September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month—a time to share resources and stories in an effort to shed light on this highly taboo and stigmatized topic. We want use this month to reach out to those affected by suicide, raise awareness and connect individuals with suicidal ideation to treatment services.

Throughout this month we will be talking with a number of members of the music community, and mental health support community to discuss the importance of mental health and self care. We also wanted to highlight a number of resources for anyone looking for more information, statistics, guidance, or assistance. Below are some amazing organizations that are doing incredible things to change the views of mental health, and provide assistance that so many people need.

AT HEARTSUPPORT
We Believe That We’re To:
love people, treat them kindly, heal the broken, bless those that would hate or even harm us, share generously, be honest about our flaws and failures, and care for the hurting, marginalized and oppressed.

From the beginning, Jake Luhrs had a few simple guidelines he wanted people to understand when they stepped foot into the community at HeartSupport. It doesn't matter who you are or what you believe. It doesn't matter what you've done or what's been done to you. It doesn't matter who you love. It doesn't matter the color of your skin. All of us need Support, Love, And Grace. WE’RE HERE TO HELP. AND WE HOPE YOU EXPERIENCE THAT.

HeartSupport provides a number of great resources which can be found here.

NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.
What started as a small group of families gathered around a kitchen table in 1979 has blossomed into the nation's leading voice on mental health. Today, we are an alliance of more than 600 local Affiliates and 48 State Organizations who work in your community to raise awareness and provide support and education that was not previously available to those in need.

To Write Love On Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery. Our founder, Jamie Tworkowski, didn’t set out to start a nonprofit organization. All he wanted to do was help a friend and tell her story. When Jamie met Renee Yohe, she was struggling with addiction, depression, self-injury, and suicidal thoughts.

TWLOHA has a number of resources available for individuals including a “Find Help” tool that helps people connect with free or reduced cost counseling and other mental health resources in your community.

Hope for the Day is a non-profit movement, founded by Jonny Boucher, empowering the conversation on proactive suicide prevention and mental health education. We have come to understand that suicide arises when someone perceives there are no resources available to end their suffering. Arriving at the point of suicidal crisis can stem from many different paths, all of which share a difficulty to communicate and address the psychological impact an experience is causing in someone’s daily life.

Recognizing this, Jonny rapidly formed a diverse coalition of suicide survivors, lived experience peer supporters, clinicians and advocates, who shared his pressing sense of urgency to create tangible action on suicide prevention.

Crisis Text Line is free, 24/7 support for those in crisis. Text 741741 from anywhere in the US to text with a trained Crisis Counselor. Crisis Text Line trains volunteers to support people in crisis. With over 100 million messages processed to date, we’re growing quickly, but so is the need.

Crisis Text Line was born “from the rib” of DoSomething.org, the largest organization for young people and social change. Dozens of DoSomething.org members were texting in to ask for personal help and CEO Nancy Lublin came up with the idea for Crisis Text Line and quietly launched in August 2013.

Within 4 months, Crisis Text Line was being used in all 295 area codes in the US. Two years later, Crisis Text Line spun out into a separate entity and Nancy went along with it.

If you are struggling, if you know someone that is struggling, or if you just want to be better prepared to have conversations that need to be had, we encourage everyone to look at these organizations and share this post because you never know who you might impact and who might need these resources but has been too scared to ask. Nobody has to battle these struggles alone.