‘A good conversation starts with really seeing someone’. In Assen, twenty benches will receive a plaque from Stichting 113 with that text. Assenaar and former chaplain Anne Gietema (69) took the initiative.
You can hear the birds chirping in the sun on a bench in the Asserbos. A runner runs past and salutes. Anne Gietema from Assen peers over the water of the old ice rink. Next to him is a gold plate screwed to the couch with the invitation to see and talk to someone. This should be a cure for loneliness and – in extreme cases – suicidal thoughts.
This plaque is here thanks to Gietema. He worked for thirty years at Lentis, at various locations in Groningen and North Drenthe. As a chaplain, he experienced suicides very closely. Sometimes someone took their own life despite all the conversations. “Then it feels like you are failing as a care provider. Damn, should I have done more?”
But sometimes Gietema could also make the difference between life and death. “I once spoke to a 35-year-old woman who wanted to end her life. Then I asked her, “What would your sister think about that?” Years later, the woman came back to me and said, ‘That was the question that prevented it. I found out my sister would hate it’.”
Benches by Assen
“People with suicidal thoughts often have the feeling: I am alone and no one can help me,” says Gietema. For that reason, the benches campaign ‘1K Z1E J3’ of Stichting 113 Gietema. “It is very important to make contact; see someone and say hello.”
When he discovered the campaign, he sent a message to alderman Jan Broekema via Twitter. The municipality decided to screw twenty plates onto benches in Assen. The first plaque was placed at the station during the Week against Loneliness in September.
The second came on a bench near the old ice rink in the Asserbos. Gietema suggested that location herself. It is hidden from view by a clump of undergrowth. “I often see people sitting alone here. Unnoticed. I can imagine that some people could use a good conversation.”
The other eighteen gold-coloured plates will be installed in various neighborhoods this spring. The ‘1KZ1EJ3 benches’ can also be found in many other places in the Netherlands.
Questions about death
The plaques invite you to look after each other. But how should that lead to conversations about suicide? Gietema: “Usually you already sit next to someone you know on such a bench. If you notice during a conversation that someone is having a hard time, you can ask questions. That solves a large part of the problem. Because you show understanding.”
“Then you can also talk about death. Often we find it scary to ask a question like: ‘do you ever think about death?’ What if someone says yes? Then you have to do something with it. We find that complicated.”
Fix the problem
It is important that you do not immediately try to solve the problem, says Gietema. “That is often our tendency. But someone is not waiting for that, he or she first wants to be properly understood.”
During the last ten years of his career, Gietema also taught this to other care providers, in the position of suicide prevention training coordinator. “Then we went to see: how long does it take before you start offering solutions? Often they lasted less than three minutes. It is sometimes very subtle. Solutions are already packaged in a question like: ‘Do you ever exercise?’”
The best thing is when people come up with solutions themselves, says Gietema. “That works best. You are trying to get someone to seek help. Sometimes with an organization, but sometimes also with friends or family, because they really mean something to you.”
‘To heaven?’
Gietema knows better than anyone that it can be quite complicated to have such a conversation. Before he started working at Lentis, he was a pastor in a Baptist church in Assen. Regularly an interlocutor asked him if they would get to heaven after death. “That was one tricky ask. If I said yes, it could be taken as encouragement to commit suicide. If I said ‘no’ then I left someone with a despondent feeling. Usually I played the ball back: ‘Where do you think you will end up?’”
Because of his transition from theologian to counselor, Gietema does not find the question so easy anymore. “I have fewer answers than before.”
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