Editorial
| Date | 19 June 2017 |
| Pages | 45-47 |
| Published date | 19 June 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMH-04-2017-0015 |
| Author | Woody Caan |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Mental health,Public mental health |
Woody Caan
I have been told my great-grandfather drowned in the Baltic, watched helplessly from the
shore by his little boy. Here, around the British Isles, the National Water Safety Forum reported
121 deaths by drowning at sea or on the shoreline, in 2015.
In contrast, the UK registered 6,188 deaths by suicide in the same year. In 2017, World Health
Day (7 April) focussed on depression. This choice came from the worldwide concerns about
depression and suicide: suicide is now the second leading cause of death among the group
aged 15-29 years (World Health Organization, 2017).
A 2015 illustration from the UK that might interest academic readers: a record 134 university
students killed themselves (Seldon, 2017). Adult males over 35 years old and working in
construction have the highest risk of suicide (three times the English average: Department of
Health, 2017). But for adult women, the high-risk occupations are familiar to many readers of this
journal: nurses, teachers and women employed in culture, media and sport (69 per cent above
the English average). Some risk factors are geographically clustered. The Psychiatrist
Dev Anand Malayandi Lakshmanan has been shortlisted for this year’sBMJ Award for his
suicide prevention work in County Durham with males over 70 years old. There, pre-existing
mental health problems, loneliness or loss of support, worries about physical health, and chronic
pain, together contribute to high mortality (Hawkes, 2017).
At a global level, suicideamong healthcare workers shows an alarminggrowth (The Lancet,2017)
and the US National Academy of Medicine is leading a multi-centre collaboration to reverse the
current trend.
At all ages, Birch (2017) writes that a relentless “me-first”society is cruel and increases the sum
total of loneliness. Research for the Jo Cox Commission found two-thirds of the nine million
British people identifying as “lonely”do not want to talk about it (Birch, 2017). To mark 30 years
after the Ottawa Charter on health promotion, the European Public Health Association has
produced the Vienna Declaration (McKee et al., 2016), that “means to give voice to the weak and
to make the invisible visible”.
For individual patients in clinical settings, both stable and dynamic features have been identified
with a risk of suicide (Sinclair and Leach, 2017). However, the latest systematic review of
psychiatric tools currently used to predict patient suicide found no “high-risk”classification was
clinically useful (Carter et al., 2017).
Recently, witnesses to the House of Commons Health Committee stressed the importance of
whole community public involvement in suicide reduction. A need was recognised by the
Committee to support many vulnerable people, who were not in contact with any health services.
The Committee embraced innovative approaches, and recommended that:
Local authorities should include in suicide prevention plans a strategy for how those who are at risk of
suicide but are unlikely to access traditional services will be reached. This should include up-to-date
knowledge about what services are available in the voluntary sector (House of Commons Health
Committee, 2017).
The British Psychological Society responded that:
There is a particular need to focus more on prevention. The Government must ensure investment in
research into public mental health interventions and research into innovative brief psychosocial
interventions (employing a range of delivery methods and modalities) to reduce suicidal ideation,
suicidal behaviours and deaths by suicide (Kinderman, 2017).
DOI 10.1108/JPMH-04-2017-0015 VOL. 16 NO. 2 2017, pp. 45-47, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1746-5729
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Editorial
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