Video Transcript: What is the LEN?

[Acknowledgement of Country: We acknowledge that our work takes place on lands that are under colonial occupation and that sovereignty has never been ceded. We hope to pay our deepest respects to Boon Wurrung Elders, past and present, and wish to extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People across this Country we know as Australia.]

Joe: This is a unique offering, this is a really unique offering and, ultimately, if we are going to reduce the suicides in this country, we need to have an intersectional approach to it and that includes an LGBTIQA+ approach.

Anna: It’s probably one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.

[Title sequence - Switchboard’s Victoria’s National LGBTIQA+ Lived Experience Network: What is the Lived Experience Network?]

Joe: My name is Joe Ball, I’m also transgender and I use the pronouns he/him.

Mia: My name is Mia and I’m the Lived Experience Facilitator here at Switchboard for the National Lived Experience of Suicide Network.

Anna: My name is Anna Bernasochi; I set up the Lived Experience Network in 2021.

Joe: There is a very queer experience of suicide because of homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, intersexism, queerphobia... These things are not things that everybody experiences, but we experience them.

Anna: We know for our communities that we haven’t had spaces to connect around loss, to connect around distress, to connect about being carers. In the suicide prevention landscape, there wasn’t space for collective voices and collective advocacy from anyone who had an experience of themselves that sat outside the mainstream idea of what lived experience was.

Joe: We had people around us who had been giving their lived experience expertise in that broader sector and weren’t having a great time.

Anna: It felt very much like we were stepping into a space where we would have to educate our way to having visibility. We set it up very deliberately because at that point in time we were running a project to codesign a website, that website’s called CHARLEE. It was pushing up against the resources that exist that come from a clinical lens or don’t centre LGBTIQA+ community into how we care for each other, how we care for our loved ones, or what it’s like for us after a suicide loss.

What I think is distinct about the LGBTIQA+ Lived Experience Network, and what we’re advocating for in the broader lived experience movement, is actually to have unified voices that bring together diverse experiences and that work in solidarity towards changing structures and systems and power dynamics that don’t serve anyone.

Mia: There’s something unique about the Network that enables that richness in stories and a messiness in stories.

Joe: LEN is breaking the stigma, it is being a voice, it’s being a safe voice and, yeah, I couldn’t be more proud of it.

[End Titles:

The National LGBTQIA+ Lived Experience Network is a community of LGBTQIA+ people with lived experience of suicide, working to share their story and experiences to help advocate and shape LGBTIQA+ suicide prevention work.

We would love to have you join us.

Visit charlee.org.au or email livedexperience@switchboard.org.au to learn more.

Filmed and edited by May as Well Productions.]

End transcript.