities to address concerns in innovative ways.
Conclusion
What does it mean for child and youth care practitioners to be ‘ready’ for practice? Or ready to prevent suicide? To be, to be well, to be well prepared, and to be well prepared for certain uncertainty.
Two decades ago, White (1997) suggested child and youth care practitioners were optimally positioned in relationships with young people who may be vulnerable to suicide. We are positioned to respond. Our relational focus serves us well to be with young people who are contemplating ending their lives. Wellness – to be well – we need to pay attention to the past, the presence and the future. Suicide – like other issues we encounter in child and youth care practice – must be seen contextually, pivoting away from uniform rote procedures towards informed improvisation and responsiveness. Our ‘readiness’ must be viewed as in constant flux. One youth work student in the mental health literacy study summed it up well: “So we’re never going to be ready. I’ve made peace with that” (Ranahan & Alsaieq, 2018, p. 7). Ready or not, here we be.
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From: Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, 33(1), 36-49
