The publication this week of the suicide prevention strategy for England is a hugely positive step, not just for those of us who work in this area but for the country as a whole, because suicide prevention is everyone’s business.
More than 5,000 people in England take their own life each year and one in five adults say they have felt suicidal at some point in their lives. At Samaritans we answer a call for help every 10 seconds, and last year there wasn’t a single second when a Samaritan wasn’t on a call.
But, tragically, suicide remains the biggest killer of men under 50 and this isn’t the only concern: rates among women are increasing, and suicide is the biggest killer of young people aged between 16 and 24. So the fact the government is taking the issue seriously enough to warrant its own strategy is exactly what is needed.
In particular, I welcome the inclusion of a “no wrong door” approach, an ambition in the strategy we at Samaritans have been pushing hard for. Far too often, people have told us they can find it difficult or impossible to get support. This may be because they have been actively excluded from certain services as a result of self-harming or using alcohol, or because they simply aren’t taken seriously, and they are turned away from getting help at the earliest opportunity. This has to change.
While published by the Department of Health and Social Care, the new strategy is actually cross-governmental, and this is really important. Two-thirds of people who die by suicide haven’t been in touch with mental health services in the year before they die, but many will have been in touch with a public service: the job centre, the education system, social services, a GP, the criminal justice system or others.
All government departments have a crucial part to play, and a commitment to ensuring all frontline workers from the Department for Work and Pensions are trained in mental health and suicide prevention is really positive. But better still would be a commitment from across government that all frontline public-service workers are trained in suicide prevention.
Improved suicide data collection also has real potential to help us drive down suicide rates. Official death registration data can take more than a year to receive, and the 2022 suicide registration data is already delayed. The government committed £1.2m to a national real-time surveillance system in 2021, so getting to the point where the system will be able to respond to new trends in suspected suicides as they start to emerge is well overdue.
Of course, there will always be policies that either don’t go far enough or don’t even get a mention. In my response to the plan’s publication, I shared my fear that a plan without proper funding is like a car with no petrol – it’s not going to get you where you need to be.
The strategy itself may be new, but a lot of the funding mentioned is old; about to run out, such as the £57m that has funded vital local work for the past few years and comes to an end in March; or, in the case of the £10m pot for suicide prevention charities, already announced. And while this funding for the voluntary and community sector is, of course, welcome and absolutely critical, it won’t go nearly far enough, which is why I am urging the chancellor to make the renewal of the suicide prevention funding an urgent priority in his autumn statement. This local funding would cost as little as £1.40 per person in England.
We would also like to see self-harm specifically addressed. Self-harm rates are rising, particularly for young people, and in 2022 one in 15 calls for help to Samaritans discussed self-harm. Self-harm is a sign of serious emotional distress and is a strong risk factor for suicide.
And yet young people seeking support with self-harm have told us they have been pushed around the health system – being deemed too high-risk for primary care, such as their GP, and not high-risk enough for specialist care. We would therefore have liked to have seen the creation of dedicated hubs for young people in the strategy, aimed at helping those who self-harm and providing them with support they can access directly within their own communities.
Finally, a big thing we believe to be lacking from the government is a really bold ambition that we can all work towards. Our goal at Samaritans is to see the lowest ever suicide rates recorded in England, and we wanted the strategy to have set this down in black and white. While the document commits to lowering suicide rates over the next two and half years, we can, and simply must, do better.
We have seen progress over the years, but currently suicide rates in England are as high now as they were 20 years ago. This isn’t good enough. We now know far more about suicide and what works to prevent it. As a result of the new strategy, we will have better systems in place to enable us to respond, so let’s not settle for lower, let’s aim for the lowest ever rate of suicides – and when we have reached that, let us continue to strive for even lower. Suicide is preventable. We need to ensure the strategy gives us the opportunity to save as many lives as possible.
Julie Bentley is the chief executive of Samaritans
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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