Starting the conversation to help prevent suicide

While at university, I volunteered as a peer supporter who was there for students to talk to when they were going through a difficult time. After university, I was keen to continue doing something similar which led me to joining Samaritans as a listening volunteer and over the last ten years, I’ve learned so much about the value of giving people a safe and non-judgemental place to talk.

The theme of this year’s World Suicide Prevention Day also highlights another important aspect of suicide prevention – the idea that everyone can play a role supporting those at risk of suicide. In suicide prevention policy, people often talk about the idea of a ‘whole society approach’, a concept which recognises that many organisations and individuals can play a role in preventing suicides. This includes different government departments but also health services, local authorities, schools, universities, employers, charities, the media and the public.

As someone working in the field of mental health policy, I have for many years been interested in the question of how to effectively get different actors across all parts of society working together to prevent suicides. I chose to focus my Churchill Fellowship on this question, researching the approach to suicide prevention policy in Japan.

Japan is in many ways an unusual case study. The suicide rate has historically been very high and remains higher than the rate in the UK. There are also some important cultural and social factors about suicide and mental health in Japan, which are different to the UK. However, I was interested in Japan because a World Health Organization report highlighted that in the mid-2000s, Japan introduced a ‘multi-ministerial policy’ to prevent suicides. After the introduction of this policy, the rate of suicide in Japan fell significantly between 2010 and 2020. In contrast, the suicide rate in England had not fallen since 2018 and worryingly the most recent statistics for England and Wales show it at its highest level since 1999.

One of the biggest learning points from my Churchill Fellowship is just how difficult it can be to unpick what has caused a change in suicide rates at a national level. Even though suicide rates have fallen significantly in Japan since 2010, people working in suicide prevention found it difficult to say definitively what had contributed to this. However, there were a number of features of Japan’s approach that offer learning for the UK.

For example, the Japanese government has in recent years invested significant resources in suicide prevention, including supporting a dedicated agency to lead on suicide prevention research and providing funding for local authorities. For many years, Japan has also been using real-time data on suspected suicides to enable national and local government to rapidly respond to trends in suicide – something that’s only recently been developed in England. There are also some specific organisations that may provide inspiration to colleagues working on suicide prevention in the UK – such as OVA, an internet gatekeeping organisation, that proactively offers support to people who are searching terms related to suicide and helps connect them to local services.

There are also many areas where colleagues in Japan were keen to learn from the UK. One ongoing area of concern is around media coverage of suicide and there was significant interest in the work that Samaritans has done with the media in the UK to improve reporting.

While my Churchill Fellowship did not give me all the answers to how to build a whole-society approach to suicide prevention, it underscored how much we can potentially learn from sharing approaches with other countries. I hope that this research will be just the start of the conversation as I continue to explore how organisations and individuals across society can most effectively play their part in preventing suicides.

Read Rhea’s Fellowship report to explore how a whole-society approach to suicide prevention can make a difference.