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Samaritans Scotland responded to the Scottish Government and CoSLA consultation seeking views on Scotland's next suicide strategy.
Our response to the consultation on Scotland's next suicide prevention strategy sets out our ambitious vision to address the barriers and inequalities that contribute to suicide risk, to improve support when it matters most and, ultimately, to ensure fewer lives are lost to suicide.
Achieving this vision will require collaboration across sectors, services and communities. As leaders in suicide prevention and crisis support, we will continue to work in partnership with government, public services, the third sector and people with lived experience of suicidal crisis or bereavement.
Below are some of our key recommendations.
Our recommendations
Prevention
- Start early, by working to improve mental literacy, emotional resilience and help-seeking among children and young people from primary school through to higher education.
- Improve access to a range of support services for children and young people, and ensure children and young people are meaningfully involved in designing policies and services to meet their needs.
- Take a life-long approach to prevention, recognising the impact of life events and transitions which may increase suicide risk - such as redundancy, homelessness, relationship breakdown, bereavement - and targeting interventions around these.
- Invest in suicide prevention leadership at a local level, including funding for core prevention activities and innovation.
Early intervention
- Invest in service capacity so more people can access a range of support as early as possible
- Fully deliver the commitments in the Mental Health Covid-19 Transition and Recovery Plan and continue to prioritise preserving access to mental health services through the pandemic and the immediate aftermath.
- Focus on re-designing whole system approaches to support, treatment and recovery, building on the skills and resource across sectors
- Increase training for professionals in recognising early signs of suicidality and offering proactive intervention, focusing initially on primary care staff
Crisis intervention
- Implement the Time, Space, Compassion principles for crisis response, accepted by the Scottish Government in 2021, to drive radical change in how people experiencing suicidal crisis are supported.
- Focus on providing crisis response which is sensitive to diversity in our communities
- Develop a longer-term action plan around reducing access to means of suicide across a range of settings, building on current partnership working around Locations of Concern.
Postvention
- Develop and evaluate a specific plan to support the full range of people affected a death by suicide including: families and friends who are bereaved by suicide; workplaces, schools, and other communities of interest; and first responders and by-standers.
- Review the current work of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal on suicide, alongside wider, emerging work to review deaths by suicide to ensure that families and communities affected are engaged, wherever possible, in a single, thorough, timely and well-supported process.
Tackling stigma
- Build on the strong foundation created through existing campaigns to increase public knowledge and confidence around discussing suicide and support the public to make safe, compassionate interventions.
- Continue to invest in and develop activity to support responsible reporting of suicide and related issues and to tackle harmful online content.
Raising awareness & building capacity
- Build capacity through greater dedicated investment to support local suicide prevention leadership, activity and innovation.
- Further investment to develop and evaluate community-based initiatives which seek to reduce suicide risk and improve wellbeing by addressing loneliness & isolation and fostering connection.
- Ensure policy and services are meaningfully shaped by people with a broad range of lived experience, including people with experience of disadvantage or discrimination, in addition to people with direct experience of suicidal crisis or bereavement.
Cross-policy work
- Recognise that suicide prevention requires a truly collaborative approach that cuts across a range of policy remits and services including health and social care, education, social security, housing, criminal justice, planning, and more.
- Learn from recent activity across a range of policy areas, such as the application of Island Community Impact Assessments, the proposed legal duties to prevent homelessness and the multi-departmental COVID-19 activity in government, to understand how commitments to suicide prevention can be embedded across government departments and the wider public sector.