Our Contributors for One Team Gov Suicide Prevention #WSPD2020
On 10 September One Team Gov will be running an event on the theme of Suicide Prevention, find out about our first set of collaborators here
10 September is World Suicide Prevention Day, designed to raise awareness of the human tragedy of suicide and also raise awareness of (practical) steps we can all take to help save lives.
This blog post showcases the
event #OTGSP #WSPD2020 taking place on 10 September 2020 at 2–5pm. It will:- provide some context for the event,
- highlight some of our excellent Contributors,
- emphasise how everyone can help to ‘make a difference’ in preventing suicides, and,
- explain why you should click through to register for the event…without delay! [Link below]
Some background
Based on recorded deaths by suicide — and accuracy of data is just one of the many issues we see in the area of suicide prevention— someone takes their own life, somewhere in the world, every 40 seconds. This is despite most deaths by suicide being preventable.
Actions we can take include completing the evidence-based, peer-reviewed, NHS-endorsed, online suicide prevention training (can you you spare 20 minutes to help save a life?!) from the Zero Suicide Alliance (ZSA) below.
It has had 1.3 million completions, half of these during COVID19 Lockdown:
Why are we doing this?
In 2020, One Team Gov has prioritised (workplace) mental health and wellbeing within our objectives, and suicide prevention is one part of this strand of work. Many of our regular UK breakfast meetings each Wednesday (online since Lockdown) have naturally featured mental health and wellbeing issues, because One Team Gov Members have raised them unprompted as key issues they wanted to discuss. The meetups have necessarily taken on a role of regular peer-support for our community, and we wanted to enhance that.
On Wed 19 August, we held an extended breakfast meeting focused more specifically on suicide prevention. 97 people attended, including Mental Health First Aiders from across many government departments and agencies. This breakfast meetup created the space for discussion, ideas and thoughts about how to promote suicide prevention and wider wellness issues. At the meetup we also launched the Wellbeing Support Grid that can be used by Mental Health First Aiders or Mental Health Advocates working with friends or colleagues, or by individuals to test the strength of your support network.
You will find the Wellbeing Support Grid here:
A little about our Contributors
The #OTGSP #WSPD2020 event will have many fantastic Contributors including key suicide prevention organisations, leaders within government, national and local charities, digital mental health specialists, and people ‘with lived experience of suicide’; some who’ve lost loved ones or colleagues.
We’re really pleased to announce the first 8 confirmed speakers for the event, in what will be a thought-provoking and packed event on World Suicide Prevention Day.
Please note: many of our speakers have ‘lived experience of suicide’ which is included within the descriptions offered below; if you feel that you might find this information upsetting, please consider whether you want to read on.
Steve Mallen, Co-founder Zero Suicide Alliance (ZSA)
Steve lost his son Edward to suicide in 2015, just before Edward was due to take up his place at Cambridge University. Steve will draw from his experience and tell us about ZSA achievements, current focus, and future agenda.
Edward’s death highlighted failings within ‘the health and social care system’ and Steve saw a number of opportunities for improvement. Through the ZSA (which is wholly funded by the Department of Health and Social Care) and hosted by MerseyCare NHS Trust, the ‘Zero Suicide in Healthcare’ framework (first proven in the US, in Detroit, in the 2000s) has reduced the number of suicides by 30% over the past 3 years while numbers nationally have risen.
Sangeeta Mahajan, Trustee PAPYRUS
Another Contributor is Sangeeta Mahajan, who lost her son Saagar to suicide in 2014. Like Steve Mallen, Sangeeta saw at first hand ‘system failure’. In one respect, however, it was even more challenging for Sangeeta. She was an NHS Consultant, being a part of the very ‘system’ that failed her son.
Below is a talk Sangeeta gave in Northern Ireland, where she used to work. Listen with your heart, and you feel the pain of a grieving mother. Listen with your head, and you hear the forensic analysis of ‘system failure’ — if it makes you want to ‘improve ‘the system’…go for it!
Among people with lived experience of suicide, this ‘system failure’ is both a source of many negative emotions (including sadness, anger and frustration) while also being a source of hope for the future — the scope for improvement across medical, managerial, technological, and human systems, provides us with a number of opportunities to save lives.
Ian Russell, founder of the Molly Rose Foundation
Ian lost his daughter Molly to suicide at the age of 14. Ian discovered after Molly’s death just how harmful ‘the online world’ can be for someone who’s vulnerable without necessarily showing outward signs.
Like so many people losing their loved ones (or colleagues or business partners) to suicide, it’s often described by the people who knew them as “a total shock”. The signs are not obvious — which is why we need to normalise conversations around suicide prevention.
Paul Vittles — that’s me
I’ll be a Contributor to the event as well, with a short summary of my own ‘journey’ and focus, and I’ll be introducing our other Contributors.
I’ve been deeply involved in suicide prevention since 2013, with many personal and professional challenges since then (also training and qualifying as a counsellor in Jan 2019, with specialist study in suicide loss and grief).
My own extended family has been ‘touched by suicide’ twice during COVID19 Lockdown. We’ve been left comforting a 16 year old who has lost her father, and, living in York, we’ve also had the death by suicide of the much-loved Richard Baines.
Steve Phillip, The Jordan Legacy CIC
Another one of the Contributors is Steve Phillip who sadly lost his son Jordan to suicide in December 2019.
Steve’s session at #OTGSP is entitled “The experience of suicide loss, the ‘must do something’ syndrome, then actually doing something”.
Shortly after losing Jordan, Steve wrote an article on LinkedIn, partly to help with his own grieving process and partly to raise awareness to help others. The article was very widely shared.
Steve has published a more recent article which illustrates both how he’s still hurting, still grieving (it never ‘goes away’) and how he’s so determined to take practical action to help others:
And Steve really is ‘doing something’, having set up the Jordan Legacy CIC, now an Organisation Member of the National Suicide Prevention Alliance (NSPA) which is a good site to visit for information and to see which other organisations are active in the suicide prevention field.
As it summarises on the Jordan Legacy website:
We can envisage an achievable desired state where deaths by suicide are rare events. It’s a huge challenge and a big goal but achievable through prioritised, focused, practical actions:
- practical actions to make our communities and workplaces mentally healthy and psychologically safe places;
- practical actions to use human intelligence and digital technology for earlier identification and intervention;
- practical actions for suicide prevention such as ‘designing out suicide’ in our built environment, education systems, health systems, and support systems for those known to be at risk or in danger (including restricting access to the means of suicide — known to be the most effective practical action to save lives);
- practical actions to encourage every hospital, university, council, employer, industry association, professional society, etc to make practical plans for suicide prevention within their spheres of influence.
We can all use the above as a personal and organisational checklist. What are we doing to make our workplaces mentally healthy and psychologically safe? What actions are we taking to tackle ‘system failures’ and ‘design out suicide’?
Does your organisation have a Zero Suicide Plan? Drawing from the menu of proven approaches to reduce suicides, doing more of what works, doing less of what doesn’t work, stopping what harms…to move towards zero suicides?
Izzy Whitelock, Houston We Have
What about applying everything we know about digital, data, and technology to help save lives? Izzy is CEO of Australia-based, world-leading, artificial intelligence firm, Houston We Have who are doing just that.
Houston We Have designs solutions for Government Defence Departments and Security Agencies. When your core business includes trying to prevent terrorist attacks, it’s a short step to applications that can help prevent suicides.
I facilitated a global forum in 2013–2014 designed to generate ‘Breakthrough Ideas for Suicide Prevention’. As well as other ideas actioned since, we had ‘Digital Life Saving’ (launched at TEDxSydney in 2014),
This was a system of identifying those in suicide danger through online communications, and getting messages of support to them when suicidal, focusing on those who are in crisis but not ‘in the system’, eg in sudden crisis due to loss of job, loss of business, loss of home, loss of relationship, loss of access to children. Sadly, we have such peaks approaching due to COVID19.
We have the technological capability to transform suicide prevention but do we have the ‘will’ and ‘human capability’ to do so?
If your expertise is transferable to ‘Digital Life Saving’ or creating apps and digital solutions that could assist with ‘Tracking for Life’ (eg helping people discharged from hospital to get home safely), let’s talk!
Becky Inkster, The HipHop Neuroscientist (Honorary Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge) and curator of the Digital Innovation in Mental Health Conference
Becky curated the global online Digital Innovation in Mental Health Conference on 4–5 August, and for our event on World Suicide Prevention Day, she will summarise key ‘highlights’ from the event.
Becky has also been compiling vast data sets during COVID19 in partnership with digital health providers to have a better, more up-to-date picture of what is happening; to counter historic data lags and deficiencies. Data monitoring and analysis is another ‘part of the solution’.
If you can’t wait to hear from Becky, you can find all of the outputs from the conference at the link below:
Chukumeka Maxwell, founder Action to Prevent Suicide CIC
Chukumeka is the founder of Action To Prevent Suicide CIC -a Devon based non-profit dedicated to raising funds for community-based programs focused on suicide prevention. He is also a suicide prevention trainer specialising in Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Trainer (ASIST) and SafeTalk as developed by LivingWorks.
And that’s not all — we are also bringing together Contributors from across the public sector and Civil Service to join us in talking about this really important subject, and will write more about them soon.
Experience has taught me that working from the ground-up; engaging with people who have lived experience of suicide, especially those who’ve lost loved ones; like many of the Contributors listed above, is the best way to work on practical steps to change.
As it says on the Jordan Legacy CIC website Our Mission page:
“The act of suicide is a practical act — it needs practical actions to prevent it”.
There will be more speakers on the day, but you’ll have to join us to find out more.
Sign up
Now, if you want to take a small practical action, register for the event below, 2–5pm, 10 September. We’d love to see you there.
