 Hello, welcome back. Today we are talking about suicide, and in particular we're going to think about three common myths and misconceptions about suicide. These are things I hear all the time, so I thought I'd take a few minutes just to try and set the record somewhat straight. Number one is the idea that suicide is selfish. When we look at the people who are left behind after a suicide has occurred, then sometimes we find ourselves thinking what a selfish thing to do. Look at the impact on their friends, on their family, on their colleagues, whoever it might be, and it's hard not to feel that suicide was a selfish act. However, when we talk to people who have struggled with thoughts and feelings of suicide, then their thoughts are not about doing harm to their loved ones. Often, conversely, actually they feel that their death, their absence from the world would be a positive, that they're a burden to the people who they love, and that them leaving, them dying would actually be a good thing. The point at which someone kills themselves, they are in such great emotional pain, their thoughts aren't of the devastation they'll leave behind, but rather just of ending this pain right now, and also the idea that maybe the world would be better off without them. So if you know someone who struggles with thoughts of suicide, it can be really, really helpful to help them to understand that their presence in the world is a positive thing and that actually they would be missed if they weren't here anymore. Number two is that if someone is really set on killing themselves, there's absolutely nothing we can do. Again, this isn't true. Right up until the moment that someone has died, there is some possibility of turning things around. No matter how unlikely this might feel, it is possible for things to change. Right up until death, there's hope. The other thing here is that if you have unfortunately experienced the death of someone by suicide, then it can be really easy to say, well, there's nothing we could have done. But actually, whilst in the short term, it doesn't really do any good to be kind of laying blame and finger pointing because it's a really difficult time, in the fullness of time, it can be really helpful to stop and think, what are the signs that we might have missed or what might we be able to do differently next time? Because then hopefully you can learn something from that death in order to try and prevent future similar deaths. Number three is if we talk about suicide, we increase the risk of suicide. Now, this is a slightly tricky one. Certainly, if you are worried about someone and you think they might have thoughts of suicide, then the best thing that we can do is to ask the question and to tackle it head on. If someone is feeling suicidal, then actually you've opened the door, you provided them the opportunity to talk, to share, to try and find a way forwards with something that is clearly very, very difficult. If that person had not thought some feelings of suicide, you're not going to put the idea in their head. Feeling suicidal and thinking about how you might kill yourself is something that happens when you're in an extreme kind of state of emotional distress and it's not something that's just suddenly going to come into your mind because someone starts talking about it. However, we do need to take some care when it comes to talking about suicide more generally in order not to cause any kind of contagion type effects. So, the Samaritans have really clear media guidelines, for example, around the safe reporting of suicide because we know that when we talk about specific methods of suicide and we provide detail that sometimes we see an increase in people using those methods because maybe they had had thoughts of killing themselves, but they hadn't thought about exactly how they might do it or they hadn't known that a particular method might have been really effective. The other thing is that if when we talk about suicide, we talk about a particular method as being quick or painless or we talk about someone ending their suffering, then again, this can make this feel like a more inviting option for someone who is already really distressed and struggling with thoughts and feelings of suicide. So, sure, we need to be really careful in how we talk about suicide more generally, but if we're really worried about someone and we think they might have had thoughts of killing themselves, actually having that really awkward conversation and asking outright is not going to increase their suicide risk. And in fact, you may well be in a better position than to help them and prevent them doing harm to themselves. I hope this was helpful. If you have thoughts and feelings on this, share them in the comments below. It'd be great to get the discussion going. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.