Talking Taboos: Why silent suicidal thoughts need to be said out loud

I mean, you want to tell us something about suicide in the context of it being the suicidal thoughts rather than suicide, the act and the survivable nature of it.

Because I think when people hear suicidal thoughts, immediately they think about death and dying.

So you want to put a little bit of context there for us?

Definitely.

I'll probably start with the figures.

So I think last year we had 6,749 people who died by suicide.

So if we imagine there are that many people who have actually got to the point where they carried out the act, there and we think about thoughts um thoughts is definitely a step away from actually ending your life there are millions of people in this country every year that have thoughts of suicide but never act on them and then never end their life so i think what we've got to do as a society is start to understand that it's very normal in our life journey when faced with different issues and problems that we consider it as a thought.

But that doesn't mean that thought has to become anything else, particularly if we can talk to other people.

What I found when I talk about suicide is that when you talk to people, you realize that People you know, very close people, have had thoughts of suicide.

But if we don't talk about it, then we don't even know that we've had those kind of thoughts.

And more importantly, how did we overcome it? You know, what got us through from having a thought to getting back to where we needed to be, where we're not thinking about suicide as a resolution to the problem that we are dealing with.

So I firmly believe that the more that we talk about suicide and generally mental health, the more we can normalize this.

And we need to normalize it because actually I think your example of young people, I don't blame young people for feeling worried if they tell somebody that they're having thoughts of suicide because unfortunately our mental health system, particularly around children and young people, focus on risk, not listening to the young person, not trying to normalize it for that young person that adolescence is hard I look around this room I know we're not in our adolescence I'm in my menopause but if we look back at how tricky that period of our life was then maybe we can share that with young people but yeah we need to get away from worrying about risk all the time really listen to why people are having thoughts of suicide and then try to look to resolve that either practically because sometimes it's practical reasons why people are thinking about suicide debt relationship breakdown where am i going to live etc so sometimes there are practical things that we can do to reduce our thoughts that that is the only way that we're going to be able to solve that problem

I mean, you want to tell us something about suicide in the context of it being the suicidal thoughts rather than suicide, the act and the survivable nature of it.

Because I think when people hear suicidal thoughts, immediately they think about death and dying.

So you want to put a little bit of context there for us?

Definitely.

I'll probably start with the figures.

So I think last year we had 6,749 people who died by suicide.

So if we imagine there are that many people who have actually got to the point where they carried out the act, there and we think about thoughts um thoughts is definitely a step away from actually ending your life there are millions of people in this country every year that have thoughts of suicide but never act on them and then never end their life so i think what we've got to do as a society is start to understand that it's very normal in our life journey when faced with different issues and problems that we consider it as a thought.

But that doesn't mean that thought has to become anything else, particularly if we can talk to other people.

What I found when I talk about suicide is that when you talk to people, you realize that People you know, very close people, have had thoughts of suicide.

But if we don't talk about it, then we don't even know that we've had those kind of thoughts.

And more importantly, how did we overcome it? You know, what got us through from having a thought to getting back to where we needed to be, where we're not thinking about suicide as a resolution to the problem that we are dealing with.

So I firmly believe that the more that we talk about suicide and generally mental health, the more we can normalize this.

And we need to normalize it because actually I think your example of young people, I don't blame young people for feeling worried if they tell somebody that they're having thoughts of suicide because unfortunately our mental health system, particularly around children and young people, focus on risk, not listening to the young person, not trying to normalize it for that young person that adolescence is hard I look around this room I know we're not in our adolescence I'm in my menopause but if we look back at how tricky that period of our life was then maybe we can share that with young people but yeah we need to get away from worrying about risk all the time really listen to why people are having thoughts of suicide and then try to look to resolve that either practically because sometimes it's practical reasons why people are thinking about suicide debt relationship breakdown where am i going to live etc so sometimes there are practical things that we can do to reduce our thoughts that that is the only way that we're going to be able to solve that problem