Voices For Suicide Prevention

A firearm is part of everyday life for many, many Ohioans, from police officers to hunters to competitive shooters.   That also means it’s part of Ohio’s suicide prevention reality, with about 60% of suicides involving a firearm and very little room for a second chance. We wanted a conversation that doesn’t lecture, doesn’t stereotype, and doesn’t turn into a political shouting match, so we brought in people who’ve been doing the work where trust actually lives; in OSPF's Life Side Ohio campaign.

Scott Light and our new co-host Sol Tsonis sit down with Daniel Bennett, OSPF Chief Strategy Officer and lifelong outdoorsman, plus Joe King, an executive at Black Wing Shooting Center and a longtime Life Side Ohio partner. Together, we unpack a campaign designed by gun owners for gun owners.  We reduce stigma, open doors to help, and create practical pathways to support our three pillar communities: firearm retailers, veterans, and first responders (police, fire and EMS)

We dig into what retailers see when someone is struggling, why “signs and cards” often miss the mark, and how peer-to-peer conversations can connect people to trusted clinicians and crisis resources like the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Then we get specific about a major win: Ohio’s Keep Them Safe Act (Senate Bill 273), a unanimously passed law that supports voluntary, temporary firearm storage through participating retailers.  We also talk safe storage, lockboxes, community partnerships, and what real progress looks like when people stop assuming the worst about each other.

If you care about suicide prevention, firearm safety, veterans’ mental health, or building community solutions, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with someone who needs a practical option, and leave a review to help more listeners find our conversation.

Hope can feel useless right before it becomes the thing that saves you. We sit down with Pristina Jackson, a military veteran, recovery advocate, and mental health speaker, to talk about what it means to grow up in trauma, spend years in survival mode, and still build a life that feels worth staying for.

Pristina walks us through homelessness and joining the Navy for stability, then the slow slide into despair, suicidal ideation, and the exhausting cycle of trying to get help while symptoms keep spilling over. We talk candidly about hospitalization, medication, and the messy middle where you want relief more than you want answers. Her perspective is grounded in suicide prevention and lived experience: sometimes you need other people to hope for you until you can hold hope again.

We also unpack addiction recovery in plain language, including substance use and gambling addiction, and why compulsive behaviors often start as “fun” before they become isolating. Christina shares a line we cannot stop thinking about: connection isn’t always protection. That leads us into social media doomscrolling, algorithms, and why endless stimulation can keep a stressed nervous system stuck in a loop. From relapse to rebuilding, she explains why transparency matters, why secrets feed shame, and how community, therapy, and honest self-reflection create real change.

If you or someone you love is navigating trauma recovery, veteran mental health, depression, anxiety, or addiction, this conversation offers both validation and practical steps. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a reason to stay, and leave a review to help more people find it. What’s one “glimmer” you’re holding onto right now?

A power line job can mean 16 hour days, severe weather callouts, and making split second safety decisions while you’re exhausted. So what happens when a company treats mental health as part of workplace safety instead of a “nice to have” benefit?

We sit down with Laura Arenschield, Vice President of Customer Experience at AEP Ohio, and Jon Griffith, Assistant Vice President at Werth PR, to unpack a workplace suicide prevention and mental wellness pilot created with the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation. They share how the partnership started, what their research uncovered about employee trust, and why leadership has to be visible and personal if you want to reduce stigma and get people to use real support like an Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

You’ll hear the behind the scenes choices that made the campaign work for field crews, not just office staff: supervisor talking points at morning safety meetings, letters mailed to employees’ homes, intranet articles that actually got read, and videos from leaders who chose vulnerability over polish. We also dig into results, including a big jump in awareness, stronger recognition that leadership is communicating about mental health, and incremental increases in EAP usage.

We close with what comes next: sustaining the message, planning for postvention after a suicide loss, and how resources like Together Through Grief, 988, and scalable communications toolkits can help workplaces across Ohio. If this conversation helped you, subscribe, share it with a leader or coworker, and leave a review so more people can find it.

A teen is scrolling at 1 a.m., feeling overwhelmed, and the difference between spiraling and reaching out can come down to one thing: remembering a simple, trustworthy option. That’s why we’re introducing “Nate” (spelled N88), the new youth-focused awareness campaign to promote the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.     

Stephanie and Scott are joined by OSPF Youth Advisory Council members Kelsey Shreve and Colson Smith, two of the creators behind the campaign. They walk us through what teens tune out, what they notice, and why older-style suicide prevention messaging can feel too harsh or too vague to land. We talk about attention span, short social posts, and the power of a recognizable character. Kelsey shares how N88's design came together and how color, expression, and even a mustache can make a crisis resource feel less intimidating.

The new slogan says it plainly: it’s never too late to call, text, or chat 988.   You’ll hear the campaign ad and the pride that comes with seeing student-created prevention work reach real communities.

Subscribe for more real talk on suicide prevention, share this with a trusted adult, and leave a review so more listeners can find 988 when it matters most.

Older adults have the highest suicide rates in the United States, and we still don’t treat that fact with the urgency it deserves. We sit down with Dr. Jessica Haberman (VA psychologist), Lisa Castro, and Tim Leonard from the Ohio Department of Aging to name what too often goes unsaid: depression is not a normal part of aging, and “they’ve lived a full life” is not an excuse to look away.

We dig into the biggest suicide risk factors for older adults and older Ohioans, including social isolation and loneliness, grief and life transitions like retirement, substance use, and the heavy toll of chronic medical conditions and chronic pain. We also talk about older veteran suicide risk, why lethal means safety matters, and how the COVID era intensified isolation and reduced people’s sense of trust.

Then we get practical with the newly released, Ohio Older Adult Toolkit:  https://www.ohiospf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Identifying-and-Reducing-Suicide-Risk-in-Older-Ohioans-Pages1.pdf .

It provides resources, conversation starters, advocacy and education.   We break down what warning signs can look like in real life, how to start the hard conversation and why “practicing the pause” helps someone open up. We also share how providers, aging services professionals, and everyday community spaces like senior centers, libraries, faith communities, and caregiver networks can build connection, and make it easier to reach help.

If you want concrete next steps and a clear path from concern to action, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with someone who supports older adults, and leave a review so more people can find these suicide prevention tools.

A phone app that helps cut suicide attempts by more than half sounds like science fiction until you hear the data and the design choices behind it. We sit down with Dr. Seth Feuerstein (Yale School of Medicine) to talk about OTX202, a clinician-supported suicide prevention app developed in collaboration with Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.  It's built to deliver suicide-specific therapy skills after hospitalization and other high-risk periods.

We walk through why proven suicide interventions often fail to reach people who need them most.  We also dig into stigma and the “why would they do that?” trap, using a striking medical analogy: suicidal crisis as an arrhythmia-like state of the brain.  Dangerous?  Yes.  Treatable?  Yes.  Finally, we get practical about implementation and where artificial intelligence may fit next, with ethics and safety front and center. If you care about mental health, digital therapeutics, and evidence-based suicide prevention, subscribe, share this episode with someone who works in care, and leave a review so more people can find these conversations.

If you’ve ever wondered why some mental health programs actually stick while others fade after a single event, this conversation is for you and your organization. We’re joined by Fran Frazier of the Black Girl Rising Research Project and Rebecca Jones, Child and Adolescent Services Director with the Mental Health Addiction and Recovery Services Board of Lorain County.  This episode is centered on what it takes to support African American girls with honesty, rigor, and care.

We start with the reality many Black girls face in Ohio: higher exposure to trauma, community violence, instability, and chronic stress. Then we move to what doesn’t get enough airtime in suicide prevention and youth mental health work: resilience, leadership, and the power of being taken seriously. Fran shares how decades of research and listening shaped a girl-led model that replaces lectures with facilitation. 

Rebecca walks us through what it looks like to bring Black Girl Rising into a new community with fidelity, including Love Letters to Black Girls, mother-daughter conversations, and the long-game goal of growing girls grow into ambassadors. 

Subscribe, share this with someone who cares about youth wellbeing, and leave a review so more listeners can find these suicide prevention conversations.

Autistic people are at higher risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, yet too many support systems still treat autism and mental health as separate worlds. Stepanie and Scott sit down with Lisa Morgan, an autistic adult and founder of the Autism and Suicide Prevention Work Group, and Dr. Brenna Maddox, a clinical psychologist and co-chair of the work group, to talk about what that gap looks like in real life and how to close it.

We unpack how language preferences differ, why a strengths-based view of autism matters, and how the social model and neurodiversity-affirming care can replace the harmful idea that autistic people need to be 'fixed'. Then we go straight at the misconceptions that can increase suicide risk, including the dangerous habit of skipping suicide risk questions just because someone is autistic. We also explore a theme we hear again and again: invalidation. Not being believed can be constant, and it can push suicidal ideation higher. 

Our conversation is very practical too. Some warning signs can look different for autistic people, including intense internal crisis paired with a calm exterior, and alexithymia that makes emotions hard to name. We point listeners to autism-specific crisis support resources, including guidance for using the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and tools like a reasons-for-living worksheet that can help even when therapy is hard to access. If you care about autism suicide prevention, share this conversation, subscribe for more, and leave a review so more people can find these resources when they need them most.

Overnight personality changes are every parent’s nightmare, especially when the symptoms don’t fit a neat box. Scott and Stephanie are joined by Gabriella True, President and founding Board Member of Aspire, to explain PANS and PANDAS in plain language and with hard-earned honesty.  Gabriella brings professional advocacy plus lived experience as a mom of twins impacted by PANS and as someone who has dealt with PANS/PANDAS symptoms herself.

We dig into what makes pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome so alarming: sudden OCD, restricted eating, and complex tics that can arrive with severe separation anxiety, rage, urinary changes, and mood swings. We talk about why some kids don’t show “typical” infection signs, how strep and other triggers can set off a neuroimmune response, and why calling these shifts “symptoms” instead of “behavior” can change how families and clinicians respond.

Gabriella also walks us through today’s treatment framework including infectious triggers and reducing inflammation alongside careful psychiatric support.  The conversation doesn’t skip the hardest part: suicide risk, the reality of hospitalization, and the urgent need for coordinated medical and mental health care.

If this helps you put words to what you’re seeing at home, share it with someone who needs it, subscribe for more conversations like this, and leave a review so more families can find these resources when time matters most.

A raw, generous conversation with iHeart radio personality and OSPF ambassador Sol Tsonis that transforms stigma into strategy and rock bottom into a starting line. Sol takes us into the moments that shaped her mental health journey—from early depression and anxiety in her teens to the deliberate, imperfect climb toward stability.

We talk about the turning points that matter: choosing a short course of medication as a bridge, returning to therapy until the fit clicked, and cleaning up friendships and habits that kept her stuck. Sol reframes self-care as maintenance, not luxury—movement to burn off stress, gratitude to anchor attention, and scheduled “me time”.   She pairs heart with data, reminding us that activity, social connection, and rest are directly tied to longer, healthier lives.

Sol also pulls back the curtain on social media’s highlight reel and the comparison traps that steal joy. Her fix is useful honesty: practical tips on seasonal depression, phone limits, and micro-habits that turn scrolling into learning.  If you’re struggling silently, you’ll hear a clear path forward: tell one trusted person, try therapy even when you’re “fine,” and choose one daily practice that protects your spark.

If this conversation gives you hope or a next step, share it with someone you love and subscribe for more real talk on mental health and suicide prevention.