Research by Dr Jay-Marie Mackenzie and Dr Jo Borrill is helping to prevent suicide within probation and on UK public transport.
According to recent World Health Organization (WHO) data, someone in the world dies by suicide every 40 seconds.
Mackenzie and Borrill have worked with the National Probation Service (NPS), and British public transport bodies to develop powerful suicide prevention strategies tailored to their organisations.
Tackling suicide in probation
When Mackenzie and Borrill began working with the NPS in 2011, very little research on suicide in probation existed.
Mackenzie was “the first academic researcher to work with the NPS to make significant contributions to strategic probation suicide prevention planning and development,” says Amy Beck, Suicide Prevention Lead for the NPS.
Mackenzie undertook qualitative research on how to counteract suicidal feelings among probation service users and how to help probation officers identify and support those who were at risk.
This work informed NPS London’s Suicide Prevention Plan, launched in 2017, which Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation called “an impressive suicide prevention strategy”.
Following WHO recommendations for non-specialised healthcare staff, the plan included several in-depth suicide prevention training workshops, which were delivered jointly by Beck, Mackenzie, and Borrill to front-line NPS staff and managers.
The strategy proved so successful that the NPS scaled it up to a National Suicide Prevention Plan, also informed by Mackenzie’s research findings, which launched in 2019.
As part of the plan, all 5000+ NPS employees received a guide with detailed information about issues like stages of higher suicide risk in probation, potential triggers, and preventative action staff could take.
These research findings have also been incorporated into the two-day training package on suicide prevention available to NPS staff across the nation.
Small talk saves lives
Every suicide on the railway is a personal tragedy to the deceased and their family, which deeply traumatises train drivers, passengers, and station staff.
The November 2017 ‘Small Talk Saves Lives’ (STSL) campaign, developed by Samaritans and Network Rail stakeholders, aimed to empower the public to take action to help prevent railway suicides.
STSL was informed by the 2016 project report, Why do people take their lives on the railways?
Within this project, led by Lisa Marzano at Middlesex University, Mackenzie and Borrill analysed CCTV footage of suicidal behaviours at railway stations and oversaw interviews with people who had thoughts of, or had attempted, suicide at rail locations.
A specific finding was that railways were chosen because commuters were not expected to intervene.
Network Rail’s Senior Campaign Manager confirms STSL’s central concept was based on the report’s related recommendation for a “bystander awareness campaign”.
This aimed to allow members of the public to “play a role in identifying individuals in distress and intervening in safe and effective ways.”
This kind of campaign is particularly worthwhile, the report explained, because it is other commuters who are most likely to be there in the moments preceding a suicide attempt, not police, volunteers, or station staff.
STSL aimed to show commuters the powerful role they could play in preventing suicide and embolden them to act.
The campaign targeted national and regional print broadcast media, online media outlets and social media.
Social media impressions achieved a cumulative reach of 33.8m with 3.9m video views; 42% of train passengers saw the campaign, with two-thirds seeing it three or more times.
A survey of 5000 commuters found that, as a result of the campaign, 74% were “likely to approach someone in distress” and 64% felt “confident” about what to say to them.
Most significantly, approximately 33% had already approached someone in distress, encouraged by STSL.
Data obtained by the Samaritans showed members of the public intervened in cases of this kind 163 times from January to September 2018, “a 20% increase compared with 2017”.
At least part of this increase can be attributed directly to STSL.
STSL is now part of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy – the UK’s first cross-governmental initiative on this topic – and cited as a best practice example.
London Underground’s Suicide Prevention Programme
The research of Mackenzie and her colleagues also fed into the Transport for London (TFL) Suicide Prevention Programme for London Underground (LU) in 2017.
The LU’s Suicide Prevention Lead attributed three aspects of the programme to the research findings:
- changes to messaging, making it clear that getting onto the tracks is more likely to cause injury, rather than death;
- the use of CCTV to identify suicidal behaviour by commuters;
- the launch of a two-hour suicide prevention training course for station staff.
With over 4,200 people now trained across the TfL, staff-led interventions have almost doubled to around 10 per week, and 700 employees have received ‘LifeSaver Awards’.
As a direct result of the programme, London Underground suicides fell from a 2017/18 peak of 66 to 45 in 2019/20.
“This represents the first two-year consecutive drop for almost twenty years, and one of the lowest levels of completed suicide on our network in recent times,” LU’s Suicide Prevention Lead says.
The Suicide Prevention Lead adds: “Training, guided by the research done, has proved extremely effective in saving lives and allowing our colleagues to effectively, and safely, intervene.”
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