Suicide can affect anyone but everyone can help prevent suicides.

For this part of our strategy, our actions are aimed at benefitting communities, including; schools, colleges and universities, local businesses, non-professional and professional sports clubs and teams, local chambers of commerce and business groups and associations, local charities and support groups, local NHS and mental health teams, suicide prevention leads, charities and other third sector organisations and groups by sharing relevant information, advice, awareness-raising, education, and support to help create communities where suicide prevention is more openly discussed and deaths by suicide become increasingly rare events.

We collaborate with local communities and those providing mental health and suicide prevention support, who support our vision to move toward a ‘Zero Suicide Society’.

Working with the community, we will identify and share what is working well within these communities, so that others may learn from these initiatives and implement similar approaches.

We will design and run events, workshops, conferences and educational talks which will raise awareness and also provide practical guidance.

We will always encourage high ambition in preventing suicides and promote strategies and actions that can significantly reduce the numbers of deaths within our communities and reduce the number of referrals to NHS mental health crisis centres.

We will also challenge those groups, organisations and bodies who appear to be setting low ambition targets.

We also understand the importance of engaging with the latest research and we have commissioned such studies with our collaborative partners, MEL Research, who disseminate research that can assist in advancing mental health and suicide prevention within our communities. Check out this particular research study: “Let’s Talk About Suicide?!”.

We understand that many of those in our communities who engage with us may be struggling with their mental health or suicidal thoughts. We will safeguard these individuals by providing signposting to appropriate support services, which can be found on the Help & Resources section of our website via this link.