According to NAMI it's suicide _prevention_ month....which I guess is slightly different than awareness....except this is what they wrote on their website:
"Each September, NAMI recognizes Suicide Prevention Month as a time to raise awareness, spread hope, and spark meaningful action around one of the most urgent mental health issues of our time."
lol
Yeah, if you are a "Prevention" organization that your goals aren't to prevent anything... you're doing something wrong.
It's so "urgent" that they do very little beyond hand-waving, parades, and platitudes.
I imagine this in other areas...
The Fire Department should have a "Fire Prevention Month" where they raise awareness of fires. They don't actually put out any fires during that month, though, they just raise awareness and tell people how fires are bad and such. It's a crisis of fires that people need to be more aware of! Only you can prevent forest fires, but let's not actually go prevent any... just watch the world burn that month... but tell people it's bad and happening... Awareness!
When you think about it... the movie "The Purge" is kind of "Crime Awareness" in that they set aside a day to make people aware of crime by allowing it to happen freely and without repercussion.
We humans spend so much time and money on awareness and patting ourselves on the bad for thinking we are good... and doing very little most of the time to actually fix things. Most of the time the undesirables are easily swept under the rug and ignored until every once in a while they have an "awareness" event.
Suicide Prevention/Awareness is little more than Flag Day... wave some flags, play some music, roast hot dogs, and take five minutes to act like you care... then go back to normal operations.
Remember the Alamo? No? They always say "Remember the Alamo" but those three words is really all that stuck... Or when 9/11 happened, it became "Never Forget" except, what were we supposed to not forget? I don't know... but Never Forget! Ironically, during the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the first responders were applauded as heroes, especially by politicians looking for photo ops and donations to their campaigns... but behind the scenes, firefighters, police, paramedics, all the first responders who worked in the area that day... were suffering (the ones who didn't die that day of course) from all kinds of complications that came from working the area and trying to save people and restore order and safety to the area... and those first responders and their families are STILL fighting to this day to get medical care...but, you know, Never forget! Except when you forget the fuck about them.
