Suicide Prevention

Amanda Hack Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) for securing it and for making his opening remarks in such an amazing way. We heard the devastating numbers and the personal experience of the impact that suicide has had on our communities and on ourselves. These people were important to us and, I hope, by discussing this difficult subject not only can we offer comfort and support, but provide the hope that we can put in place improvements to prevent someone else from taking their own life.

I want to speak about two friends: my childhood friend who lost her dad to suicide when we were just in our teens; and one who made the decision to take his own life just a couple of months ago. It was not until my friend’s funeral in July that I reflected that while those suicides were more than three decades apart, the similarities between the two men who made that decision were stark. They were both men in their early 50s, successful and running their own businesses. They were amazing family men who were well respected in their work and in their social circles. Yet they still both made that ultimate decision to take their own lives, leaving those left behind to unpack their grief and sorrow with the overriding question: “Why?”

In the face of such loss, we often search for answers—something to help us make sense of the silence and the unanswered questions. While no single explanation can ever truly account for an individual’s decision, patterns begin to emerge when we look more closely at the broader picture. We can look at age and gender, and the risk of suicide is highest among men aged between 45 and 54. It is three times more common among men than women—a gap that only continues to grow. We can look regionally too. Between 2021 and 2023, the east midlands had a suicide rate of 11.3 deaths per 100,000 people, placing us above the national average and making us the fifth highest of the English regions. We also need to look nationally, and we have to create some hope.

Local authorities develop strategies to prevent suicide, but the funding for voluntary services has, sadly, gone awry in recent years. We need the much more important national debate. We can look at the limits of existing mental health support and the reality that nearly a third of people who die by suicide are in contact with mental health services in the 12 months leading up to their death.

Those are of course important insights, but they are just insights, just statistics. We have to search for answers to this difficult question. Although we might never know why someone decides to take their own life, what matters is what we do with the information that we do know. We know that we have to build resilience for young people in schools, teaching our young people how to promote good mental health and wellbeing in themselves. We need to equip people with the language to talk about how they feel, the confidence to ask for help, and the tools to support themselves and each other through the inevitable challenges in their life. We can also look to our local organisations, such as the Leg Up Project in my constituency. Its core philosophy is about building resilience, and tackling loneliness and isolation.

The Government’s commitment to transform mental health service with 24/7 neighbourhood mental health centres is a fantastic start, but it will mean nothing if we are not giving people the tools that they need to communicate to get themselves there in the first place. Prevention of deaths by suicide will come from continued conversations, a growing understanding of the mental health landscape and hearing the voices of those whom we have lost and those of us struggling now—those voices are the ones that truly matter.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

We now come to the Front Benchers, and I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, Dr Danny Chambers. We have three doctors on the Front Benches.