Aimee Johnson is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has more than 20 years of experience, from direct clinical practice with youth, families and adults in crisis and working with military service members, Veterans and their families. Aimee has worked both in the private sector and for the federal government, most recently at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs where she led a portfolio of work to include short-term strategies to reach high risk populations. She serves as a national subject matter expert with specific focus on firearm suicide prevention and lethal means safety strategies, creating and launching media campaigns, building, leading and implementing public private partnerships and leveraging innovation to bring new strategies to the field of suicide prevention. 

The work that Aimee does is personal. Her late grandfather and his brother survived the Holocaust after losing their immediate family and many others. American service members liberated them after a miraculous escape from the Nazis. Aimee has always felt a need to be of service to our American military, Veterans and service members from any country who embody freedom and democracy. Those who serve for a mission greater than self give so many people another chance at living. She believes that people in crisis deserve another chance at life. She experienced her first suicide loss in high school and has always felt that people who are in crisis don’t want to die, they want the pain they are experiencing to end. Helping people over the course of her career find hope and recovery has been an honor. 

The PsychArmor Resource of the Week is the PsychArmor course Suicide Prevention and the Safe Storage of Firearms in the Military-Connected Community: Conversations for Everyone. This course provides critical information for members of every community about the safe storage of firearms. When people are in crisis, honest conversations about accessibility to lethal means for suicide are vitally important. This short course, jointly narrated by four people from different cultures – including military Veterans, non-Veterans, gun owners, non-gun owners, and clinical psychologists – aims to reduce the hesitation we often feel in talking to those we are worried about, through education. Everyone who is worried about someone in their lives should feel confident in having frank, open conversations about firearms and their safe storage – and know with certainty that those conversations save lives.

You can find a link to the resource here: https://learn.psycharmor.org/courses/suicide-prevention-and-the-safe-storage-of-firearms-conversations-for-everyone

 

This episode is sponsored by PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory with custom training options for organizations.

Our theme music Don’t Kill the Messenger was written and performed by Navy Veteran Jerry Maniscalco, in cooperation with Operation Encore, a non profit committed to supporting singer/songwriter and musicians across the military and Veteran communities.