Impact
Making change that saves lives
We’re making our voice heard at a national, regional and local level to make suicide prevention a priority and ensure fewer lives are lost to suicide.
Saving Lives Can’t Wait
In Autumn, we launched the public campaign Saving Lives Can’t Wait, calling on the Westminster Government to commit to reaching the lowest national suicide rate ever recorded. We held fringe meetings at Labour and Conservative Party Conferences to highlight our asks of the new strategy, and met directly with Ministers and officials.
Something needs to change in relation to mental health. It’s so important that lives aren’t lost to suicide. My experience of support with Samaritans was so positive that I wanted to be involved with the campaign.
Louise, who’s supporting our Saving Lives Can’t Wait campaign
Online harms
This year, with the support of the University of Swansea, we released ground-breaking research into how social media users experience self-harm and suicide content and an e-learning course to support mental health practitioners in discussing online behaviour with their clients.
In order to help protect potentially vulnerable web users, our advisory service continued to support a number of online sites and platforms. We helped an app provider, with over 300 million users worldwide, improve their user messaging surrounding self-harm and suicide. We also assisted a games platform, where over five million games are played every day, with finding ways to sensitively handle mentions of suicide by users outside of game play.
Our toolkits to help people equip themselves with ways to stay safe when viewing or posting content relating to self-harm and suicide were viewed over 6,100 times last year. Our industry guideline pages also had 2,900 page views and our new guidance pages for practitioners, such as medical professionals, had a total of 5,600 unique page views in just one quarter.
The Online Safety Bill
The Online Safety Bill continues to make its way through Westminster and we’re working to ensure that the crucial support that people find online continues to flourish, while reducing access to harmful and dangerous suicide and self-harm content. We worked alongside campaigners to make the case for the Bill to prioritise suicide and self-harm. They helped us reach 95 per cent of all the MPs in the House of Commons. The government has made it a priority to amend the Online Safety Bill to include written illegal suicide content and has said that they will create a new communications offence of encouraging or assisting self-harm. This means that illegal self-harm content will be a priority in the new online safety laws.
Working with the media
We know that certain types of media coverage of suicides can increase the suicide risk for some people. Samaritans delivered 60 media guidelines training sessions to media and other audiences this year. We also expanded this training to journalism university students – so far we have delivered training to six universities. Our media advisory team monitored nearly 6,000 news articles in 2022.
We’ve also been working with and advising researchers and producers of soaps, dramas and documentaries, such as Coronation Street, Casualty, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Hollyoaks, Silent Witness, Screw, and documentaries including BT Sport’s After the Roar and a Roman Kemp documentary covering youth mental health. Some of this work created opportunities to highlight our media guidelines work in the press.
High-risk locations
We have given bespoke advice and prevention measures for suicide interventions at high-risk locations to 25 city or county councils and 23 external organisations. We’ve partnered with the Safer Public Spaces Network, a practitioner network for people working on high-risk locations, to be part of the coordinating body and drive the network forward. We have also continued to support and influence the implementation of National Highways’ suicide prevention strategy through the development and review of the guidance, including regional engagement and communications plan, as well as providing advice and guidance for interventions at high-risk locations.
Influencing every nation
Scotland
We’re engaging with Scottish Government to develop their Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy and a Self-Harm Strategy. We’ve been raising our concerns with the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care, including at meetings of Scotland's Mental Health Partnership. We’ve continued to influence the delivery of Scotland’s Suicide Prevention Strategy: Creating Hope Together.
Wales
We chair the Welsh Government Cross Party Group on Suicide and Self-Harm Prevention and continued to be active members of the Wales Alliance for Mental Health, the anti-poverty coalition, and the Wales NHS Confederation Health and Wellbeing Alliance.
Ireland
The Online Safety and Media Regulations Act 2022 was signed into law. Samaritans Ireland worked closely with relevant bodies to ensure the legislation would create a safer online space for those most vulnerable. The legislation includes specific wording put forward by Samaritans Ireland in relation to the prevalence of harmful content. We will continue to help develop the online safety codes in 2023.
Northern Ireland
We developed key priorities for preventing suicide in Northern Ireland, gaining support from the Health Minister and Justice Minister, as well as all political parties. We partnered with Start360, a voluntary organisation working to improve mental health in Northern Ireland, to host a hustings event coming up to the Northern Ireland Assembly Elections.
England
We inspired more than 200 Samaritans campaigners in England to give their views directly to the Government to inform a new suicide prevention strategy for England. We made the case strongly throughout the year for a new England cross-government suicide prevention strategy and the Government committed to publishing a stand-alone strategy on suicide prevention.