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Today's workshop was about looking out for those who are falling into suicidal ideation. Shantel Neal reports:

Since the start of the week 33 government workers have been participating in the inaugural "Train the Trainers" Workshop hosted by the Department of Human Development, aimed at Suicidal Assessment and Safety planning. We spoke to Onando St. Bernard, Counseling Coordinator, who told us that that the training will help to prepare government workers to do suicide assessments within their offices in an effort to reduce the number of suicides within work place.

Onando St. Bernard, Counseling Coordinator, Human Development
"The reason why we want to do this is because year to year more or you have about 36 suicides happening in the country so again this is the government doing its part in making sure that we can bring those numbers down. Anything more than 0 is too much and so we continue to push this to fight this. So this something we want to do on a yearly basis to continue helping individuals and with these fantastic individuals they will be able to do suicidal assessments they'll be able to catch the risk factors and so they catch the risk factors, they do the assessments they do the safety plan and then they refer to the counselors, psychologist, psychiatrist who would then be able to take on working with that individual. So in doing this they get to work with their staff, so we are looking after government workers. We want to make sure the government workers are looked after and as government worker work with the public then they can also see these things with the very clients and customers that government workers work with so that we can also provide help and assistance when we see things."

Mental health counselor Caryl Brannon finds the training valuable in assessing potential suicide risks.

Caryl Brannon, Mental Health Counselor
"I believe this is a beneficial training because the participants here are public officers, are administrative assistants and administrative officers who deal with everybody within their ministry. So being able to observe people who are displaying certain behaviors, being able to know what to look for in certain conversations and to assess that risk and to connect with the proper services to get assistance I think is very very beneficial."

"Well for me it's the safety plan particularly. I would already do safety planning but one of the takeaway here is an actual template for the safety plan and also sharing that with the person you are working with."

And to assist with the safety planning, St Bernard says, that the training guide being offered is necessary in educating the participants on how to conduct suicide assessments.

Onando St. Bernard, Counseling Coordinator, Human Development
"Our training guide looks at educating them on the suicide assessments and the safety plans and the training manual also teach them on how to carry out a training so that they are effective. So the whole point of this as well is to give them that confidence so that if somebody says to them "I want to kill myself", they know what to do they are not nervous they know exactly what to do, they are going to give that top notch help so that we can save lives."

The training ends on Friday.