Changing the narrative around suicide

In our latest blog, Jenny Smith, Health Improvement Manager and Suicide Prevention Implementation Lead, acknowledges World Suicide Prevention Day 2024 and emphasises the importance of changing the narrative around suicide.

The reasons that might lead someone to take their own life are complex. In suicide prevention, we can rarely say that one intervention or activity saved lives. Instead, it’s likely that many factors contributed and that our efforts were part of that.  

That’s why we at Public Health Scotland, as part of collaborative effort with Suicide Prevention Scotland, are leading the way in moving towards an outcomes-focused approach to prevent suicide.

This focuses on the overall change that we’re working towards. It can help us to measure the outcomes for people who are at risk and capture how the work of different organisations or programmes may help to make a difference.  

An outcomes focused approach helps us to stay centred on the human element of suicide prevention, the people who have lost their lives, and all of us who are striving to make a difference. It helps us to move away from a narrative where decision makers are solely focused on the annual suicide figures to benchmark whether their local area or health board is above or below the national rates. 

By adopting an outcomes focussed approach, Scotland’s Suicide Prevention Strategy ‘Creating Hope Together’ helps us to recognise the breadth of work required, and move further towards a learning culture where everyone at all levels can recognise their contribution to suicide prevention. By defining the change we want to make and setting out the steps required to make that change a reality, we can measure the journey to change, as well as the change itself. This helps us to learn from what we’re doing, adapt or make changes along the way, and illustrate the difference that can, and is, being made.

In complex systems that are often limited by short funding cycles, outcome focused approaches allow us to clearly articulate and evidence the journey of change on a shorter timescale, while still acknowledging and planning for how we measure against our ultimate aim of saving lives.

People can understandably feel hesitant to share the positive work that we’re doing, after all no number of suicides is a good number. We need to change the narrative on suicide and support a culture where sharing our work is actually okay, feels safe to do so, and inspires hope. It's a difficult balance, and it's good to acknowledge that.  

This approach requires a shift in thinking, and for us to become more creative and bolder in how we’re sharing the impact of our work.

Sharing our work can be done in many ways. It could be a case study or story of how partners have worked together to overcome a particular challenge or meet the needs of a specific group. It might mean capturing how a peer support group makes people feel, or the learning that people have gained from attending training. It could be a photograph of a local activity that gives people hope. Sharing what we do ultimately helps us make progress in our efforts to prevent suicide. 

An annual figure doesn’t define our efforts, but it is a driver for us to continue our collective work to prevent suicide. If suicide prevention is everyone’s business, then we need to share how we’re all contributing in order to learn from each other. There’s no single approach to suicide prevention, but by sharing where things are making a difference, we can inspire hope, motivate, and encourage others to take action to save lives.  

Our challenge to you, as part of Suicide Prevention Awareness Week and beyond, is to share how you’re changing the narrative on suicide to create hope together. 

If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health or feeling suicidal, please don’t hesitate to ask for help by contacting your GP, NHS24 on 111, Samaritans on 116 123 or Breathing Space on 0800 83 85 87 

Helpful links

Visit NHS Inform, Samaritans and Breathing Space