Just yesterday I spent my Saturday learning about suicide, how it affects us as a society and listening to those bereaved by suicide.
‘Suicide in the Media’ was a workshop run by Principal Academic Dr Ann Luce, who has spent the last 15 years researching suicide, and now sits on the World Media Task Force for the prevention of suicide. Her research largely focuses around responsible and ethical reporting of suicide, so I knew I’d be able to pick up some important tips and advice for the reporting of self-harm. I signed up for the workshop in hope to aid my understanding of suicide, it’s relationship with self-harm and also to gain advice on responsibly reporting such sensitive issues. As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, the fact that according to the NHS over half of those who die by suicide have a history of self-harm really made me feel a relevance between the workshop and my own documentary.
It’s important to understand that just because somebody self-harms, doesn’t mean they want to die. However in some cases, self-harm is a pre-cursor to suicide and suicidal ideation. I felt as though a lot of the messages behind helping those dealing with a suicidal loss and what we, as a society, should be doing to help reduce the number of people who die by suicide were applicable to helping those who self-harm also.
We heard from various individuals, including Mental Health Nurse Gifty Markey (who you can hear from here) and Joy Ford, a survivor of suicide bereavement. For me, it really put life in perspective and definitely increased my drive to want to help those out there who are struggling even more.
“Mental health is an everybody problem”
One statistic that really stood out to me during the day was that 11% of the NHS budget is spent on mental health services. When mental health is something that every single one of us has, it’s hard to fathom why such a small allocation has been made here. It also highlighted to me that if we, as a society, can learn how we should be helping those who self-harm and those who are suicidal, we can help take a small portion of the undeniable pressure off NHS services.
As Dr Ann Luce said, mental health is an everybody problem. My journey throughout my documentary has taught me so much about mental health, about looking after those around us, and lastly how important it is that we are there for those who need us. We all matter.