#SPSM chat will be doing a special innovation chat, 5/3/15, 9pm CST. A “Night Without Stigma” is an #SPSM braintrust project designed to spark and curate innovative suicide prevention ideas from our community of suicide prevention thought influencers. We want you to be on this chat, and we want you to bring your most creative, daring, and flexible thinking.

Stigma!!! STIGMA!!! #Stigma

If talking about stigma, and busting stigma, and overcoming stigma were really at the center of preventing suicide, then shouldn’t we expect that our field’s decades long, intense focus on stigma would have made a dent in suicide rates?

It’s easier to talk about suicide publically than ever before, and it continues to get easier using platforms such as social media. We are elevating and extending the conversation about suicide to places it has never been before.

But the suicide rates doesn’t seem to budge. So, during this #SPSM chat, we will use social media to have a conversation about innovations that could reduce the suicide rate, but WITHOUT EVER FALLING BACK ON THE STIGMA STRAWMAN.

It is entirely plausible that developing effective and available interventions for #ZeroSuicide are what will end stigma about suicide (and not the other way around). So let’s have a #NightWithoutStigma.

Here is the plan: The moderators will pose four questions about innovation and change in suicide prevention. #SPSM-ers will be encouraged to comment creatively, and irreverently. The goal is to shake loose new thinking and new ideas.

When someone falls back on “But STIGMA!” then our mod, @BartAndrews has some fun and games planned to redirect the conversation.

We will periodically revisit these ideas and conversations with the goal of shaking loose different ideas in the hope of finding *better* ideas.

I’d rather be wrong, and fail a million different ways, then fail the same way over and over. Stigma is real, and is causes real difficulty in preventing suicide, but focusing on it may not be the whole enchilada when it comes to moving the needle on #ZeroSuicide.

Bring your voice, bring your ideas, and please bring your creativity to a #NightWithoutStigma.

The Tweets for this chat will be archived on Storify.