Why we must all stand up to suicide

FOR more than a year a team of business leaders, HR specialists and clinicians have been working on a new strategy to deal with the UK’s suicide crisis. Their work has been presented to MPs and employers and at a conference in Yorkshire this week it will be publicly unveiled.

It’s called the Workplace Pledge and the hope is that when it comes to preventing suicide it will become a kitemark for best practice by employers large and small.

It will be my privilege to present the Pledge to the conference in Sheffield during Mental Awareness Week but it is an honour I would relinquish in a heartbeat if it meant I could turn back the clock.

My involvement springs from a phone call in the middle of a February night three years ago. It was a call to say that my beloved son, Ross, had taken his life aged just 31. Ross had suffered from severe depression for more than ten years and after seeking treatment he was put on a six-month waiting list. Anyone with experience of depression will know that it is impossible to put on hold. Ross died two weeks into the wait.

In the aftermath I felt I was in an eternal free fall, but I thirsted for explanations and information. How come in a 40-year long career as a journalist covering wars, terrorist atrocities, floods, poverty, crime – you name it – the subject of suicide had barely crossed my radar?

I learned about the true magnitude of suicide. It is now the biggest killer of men under 50 and women under 35 in the UK. As a journalist I could not believe the subject had hardly crossed my radar. It was though the nation’s 6,000 suicide deaths had been regarded as ‘collateral loss’. What shocked me even further was to discover that most experts agree suicide is preventable. So why, I asked, were we not preventing it?

In a long farewell letter to his family my son wrote: “Please fight for mental health. The support is just not there.”

I discovered just how true his dying words were. Three years on I have spoken to countless bereaved loved ones and every single one has shared their aching stories of woefully inadequate, overstretched, under-funded mental health services staffed by overworked nurses and psychiatrists. Shockingly, I heard from parents who had been told by child mental health professionals that they could not intervene in the case of a youngster unless they had attempted suicide.

The Baton of Hope suicide prevention charity was established partly by the refusal of myself and others to accept the defeatist status quo that has resulted in a stagnation in UK suicide statistics for more than 15 years.

True hope must be accompanied by practical change. The Workplace Pledge is the first in a series of ‘charters’ aimed at encouraging different sectors of society to stand up to suicide.

At the Octagon Centre in Sheffield on May 16, an inspiring lineup of speakers including Alastair Campbell will address this largely overlooked subject and on behalf of the Baton of Hope I will join them doing what I can to give voice to my son and the thousands of others no longer here to use their own.

My hope is that we can help create a sea-change where the stigma and silence shrouding suicide will be broken and that all the rightful vigour we apply to fighting cancer will one day also be targeted at Standing Up To Suicide.