Column: We know that suicide doesn’t usually arrive out of nowhere
When you lose someone to suicide, the last thing you start to think about or focus on is policy or laws, writes columnist and mental health champion Vicky Waring.
Your focus is on the day-to-day survival of ‘how the hell am I going to get through this?’
For many of us, we know that suicide doesn’t usually arrive out of nowhere – there may have been signs, the person may already have been known to services, they may have been experiencing long-term mental ill-health, or it may have been something that escalated very fast.
What is clear is that afterwards, those facts don’t bring comfort, they bring questions. Did I miss something? Did services involved miss something? Did the system step in too late, or step back too early? Did the system even bother to get involved?
Facilitating a local bereavement support group, I hear all too often stories of those lost to suicide, being let down and families feeling they were not heard by the system.
So, when I read that the Mental Health Act changed at the end of 2025, I didn’t feel relief straight away. Because if you’ve been through what I have, and heard stories from others that I have, you know prevention isn’t just about what happens at the point of crisis, it’s about everything that comes before it.
The Mental Health Act might make the point of crisis fairer, and I hope it does. But prevention is more than legislation: it is conversations, it’s that multifaceted approach to address the most traumatic and awful of experiences.
If this new law teaches us anything, I hope it’s this: stopping suicide isn’t just about saving lives in crisis. It’s about making life feel survivable long before then.