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Progress to Practice

This World Suicide Prevention Day 2025 Special episode explores the three critical mindset shifts that bring suicide prevention from concept to care.

First, the shift from prediction to prevention — moving beyond static categories of “low, medium, high” risk to dynamic, forward-focused conversations that anticipate what lies ahead.

Second, the shift from past to future — learning from history but ensuring time is spent preparing for the immediate days and weeks where safety can truly be shaped.

Third, the shift from deficits to assets — not only naming what is wrong, but reconnecting people to their strengths, values, and relationships that hold them in distress.

Together, these shifts are woven into a deeper transformation: from TOP (The Only Professional) to TAP (Together As Partners). Relational safety grows not through control, but through shared responsibility, dignity, and connection.

This special episode also reflects on Creating Hope Through Action — a new song released on 10 September 2025 to mark World Suicide Prevention Day. Inspired by the idea that hope lives in small, shared actions, the song invites us all to consider how we can nurture hope for ourselves and for others.

We close by setting the stage for the next episode, where we’ll explore the four guiding tasks of the STEPS model: Step, Source, Span, and Scenario — practical anchors for turning mindset into method, and hope into action.

Connect with Assoc Prof Manaan Kar Ray on Linkedin
Follow us on www.progress.guide

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A Song for World Suicide Prevention Day

Released on 10 September 2025 for World Suicide Prevention Day, this original song captures the heart of this year’s theme: Creating Hope Through Action.

Hope has been described by poets as the thing with feathers, fragile yet enduring. But hope is more than a feeling — it is something we create together through the choices we make, the questions we ask, and the care we offer one another.

This song is our tribute to those we have lost, to those who are struggling, and to those who continue to work each day to build safer, kinder communities. It reminds us that prevention is not about prediction, but about presence. That dignity lies not only in survival, but in reclaiming connection, meaning, and agency.

May this song be a reminder that hope is not abstract. It is actionable. And each of us, in our own ways, can take part in creating it.

Lyrics:

Creating Hope Through Action

Verse 1
We remember the names, the lives, the years,
Stories carried through silence and tears.
No label, no number can capture their song,
Their voices remind us we all belong.

Verse 2
Hope, Emily said, is a bird in the soul,
A feathered companion that sings and consoles.
But hope is not only a whisper or rhyme,
It lives in our actions, it grows over time.

Chorus
Hope is not waiting, it’s what we create,
In each small action, in love we demonstrate.
Together we carry the flame through the night,
Creating hope through action, in each other’s light.

Verse 3
The past is a teacher, but the future’s our thread,
Woven in moments, in words we have said.
Not just what is broken, but what still survives,
The ember of meaning that keeps us alive.

Bridge
From silence to speaking, from shadows to sight,
We find in each other the courage to fight.
Not one hand alone, but all hands combined,
A circle of safety, a thread redefined.

Chorus
Hope is not waiting, it’s what we create,
In each small action, in love we demonstrate.
Together we carry the flame through the night,
Creating hope through action, in each other’s light.

Outro
For the lives we’ve lost, for the lives we save,
Hope is the thread we choose to brave.

Final Chorus
Hope is not waiting, it’s what we create,
In each small action, in love we demonstrate.
Together we carry the flame through the night,
Creating hope through action, in each other’s light.

Connect with Assoc Prof Manaan Kar Ray on Linkedin
Follow us on www.progress.guide

Would love to hear your thoughts...

This episode is a deliberate pause: a chance to gather the threads of Ari’s journey and see the STEPS model as a whole. We begin with the heart of any assessment—the room between two people. We explore relational safety as a felt sense created by presence, tone, pacing, and transparency, and we name the real tension clinicians hold: the story that needs to unfold and the structure we need to make good decisions.

From there, we model a balanced stance—curious, compassionate, and clear—drawing on the posture of motivational interviewing. We show how narrative first honours meaning, and how validity techniques (used gently and transparently) help complete the jigsaw: normalisation, shame attenuation, behavioural incident, gentle assumption, denial of the specific, and symptom amplification.

We introduce B4Now, a simple time-window scaffold (Day 1, Two Weeks, Three Months, Before, Now) that weaves story into structure—especially when time is short or memory is scattered. We name common pitfalls (all heart/no map; all map/no heart; cannon questions; hidden agendas; premature reassurance) and how to repair them.

Then we revisit each phase—FABRIC, THREAD, NEEDLE, TIP, MEND, FLOW—before hearing Ari’s reflection in her own words: continuation is not neat, but it is possible.

We close by previewing what comes next: three practice shifts that deepen STEPS in real-world care—from prediction to prevention, from past to future, and from deficits to assets—alongside four guiding tasks that help us see not just the tear, but the tapestry in motion.

Connect with Assoc Prof Manaan Kar Ray on Linkedin
Follow us on www.progress.guide