Suicide prevention

What do you think? Is it in everybody that when a, when a tragedy strikes, To change the way they're talking to mates or being like their own mental health? Like, does that change?

Like, man, for me, I feel like Suicide prevention, in my experience, I've been fortunate slash unfortunate enough to be involved in a lot of different interventions.

A lot of the time, it's not like the movies.

I mean, to make a difference, I think telling your mates you love them is fantastic.

No, just grateful for the opportunity.

Anybody listening, just grateful for the opportunity to be able to talk and impart at least a little bit of what I've learned over the years since losing Big Matty.

And, you know, just that suicide interventions and suicide prevention doesn't often look like, you know, someone on a bridge.

you know, even though I can, it often looks like people that are, you know, struggling at home sitting by themselves and we can combat that by sending a text, checking in, but it's important we check in on ourselves.

It's only about half of the deaths by suicide are people who are mentally ill. the other as people who are simply overwhelmed by life.

So we need to stop looking at suicide prevention completely through a mental health lens.

And we need to see it that this person could be being affected by all manner of stuff.

You know, I had a conversation once with a guy in a workplace setting who was really struggling.

So as I said to you, I'm doing a lot of work at the moment around domestic abuse-related suicide.

For example, did you know that more victims of domestic abuse died by suicide than were killed by their partner for the third year running in England and Wales? So more victims are actually a risk to themselves than they are at risk from an abuser.

So it's also understanding the context that sits around suicide prevention because whatever's going to be right for that person who's perhaps living with a coercive controlling relationship is not going to be the same situation for somebody who's frightened to death because debt and losing their home is a problem.

And that's going to be different again.

So that, I guess, would be the vision is could we have a national...

if you will, maybe St. Jude's for Suicide Prevention or a National Cancer Alliance that focused on this aspect.

Because I think we'd learned that by taking care of these issues, we're actually taking care of other things that are traditionally not even thought of as related to the brain.

I mean, again, the inflammation, the bidirectionality between inflammation the gut all of this systems how what does that do to our immune response how does that make us more or less it just it's it's a i recognize it's kind of a big vision but but succinctly and specifically it would be that it would be a mental health research ecosystem that consists of centers of excellence and kind of hub and spoke models regionally that we just brought this into the era of modern medicine and as a way to not only care for people differently now as we build it, but to create the system that allows continual advancement for the next generation as well.