For many people who try to take their lives, suicide feels like the only option – they can’t change what’s happened in the past, they feel unable to change their present situation and can’t imagine a future where things are better. Many people who have attempted suicide have said that they believed that the most useful thing they could do was disappear, and they felt that this meant they’d no longer be a burden to others.

At CALM we look at the continuum of suicidality, where at one end of the scale a person is absolutely fine, and at the other end they are at total crisis point. This is where we can differentiate between prevention and intervention – the intervention happens once a person gets to the latter end of the scale, but the vast majority of it requires suicide prevention. We look at it as providing ‘off ramps’ to allow people to work their way back to the ‘feeling fine’ end of the spectrum. We all need to be dedicated to building a society that prevents people from becoming suicidal in the first place.

A truly progressive government would step up and take its responsibility for suicide prevention seriously – the society it creates should provide the off ramps we all need to continually reset and recover from the challenges that come our way.

There are two key issues when it comes to previous suicide prevention action plans. First: they’re rarely fully funded. Many of the pledges we’ve seen, including the previous Conservative government’s suicide prevention strategy, relied heavily on the NHS and social care systems that we know are already stretched beyond their limits.

The second issue is that they focus on treating the symptom and not the cause. You don’t treat cancer – you treat the behaviour of the cancerous cells. If someone is struggling with depression after losing their job, the thing to ‘cure’ is not their depression, it’s their unemployment. With mental health in particular, we have become a society of quick fixes because GPs aren’t afforded the necessary time and mental health waiting lists for specialist support are far too long. When parties are looking at the funding and management of the NHS, they have to find a way to enable us to ‘un-quick fix’ the system – to enable medical professionals to take a step back and understand a person’s biography and the circumstances that led them to this point, rather than labelling the symptoms and prescribing as a first port of call.

“A truly progressive government would step up and take its responsibility for suicide prevention seriously”