No hope, no future - thoughts on suicide prevention month

Here in the UK, September is suicide prevention month, while internationally it is restricted to a single day - September 10th. In either case, it represents a worthy ideal to hold on to and an important goal to aim for, and my Facebook feed is full of appropriate aphorisms and pithy one-liners all of which are posted with the very best of intentions. One of the most ubiquitous of these this year is this one:


The sentiment is true of course, but doesn't tell the whole story. For it is not simply wanting the pain to stop that drives a person over the brink, but the belief that it never will. It is that complete loss of hope that grinds a person down, sending them spiralling downwards into the depths of a despair from which there can only be one release. The loss of hope extinguishes any light that there might have been at the end of the tunnel, plunging them into a darkness that I pray you and I will never have to experience. It is the loss of hope that is, quite literally, the killer.

For those of us who have been bereaved by suicide, talking about suicide prevention can be a triggering affair. For we did not manage to prevent it. Our loved ones took their lives and left us bereft, adrift in a sea of guilt and regret, plagued by a thousand 'what if' scenarios. And no matter how much the therapists and counsellors try to persuade us otherwise, at some level we remain convinced that there must have been some action we could have taken which would have prevented the tragedy, and the fact that we didn't means that we failed them - failed them in the most extreme way possible. A failure from which there is no coming back. 

Suicide is at epidemic proportions, and we MUST do more around prevention. Anything that can begin the process of replacing the soul-crushing darkness with a glimmer of hope simply must be tried. We have to believe that the outcome is not inevitable. Anything that might reverse the direction of travel down those cold, dark steps toward oblivion, and begin the momentous process upwards toward the light, step by faltering step, has to be attempted. 

And we who are affected by the aftermath have a duty to speak out, because even though things are gradually improving, suicide remains very much a taboo subject, and until it is discussed more openly many will continue to die by their own hand, alone and in despair. Since I 'went public' in my book 'Precious Dreams and Living Nightmares' there have been so many people who have come out of the woodwork to talk to me about their own experiences - some who have been close friends for years, yet I had no idea that their son/daughter/husband/wife/mum/dad had ended their lives through suicide. There are so many reasons why people don't want to talk about it: guilt, shame, denial, anger, societal pressure, or simply not knowing where to start - but we must try.

For if we can prevent just one person from taking that final, irreversible step into the darkness, we will have done a wonderful thing indeed.

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