Jess Stohlmann-Rainey

Jess Stohlmann-Rainey (she/her) loves to talk about suicide. She is a mad, fat, queer, feminist, witch, and care worker. She is currently an instructor in the University of Denver Graduate School of Professional Psychology and the Director of Program Development at Rocky Mountain Crisis Partners (which provides the statewide crisis and peer support lines, RAINN hotline, Colorado Lifeline, and other telephonic and online emotional support services). She has focused her career on creating pathways to intersectional, justice-based, emotional support for marginalized communities. Jess centers her lived expertise as an ex-patient and suicide attempt survivor in her work.

Jess's work has been featured in Mad in America, Radical Abolitionist, No Restraints with Rudy Caseres, Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Centers, Postvention in Action: The International Handbook of Suicide Bereavement, Crisis, and The Suicide Prevention Resource Center. She collaborates on a podcast called Suicide ‘n’ Stuff with Dese’Rae Stage from Live Through Thisughthis.org/). She holds the Lived Experience seat on Colorado’s Suicide Prevention Commission, and was the winner of the 2019 American Association of Suicidology Transforming Lived Experience Award, and the 2019 Cookie Gant and Bill Compton LGBTQIA Leadership Award for Excellence in Promoting Diversity and Inclusion.

Jess lives as a white settler on the unceded territory of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux) people, (Denver, Colorado). She has focused her career on creating pathways to intersectional, justice-based, emotional support for marginalized communities, and believes mutual aid, disability justice, abolition, and other liberation ideologies are integral to solve the problems that lead to suicide. She has particular interest in talking/thinking/collaborating about epistemology, capitalism, and ethics in the context of suicidology.