‘ <i>Resilience is action taken together</i> ’ results of a dialogue-based study on community factors shaping resilience in the context of youth suicide prevention

Suicide is a leading cause of death among children and youth around the world, and is centred within the Sustainable Development Goals. While research consistently shows the importance of external, intersecting factors that shape youth resilience, much work in this field remains vague and focused downstream. Situated within a community-based partnership and grounded in critical pedagogies, this research invited young people and caring adults into deliberative dialogues about how resilience-promoting communities look and feel. Our goal was to centre youth voices, illuminating their ideas about wellness and suicide prevention. The study brought 31 people into four dialogues: four school aged youth (15–18); nine emerging adults (19–24); nine caring adults; and nine community service providers. Contributors described resilience as a set of collective actions involving three mutually-reinforcing actions: cultivating belonging; cultivating connection; and promoting a positive social climate. These concepts were the essence of how resilience-promotion looks and feels. People in all four dialogues explored this idea of resilience as action taken together, reinforcing these three conditions as points of intervention to promote collective thriving and invest in upstream prevention of suicidality. This relational and upstream conceptualization of resilience-as-action serves to shift the ways communities organize around youth suicide prevention. Shifting conceptualizations of resilience upstream and toward resilience-promoting communities opens new ways of conceptualizing interventions to promote youth mental health. Doing so requires us to embrace solidarity, collective and population-level strategies, and place-based interventions that disentangle knots of social and structural determinants of health.