Rose Rowkins

Who are you?

Hi, I'm Rose Rowkins and I'm on a mission to prevent suicides, one conversation at a time. And when I'm not busily doing that, I am a lover of travel soon to be in my new camper van. Again, I'm a lover of sunshine, beaches, festivals, dancing, music, being with my son and my husband and my friends, and keeping well in my body as well as my mind. So yoga, I've started weightlifting, bring on the menopause, and yeah, just generally being a positive person and hopefully spreading some of that joy through the world.

What is your background?

So my background is pretty varied, but actually looking back, all the roles that I've done in terms of my professional career have been in some way involving helping people and certainly involving people, but so such varied kinds of people. So very young. I became a Samaritan. I lost a really close family friend when I was a late teenager in my late teens. And so I was already really interested in what we can do to prevent suicide. At the same time, I was working for a psychology publisher, an academic publisher, and I loved it, but I was selling these books and I really wanted to be reading the books, maybe even writing the books one day and 10 years later. Sure enough, when I was training to be a counsellor, my entire reading list was the books I used to sell. In the meantime though, I went off, I became an English teacher just for a change of scene, and I taught English in England, but also all across the Middle East, living in my camper van at the time. So stopping across the Sahara Desert whenever we broke down, which was often to teach people English. And what I found was that no matter where I was in the world, people just seemed to be comfortable coming to me and sharing their problems, unburdening themselves. And so when I got back to the UK and I started, I was leading then on a couple of frontline award-winning mental health projects down in Brighton. That love of just those one-to-one conversations, helping people just never left me. It just grew and grew. So then when I was a counsellor working with teenagers, that need in me was fulfilled and I could really see the impact I was having on these young people. I then had a year in Australia, and that was in some ways a dream come true. But it was also for me personally, very quickly the dream became a nightmare, and it was my darkest time. It's when I became the closest I've ever come to suicide and I got the help I needed. And when I came home, yeah, I took on another management role for the wellbeing service in my city. And Covid hit didn't it? And then with Covid, and I was also a new mom at the time, everything changed and I reassessed what's important, who's important to me, and I found myself doing what I do now.

Why did you become a suicide prevention trainer?

As you can imagine, most people who I work with in this area, I guess my drive was through personal experience of having lost a really close friend in my teens and then nearly losing people in my twenties, thirties, and then my own struggles as I got older. And I guess there's something about through my career history and just as I grew and got to know people all over the world, I just had this stronger and stronger pull towards helping directly people who are thinking of suicide. But more than that, having greater impact by helping anybody who might be encountering people who are thinking of suicide. So yeah, bringing together, I guess all my experience and expertise in educating, in training, but also in mental health and specifically suicide prevention. So bringing those two things together just feels like a calling for me, like a vocation. I actually really have no choice but to be doing this.

How big of a problem is suicide?

What training do you provide?